SIX BEGINNINGS FROM WHERE I DON’T LIVE ANYMORE

These are just as titled — six “beginnings” of fictional stories, long or not, and still unfinished, from where I no longer live. Mostly true, though, so the fiction part is probably not true … even though I thought I was trying.

At the homeless camp on the southern edge of the downtown financial district, Carl stood tending the fire beneath the cauldron of gleaner’s stew and listening for signs of life from the detox tent.

When they rescued Hilda from the street, her long grey air was glued to her head by blood from a skull-splitting blow, and her polyester slacks had to be cut away from her legs because of all the sticky open sores crawling with maggots.

Apparently no one had warned the new mailman about Henry, because he suffered a severe shock when the grizzled, unshaven 93-year-old man stepped out into the hall to fetch his mail, resplendent as usual in his 4-inch velvet platform shoes, evening gown, rhinestones, and blond wig.

When the shotgun blasts began to come through the windows into the ground floor apartment, moving away from the territory disputed between the V-13 and Crips suddenly seemed like a good plan.

Very few of the people walking down Navy Street on their way to the beach noticed the well-camouflaged hand-dug underground “apartment” in the empty lot, where Steven had been living rent-free for the past several years.

Only his parked bicycle and the full grocery bags left by well-meaning neighbors gave any hint of the place hidden in the landscape bushes at the corner of the Malibu Lucky Market parking lot that the old Italian man called home until he passed away.

NOTE: I’ve been away from Los Angeles since 1988. It takes a while for me to process experiences and turn them into fiction, which is what is happening with these sentences, all of which are based on something close to reality, but not quite.