Literati!
The multi-talented Ed Coonce has submitted an entry into our current contest (what are YOU waiting for?). He visits the nether-world where humour and meloncholy come to some sort of agreement. I am recalling the words of my dear friend, Morgan, for whom I named my son, “Americans…we’re the only ones who continue to believe that love will be less painful than life’s other experiences.”
Please help us gain momentum by leaving comments on this and all entries as they come in, and of course, we’d like to see what you have to say on the topic. What if you were given a second chance with your first love?
Here is
Where Do You Go When You Dream?
by Ed Coonce
I sit next to a shining sphere, larger than me…it contains paragons of virtue, such as “If it ain’t broke, then you won’t need to use your 30-day money-back guarantee.”
I don’t believe anything.
Gathered around me is a crowd with smirking faces, waiting for a good joke or something. They don’t get it, they have paid good money, but the weather pulls a Woodstock.
A face of rain sheets and shoots into the sphere, it comes apart, sprinkling soundless shards, burying me and my pain. I am not immune to agony, I have lived with it and and its brother sermons for all my lifetime.
Where do you go when you dream?
Is it the Parisian villa with hot bread on every corner? That’s not the hellhole of me taking that fatal shot over and over.
Maybe it’s the heaven of finding her…the one. And the emptiness that comes when you know hearts get locked up and distant?
Where do you go when you dream?
Have you ever ridden that brown mare along the 2-lane blacktop, waving at the other kids on the school bus? Perhaps I dream of Marion and our instant grade school hearts, wondering “what became of us?” Sometimes… with that sphere pulsing in time with my heart, I expect the phone to ring. I will answer, and it will be Marion. I will offer her a stick of gum, something forbidden to fifth graders, she will like it, we will once again sit close together on the gym bleachers after school and dream together of maples turning orange in the fall winds.
Where do you go when you dream?
Ed Coonce, 2025