Bears in the Punch Bowl and Other Stories
by
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“It’s Jake,” grumbled Melissa as
we made our way from the car to the lodge.
She pointed at a huge red blob tumbling down a nearby hill in a flurry
of white powder, carving an erratic rut in the snow as a pair of skis flew up
in the air like improperly fired missiles.
“What’s he doing here? I don’t
believe it.”
Jake was at least a hundred yards
away from us, so I couldn’t imagine how Melissa had known it was him. But somehow she had been able to tell. As the flailing Jake rolled closer, I could
see she was right.
“God, this is weird,” I
said. “Every time we take a vacation we
run into him.”
“Pretty soon we’ll have to adopt
him,” Melissa said with a sneer.
After the park rendezvous of a
few years earlier, Melissa and I had discussed Jake at great length. It bothered her, especially, to see a life as
unguided as his, a life so totally without purpose. She did admit that Jake fascinated her “in a
sad sort of way.” Her own life didn’t
lack structure, nor did the life of the man she had married. NASA paid her a quarter of a million dollars
a year for important blueprints, and I had received twice that for my last
movie screenplay. She engineered, I
wrote, and that was more or less the way we’d always planned it.
Jake was an unknown. What did he want out of life? What would he do next? Melissa and I didn’t know, largely because
Jake himself didn’t know.
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About the Book
You’ll encounter a unique variety
of characters while reading the stories in Kent Robinson’s first book, a
collection of contemporary pieces that focus on serious subjects like
terrorism, suicide, homelessness, and the unsettling disconnect of life in the
modern age when not veering off into less weighty topics like kids who just
want to have fun, football fans who just want to have even more fun, and one
little boy who just wants to be green.
Then there’s a literary excursion into that burning social concern of
millions of people everywhere, farting.
Yes, that’s right, farting. Passing gas. Breaking wind, as it were.
These are raucous, sobering, thought provoking, and quirky stories that
could make you think twice the next time you throw a party, take a trip to the
toy store, or allow yourself to be engaged by a friendly stranger in a bar.
About the Author
Kent Robinson is the author of
dozens of short stories in a wide variety of genres, including contemporary,
horror, mystery and suspense, and science fiction and fantasy. A former newspaper reporter, he served as news
writer for the University of Southern California *USC) for nine years, during
which time a LexisNexis search determined him to be
the most prolific press release writer of any college or university in the
United States (He wrote more than five thousand altogether.) He holds a journalism degree from