Marge was aching for a cigarette. It had only been twenty minutes or so since her last cigarette break when she’d polished off three unbelievably delicious Winston 100s in rapid succession but now she was craving a juicy Newport 100 and she couldn’t wait another second. Yet wait she must... for forty more excruciating minutes.
Leah’s boots indent the pristine snow with her footfalls trudging to the picnic table blanketed with three inches in this suburban recreational park. Before she sits down to enjoy the view of the vacant skating pond, her wooly mittens whisk off mounded flakes from the bench, while she jets clouds of steam from her mouth in this 20 degree weather. This New Year’s Eve afternoon snowfall is at its most intent so of course the grey cloudy ceiling overhead is accentuated by aimless luminous spots dropping over every available surface, even Leah’s caramel-colored woolen cap framing the face of what she’s been frequently reminded is a Cate Blanchet look.
Eleanor fled the great ball room of Stoppard Hall, parting the milling throng; jostling party goers as she escaped. That was, until she herself was brought up short by a familiar face.
He raised his gloved hand to hail her, “Eleanor, so glad I caught you!”
This is the favorite part of Deirdre’s morning; arriving at Imperial Port, to board the early morning ferry departing the New Jersey dock for midtown Manhattan, a relaxed crossing of the Hudson River. She finds it good for half an hour’s relaxation with (maybe) three Virginia Slims. A trim five foot seven brunette with a pageboy cut, and soft grey three-quarter length coat, accessorized with black rabbit gloves, she cuts the image of a woman sensitive to fashion but flavored heavily by conservative couture.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
