Bande à Part on Land’s End
A trio of young friends living on the edge of Point Lobos in San Francisco find love and friendship in a breathtakingly dramatic setting. Coming of age are Johnny, Gary and Denise. Back to Land’s End Stories: Contents Page
The Repo Men
On most days the sun burns off the fog covering Land’s End by mid-morning. But on that day in 1961, it lingered and thinned, diffusing the sun’s light to a dazzling thick haze. Even the normally gloomy woods of brooding Monterey cypresses that cover the land on the Point were surprisingly bright. The light appeared…
The Confession Line
The shopworn airplane was packed, every seat was occupied. While the Delta flight from Paris went smoothly enough, everything else about it was a disaster: cheap cramped seats, non-working entertainment system, smelly bathrooms, and food that no one should eat. On arrival in New York, we barged our way off the plane, and raced through…
The Killing of the Dove
He stayed behind in the garage/basement of that grim, brightly painted San Francisco box house, rooted in place, trembling and terrified by her anger, until she had climbed the inside stairs, and closed the door of her mother’s apartment, turning off the lights as she went. In the darkness, he could hear her angry steps…
Terminus
This is it, the end of the line, as far west as you can go on this continent, at the western terminus of the #2 Clement Street bus line of the San Francisco Muni Railway. Do they still call it that? He returned to Land’s End, finally, from a long and uneventful exile, drawn back…
The Curse of the Jesuit
Draft Back to Land’s End Stories: Contents Page Saint Ignatius High School Stories: Charles Henry, S.J. To this day, nearly fifty years after the event, Father Henry’s gratuitous act of spiritual violence still astonishes me. Out of nowhere, he served up one fantastic moment of revelation: that a priest could be so casually…
The Landlady’s Daughter
He lingered, motionless, for a while longer, watching Gary disappear into his house, not knowing what he would do next, just staring, but once again feeling the pull of the amniotic sea beyond the edge of the land. The result of the game they had played had startled him. While he felt good about his…
End of the Line
The fog was like gray cotton, suffocating. I knew the sunlight was up there somewhere and the dark ocean somewhere below, but all around me everything was gray. I could see the ground around me, of course, and the nearby trees, but the light was muted, and the sound was dimmed; it was all…
THE MUNS STORY
Johnny raced out of the boy’s locker room, still wet under his clothes and smelling of chlorine. He actually liked the smell because it made people ask about it. That way he could talk about his swimming, otherwise there was never much to talk about with anybody. It was something he was good at; besides,…