Enchanted Night: A Novella

Through a pair of open curtains, moonlight enters the living room. The moonlight glistens on Laura's silver-speckled raspberry barrette lying on the mahogany piano bench, on the glass-covered black-and-white photograph, taken by her father, of a pile of lobster pots beside an overturned rowboat on the coast of Maine, on the blue porcelain statuette of a Chinaman standing on the coffee table, on a bronze key attached to a cowhide keycase resting on the arm of the reading chair beside the lamp table. Anyone sitting on the couch, head turned toward the screened window with the parted curtains, would see a basketball net over the garage door across the street, a roof with a black TV antenna against the dark blue sky, and a nearly full moon, white with blue shadows, divided into two uneven pieces by a single black antenna arm cutting across the bottom about a third of the way up."

"So down in the valley, valley so low, I'm working my way up an inch at a time and meanwhile on top of old Smokey all covered with snow I've got my hand under her blouse and I'm feeling her up through her bra which has these fancy lacy edges, man."

The two-story frame houses sit looking at the steep thruway embankment like drugged-out ladies in an old-age home trying to remember what lies on the other side.