Hordes of Indigent Psychologists

Southern Review, The, Wntr, 2008 by Scott Coffel

Hours after my decision to defect, the elders of the West blamed me for the drought and the power failure. Monopolists at heart, it was they who gouged the price of remaining to prohibitive levels. I ' ve outgrown the sequoia. I ' ve ogled my last Joan of Arc at the drive-in auto da f

.

Time to release my daemon on its own recognizance, to resuscitate my dream of staging the Ring

cycle in its original Yiddish or inciting riots among hordes of indigent psychologists practicing in squalor under the viaduct.

Bald as my tires, I haven ' t hugged the road in years. But why disclose my lusts to gluttons for titillation? Better to misread a cluster of thunderheads building east of Des Moines for the tops of the Olympic Mountains, my life at forty beginning in medias res

of a price war between rival masseuses.