The Real Memphis Mike (don't settle for imitations)

I remember some years back having to switch to a new phone. I’m not a fan of change, especially when it comes to things I consider appliances. In the landline days of old, phones were relatively cheap, and you didn’t have to get a new one every couple of years. I still own a couple of rotary phones from the 1940s that work perfectly fine and have better sound quality than anything else I’ve ever used. But this story ain’t about phones. Or change. It’s about my personal phonebook. That’s one thing I’ll admit to liking about cell phones. Everyone’s number right there in the device. No more having to remember - or risk forgetting - telephone numbers. At the time of this particular phone change, I was at one of those midlife crossroads. My dilemma was simple enough: Do I continue with music at some professional level? I wasn’t happy with my playing. I felt like I was spinning my wheels, doing the same songs over and over. I was burned out. It happens. The young lady at the phone store help...

Lately, he’d been thinking about his ex-father-in-law. Not the ex-wife - calm down. That road had enough potholes already. No, this was about Kolya. They had never been especially close. Between the language barrier, the cultural divide, and the lingering fog of the recently ended Cold War, “warm relationship” was never really on the menu. Still, Kolya had made an impression. Men like that tended to. He was somewhere in his mid-to-late sixties when they met. Picture the farmer from American Gothic if he’d been drafted by the Soviet Union, fed boiled cabbage, and taught to glare professionally. Bald as a cannonball, which somehow made his head seem even larger. Thick square plastic eyeglasses magnified his eyes until they looked like a permanent accusation. He dressed sharply, but in a way that suggested the tailor’s motto had been adequate for the State . Then there were his teeth. No expert on the subject, he could only assume cosmetic dentistry had been dismissed by the Soviets a...

For three days, Grace Holloway was herself again.  Or the version she preferred to call herself. No headaches. No lost time. No strange notes. No waking with dirt beneath her nails or blood she could not explain. She slept eight hours each night. She attended a luncheon, chaired a committee meeting, sent flowers to a widow she barely knew, and was told twice she looked radiant. Grace almost laughed. Perhaps it had been stress. Hormones. Some temporary neurological storm. Perhaps Dr. Julian Vale had frightened her with his expensive calm and ominous questions. Perhaps all of it was passing. By the fourth evening, she was nearly certain. --- The package arrived at 6:40. No return address. Inside was a single cream card. Same time next week. The others adore you. Nothing else. Grace stood in her foyer for a long time. Then, despite every rational instinct, she dressed. Not elegantly. Automatically. As if following remembered instructions her conscious mind had never learned. --- The t...

Three days after the church incident, Grace Holloway lost nearly six hours. She remembered leaving work. Rain on the windshield. A voicemail from her mother. The smell of wet wool. Then - Music. Heavy bass, muffled through walls. Grace opened her eyes while lying on a velvet chaise lounge in a room lit red and gold. Her head throbbed. Bodies moved everywhere around her - half-dressed, masked, laughing too loudly, touching without tenderness. Champagne spilled. Someone cried and kept laughing. A man in a suit was on his knees praying or vomiting, or something else entirely. Grace could not tell which, until she noticed his head bobbing up and down. No one seemed surprised to see her awake. Someone passed and kissed her forehead. “Back from the dead,” he said. Grace sat upright too fast. She was clothed, mostly. Expensively, but incorrectly. One heel missing. Blouse buttoned wrong. Her hands trembled. There were dark stains on one cuff. Wine, she thought instantly. Blood, she the thought...

Thirty-one-year-old Grace Holloway was, by every public measure, a lovely woman. People used that word often. Lovely . Lovely smile. Lovely manners. Lovely home. Lovely to work with. Lovely to have at dinner. She remembered names, birthdays, dietary restrictions, anniversaries, children’s allergies, preferred wine, and exactly how long to hold eye contact before looking modestly away. She sent sympathy cards on thick cream stationery. She volunteered suggestions where photographs might be taken. She touched forearms when speaking, leaned in at the right moments, laughed without showing too much gum, and could make almost anyone leave a conversation feeling slightly improved. Grace had spent years becoming indispensable. No one noticed that no one really knew her. --- The headaches began in late October. A bright, needling pain behind the left eye. Brief at first. A pulse. A stitch. Then gone. She blamed backlit computer screens. Stress. Weather. Then came the lost minutes. Standing in ...

He sometimes said his greatest regret was not taking the old Trans-Siberian Railway eastward to Lake Baikal. Not because he cared much for bucket lists. He considered such catalogs as vanity with stationery, for those who had wasted decades suddenly writing down ten expensive ways to continue wasting time. No, what he regretted was more precise than that. He regretted never sitting in a dim canteen somewhere near Irkutsk while some broad-faced stranger lied to him magnificently over soup and vodka. He regretted never hearing the room laugh at a joke he only half understood. He regretted missing stories that would now likely never be told the same way again. His body had long since vetoed such ambitions. These days he was lucky if the month’s arithmetic ended with enough left over for prescriptions. If Melinda French Gates wished to finance a crippled Pennsylvanian’s global adventures, he remained open to discussion, but until then, conversations near Lake Baikal would have to survi...