Desolate Feeling

Written By Joe Smolen

I returned to the Coast at night from her Portland Memorial. It was full of kind, friendly people I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. I was glad to be back home. In rapidly dying Portland, there was much talk of Covid and where to live as the world changed. Conditions in the City, Powell Blvd 50th to I-205 shocked me.

I awoke in the morning shuffling sleepily and filled by an oddly desolate feeling. As if it were a premonition, my mind simply would not stop working of my first waking thought: “...lucky ladies left standing soaking in a cold acid rain listening to an ammunition train rumble in the distance.”

I went straight down stairs, put on my slippers went outside and stood the Stars and Stripes up in the sun and the blowing Northwest Trades where it belongs.

Joe Smolen

Joe C. Smolen, AKA L.W. Smolen is an Oregon Coast writer of insufficiently exaggerated notoriety. Never having been arrested, he lives with his wife Sherrie and the ghost of their black, Standard Poodle Rico Suave in a really pretty good, Prairie Style house they built themselves. Since the Literary Magazine Fleas on the Dog of Kitchener, Ontario has permanently stopped accepting submissions, in order to read L.W. Smolen’s 2021 short fiction, A Real Guy, you are referred to joecsmolen.com. Some of L.W’s other, subsequent short fictions are archived at Olive Tree Review, Ginosko, Cardinal Sins Journal, Wrath Bearing Tree, Wilderness House and etc. Kirkus reviews once interpreted his work favorably.

https://joecsmolen.com
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