The Pinecone

     "Besides the drivers and the bicyclists, she was sick of joggers, power walkers, rollerbladers, and the people who rode around the Stanford Research Park in those pokey golf carts that always pulled out into traffic just ahead of her.  Also of the whole crowd that sat around outside Starbucks for hours with their laptops, drinking mucho grande double-decaf soy lattes with mandarin-pistachio-peppermint syrup.  She was sick of pretty much everyone around her—the WAH moms and the OB-GYNs who seemed to need the license plates to prove it, the ITS consultants and the CEOs.  

     "She was sick, indeed, of all acronyms, abbreviations, and the use of numbers for words, like 4 sale and 2 night.  She missed real words, examined lives, old-fashioned courtesy, Henry James novels, her mother’s homey Sunday pot roast, and lazy summer mornings inner-tubing on a slow green-hearted river in the heartland of the country, somewhere far, far from the coast."

I am very pleased to have this story from my days as described above (oops, sorry—from a purely fictional place and time) in Issue 8-3 of Cumberland River Review.

The Pinecone also received an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest in 2016, though it was not then published.

image:  Roman relief showing a Maenad holding a thyrsus, 120-140 AD, Prado Museum, Madrid