oh fine. just fine.

He pushed through the doors of Galatoire's on Bourbon Street , sated and content, and stepped into the twilight. He walked away from the tourist throngs and around the corner onto Iberville, where gaslights were just coming on. This deserted street afforded him the privacy to belch and contemplate a stroll before darkness. He did not turn to see the two men following him. They could see him very well: a large man in a pale, seersucker suit, the seat of which was slightly stretched. His gait was unsteady, a sign that he had enjoyed more than one sazerac cocktail with his lobster bisque and deep-fried, soft shell crabs. He walked on, losing his footing once on the cracked, uneven pavers until he rounded the next corner onto Royal. A door opened, letting music momentarily escape from the Old Oyster House where he slipped in for a night cap. The followers stretched and waited in a doorway. One lighted a stub of cigar while the other pulled his cap low over his face an...

Maritzer's Axiom:  Nobody really knows what there is between two people except the two themselves, and sometimes even they don't know. 1 . What surprised the family most when she brought him home was his ordinariness. Mother had set the table with her best company's-coming cloth napkins and the good bone China, while Father had donned an anathematic necktie for a meal in his own home. My nervous sister ushered in this man -- one suitor among so many that we'd wondered what made him special -- who wore a shirt that must have spent its life in a clearance bin at Woolworth's. An international spy would have prayed to have his coloring and face — immediately forgettable — and Father later griped that no good comes from a man already balding in his 20s. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that we had been so snobbish, as if we were nobility when we were just as bourgeois as Bloomingdale's, one generation past canned ravioli dinners with cheap...

This must never get out in the press, for it would cause widespread panic. The priests would surround my house, not to mention the police and possibly the army. Castor Desayuno has come back from the dead! Yes, the butcher himself! You are saying to yourself right now, or possibly to your beloved who sits beside you in the morning sun with her hair down and a cup of café con leche in her sleepy grasp, 'Castor Desayuno cannot possibly be walking the earth. You must be mad!' You are protesting, ‘But we saw his head on the end of a bayonet, paraded through the streets of San Cristobal. We saw his body lowered, headless, into a grave over which no priest said the holy words.' But as surely as I stand before you at this moment, I saw Castor in the flesh, last night. He was a hungry ghost, desperate for conversation. He beckoned to me to sit beside him on the steps to the Shrine of the Eternal Madonna, the very one where he was cut down in the middle of fornicating wi...