Sunday March 21, 2021

We rearrange ourselves beside a canal among people with good stories. A seal docked beside me with a smiley face sticker atop its face prompts me to imagine the addition of hieroglyphs to the text message emoji/emoticon lexicon. Mermaids hover to my left, and to my right a friend’s new romance novel: Joanna Lowell’s The Duke Undone. A trip down memory lane. “Down By the Bay” theme song performed on ukulele. I eye the book’s prologue and note its relationship to another of the friend’s novels. Female protagonist. Third-person subjective narration. Yet there the similarities end. Or so I imagine.