A collection of coming of age stories set in the early sixties against the backdrop of deep social unrest

KISS BLOOM possesses a fierce imagination but when her father, a commander in the Navy, is transferred from the northeast to a small shipbuilding town on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, her imagination becomes more than fanciful dreams. Even at five she see’s and hears things that others don’t. And since the move, aliens visit her; mermaids swim along side her bed; neon signs and TVs wink, sending mysterious messages. Even Jesus wants to joke with her as he hangs from his cross over the classroom blackboard. Her mother worries that her daughter is more than a little different. She thinks it’s the constant moving that makes her strange. She’s only half right.

At first Kiss and her older brother Jess are excited by the wild, natural beauty of their new home along the Yazoo Bayou in Pascagoula Mississippi. Summer days are filled with exploration and adventure. But soon Kiss begins to sense a deep under current of cruelty running through the town. The segregated Catholic school where she and her brother attend is rife with superstition and prejudice. When she meets someone she likes but can’t befriend because of the color of their skin; when her classmates jump with joy to the news of Kennedy being shot, or when the neighbors shun a boy next door because of his sexual identity, she grows confused and angry. Her inner self and the world at large seem torn apart from each other. She asks her parents for guidance, but they only say, “It’s the way things are. Just try and fit in.” Kiss can’t fit in and she doesn’t understand why she has to. She lashes out at her father and is tormented by world ending nightmares. It is when disaster hits and death grips the family that Kiss begins to understand how to navigate the path between society’s limits and her own power of inner truth.

THE STORIES

A Collection of Twenty Short Stories

Leaving

Trampoline

New Frontier

Coin Toss

Other

Visitors

Turtle

Confession

Kool Aid

Bue Rabbit

Party

Yearning in the Time of Assassination

Hierarchy of Beauty

Night

Next Door

Chevy

Talent Show

Ghost Man

Mermaid

Sea Change