Deadly Diamond

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I put down my book, The Meaning of Zen, and see the cat smiling into her fur as she delicately combs it with her rough pink tongue. “Cat, I would lend you this book to study but it appears you have already read it.” She looks up and gives me her full gaze. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she purrs, “I wrote it.”

––From Miao by Dily Laing

Beachside, Florida, December 15:

Friday morning, ten days before Christmas, shoppers crowded the sidewalks in downtown Beachside, a tourist town on the east coast of Florida still in the process of renovation, the physical location not beach side, as the name implies, but about two miles inland.

Christmas decorations were up––huge wreaths and banners hanging from the art-deco style streetlights, and tiny lights wrapped around palm trees planted at equal intervals on the brick sidewalk. Some of the storefronts of the mostly art-deco style buildings decked according to the owner’s personal taste were not at all in keeping with the classy image the city wanted to portray. Tourists and locals in shorts and sandals were in the holiday spirit even though the temperature was in the eighties––not bothered by the incongruity of the frosted glass windows and the hot sun scorching their skin.

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