Love on the Road 2015 Read Free

then you can go for meetings in Harare. When you get ten people to join, and they get another ten to join, you are given fifty million. My cousin who made me join has just harvested his fifty,’ the fat man said to his queue-jumping comrade.
    Tinotenda listened to the voices, his mind tripping, returning to Star, oscillating between her and the world around them. We are the fish and the people are the sea. The queue kept moving forward. Tinotenda smiled to himself as if there were no one else about. He now stood at the threshold.
    The guard emerged and held his baton to Tinotenda’s chest. It was a short, stout phallus with a rope that was tied around the guard’s wrist.
    ‘Right, there is no more money. It is finished,’ he said.
    ‘We’ve been here all day!’ the overalls man shouted.
    ‘We don’t print money here. Come back tomorrow. There’s nothing I can do. Don’t shoot the messenger.’
    The guard bolted the door, locking them out.
    Tinotenda saw how close he was. Had the fat man’s friend not jumped the queue, he’d have made it. The people in the queue hung about for a while, as though they expected the guard to come out and say it was a prank. A few voices of dissent grumbled for form’s sake and then fizzled out. Tinotenda felt a hand on his shoulder.
    ‘I guess we’ll meet here tomorrow, same time?’ Star said.
    ‘A little earlier may be better.’
    He watched her walk away until she was swallowed up bythe crowd. She was autumn orange, appearing and disappearing, twinkling, twinkling as she went. Tinotenda walked away a happy man; he had a date tomorrow with the queue.

2.
Sunrise over Sausalito
    Marlene Olin
    Monroe Rosenberg figured that a nursing home was like a hotel. He had checked himself into the South Beach Senior Center. By God he could check himself out.
    His downward slide began the day he hit eighty. He ate lunch at the Van Dyke, bought himself a New York Times, and was taking his usual three-mile stroll up and down the Lincoln Road Mall. Suddenly, a crack in the pavement appeared out of nowhere. He lurched forward and landed like a tumbled bag of groceries. His eyeglasses flew in one direction, his cane another. A tropical breeze blew his newspapers like tumbleweeds along the street.
    Monroe had prided himself on both his independence and his good health. When his wife Goldie died ten years earlier, he didn’t cry in his soup like other widowers. He learned which buttons to push on the microwave and how to wash his clothes. Monroe had served four years in the Navy unscathed. Now a simple flaw in the cement redirected his life. His hip cracked like an egg.
    The visions started the first week in the rehab centre. Monroe was wide awake. He tackled Sudoku puzzles and kept track of his investments. There was nothing wrongwith his mind. And keeping your thoughts intact was no easy task in an institution. Half of the patients spoke Spanish while the other half spoke to Elvis. So when the visions flashed on his TV screen, right there in Technicolor like a commercial, he didn’t flinch.
    One minute he was watching CNN and the next minute he was watching his funeral. A rabbi he didn’t recognise stood at a podium. As old and stooped as Monroe, his liver-spotted hands grew shakier from one vision to the next. For the next seventeen minutes, the rabbi would tell a story so distorted and distanced from the truth that it was only at the end that Monroe realised it was about him.
    ‘And now will you please bow your heads and say a prayer for our friend and neighbour, not to mention beloved uncle, Monroe Rosenberg.’
    Then the crowd – the men straight from the golf course in their pastel-coloured shirts, a handful of Goldie’s friends in pearls and going-to-synagogue suits – chanted Kaddish. In the front row sat Goldie’s nephew Carter. Curling his fingers into a fist and thwacking his chest, he out-cried them all.
    For years, Carter had been like a son. He had been directionless,