Farewell to Moristotle & Co.

By Pat Hamilton

Vale, Moristotle!
    When I was down, Morris lifted me by publishing me. I know all other contributors feel the same. He increased my joy by becoming a brilliant penpal, too, taking me along to France and to Duluth, Minnesota. I treasured his friendship as a private joy, until I realized everyone else knows and feels it, too.
    The nightly news tries to convince us of a dark new world of hate and division, but Morris and Goines return us to a world of love and family.
    Let’s hope he’s a David Bowie, whose every tour was a “final” tour...until the next one.
    Keep living, loving, writing, and inspiring, dear Morris!

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton

Shots (a true story)

By Pat Hamilton

Nick and I walked home from the campus movie, knowing that a few cold beers in the breeze on the front porch would cap the end of a long stifling summer day.
    “Help! Help!” someone cried next door. “They’re killing us all in here!”

Crickets: A Music Theory

By Pat Hamilton

Crickets will change their pitch to harmonize with you.
    As I was reading on my patio one evening, the first crickets of the year began to tune up. I won’t expound here now on my joy at their return. I’ll just present a music theory. 

Fiction: Her Name(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

My one-block street goes straight to a high school. I look out a window all day every day onto that street, only because my laptop rests on a desk so that sunlight falls on it. Through the window I can see if it rains, or really, if rain has brought down sticks or limbs from three huge oaks onto my front yard that I must clear away before I mow. Woodpeckers love those oaks, and sometimes a hawk visits. When it snows or freezes, I can gauge road conditions by how many cars brave my one-block street, always the last one salt-trucks clear. But mostly, I watch students heading from left to right to school and returning from right to left at 2:30 in the afternoons.

As Soon as Gotten

By Pat Hamilton







No sooner had I gotten my second wind than I broke it.

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.

Fiction: Our Destination(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“So we agree,” Billy clarified, “to think about finding a second home, for the purpose of spending times of fair weather in one, foul weather in the other. Are we, so far, of one mind?”
    “Yes,” Paula agreed.
    “Then it seems to me our next step is to narrow down possible locations.”

Fiction: Brunch(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

While speaking of splurging and the topic of champagne, Paula opined that brunch was the most exquisite form of splurge.
    Billy could not yet concur. “So many conflicting feelings about brunch!”
    Paula answered, “Not one single thing is ever simple with you,” shaking her head.

Fiction: Billy Lets Go (a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“No, love. I’m done praising the virtues of our freckled leguminous friends. Allow me just to add that adding a spoonful of vinegar to each bowl right before you serve the beans serves miraculously to solve the flatulence problem.”
    Paula knows this. “You’ve told me this same thing every time I ask you why you put vinegar in.”

Fiction: One Lazy Day(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

One lazy night, after they’d lazed in bed all day and taken their properly cooked but previously frozen lasagna and a ring of shrimp with cocktail sauce into the den to dine while watching Happy Christmas, Paula asked whether Billy preferred traveling or staying at home. They’d already spent three years locked down at home, and this plague kept returning just when everyone began to act as if it were gone.

Fiction: I Have Seen the Past(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Flick flick flick sounds.
    Frustrated, Paula screams, “I just need to light this one last ciggy. I just need it right now! “
    Here we are in the present.
    Click click click.

Fiction: She Likes It Cold(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Even long before the wedding, Paula knew they were doomed.
    She liked it cold. Windows-open-in-winter cold. Air conditioners from the 1970s set on 8 in November. Running barefoot in the snow and freezing sleet to retrieve the mail. She’d bring the old-lady neighbors their mail, too. Barefoot in snow.

Fiction: Movie Night(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“Remember you told me I’d have to tell you about all my lovers someday,” Paula reminded, “but I was so cool that I never did? Haha!”
    “I do remember, and yes, you are so cool. I said you didn’t have to.”

Fiction: Can’t Shoot ’Em(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“The imbalance of power between women and men since the Middle Ages correlates precisely to the replacement of worship of Astarte with that of Yahweh back in the dusty middle-eastern misogynist deserts of numberless aeons ago.”

Fiction: Huevos con Chorizo(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

This Mexican egg specialty, originating, actually, with the Mayans roughly 7,200 years ago, offers not just ease of preparation, but magnificence of taste, especially if you’re a newbie young gringo or African-American or a Lufthansa flight attendant on a stopover at Billy’s house on your way to the Taj Mahal or some similarly exotic destination and Billy begs you to take him with you, to free him from the figurative and literal claws of his wife, Paula, who is trying to kill him, but very slowly, he avers.

Fiction: Thanksgiving(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Billy said, “Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday for more than the fifty first years of my life. Of course I don’t remember my first few feasts, but in the photographs, my dad’s father and my dad’s sister were there at the table with us, grinning bigger than I ever saw them grin, along with Ma’s aunt and her husband, you know: all the old relations who died long ago had gathered round the table, smiling and hungry, all politics aside, driven actually mad by hours of aromas, the men in suits and ties, the ladies in pearls, hair fresh from the beauty shop, the air throughout the whole small house aromatic of old ladies and all their mingling perfumes.”

Fiction: Sixteenth Anniversary(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Billy: “There’s only one God, and it ain’t you.”
    Paula has caught him writing at the computer to someone named Lisa. She doesn’t attack him immediately. Then she does, but Billy protests, “To cheat on a spouse is a sin. A bigger sin is to stamp out love wherever it has established a tenuous foothold in lives. An even bigger one is to play God and pretend to decide which love is good and which love you get to stamp out.”

Fiction: Four Vats(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Billy said that his talk of huevos con chorizo yesterday compelled him to tell the story of Carlos’s abuelita and her four huge, tall pots.
    “When I was newly arrived in El Paso, I met Carlito in a Lit class at UTEP. When he found out I played guitar, he introduced me to two guys in his apartment building who played and sang, and so he brought us all together, and that night was so great, it enhanced the bond between Carlos and me, one result being that one evening, he took me to meet his grandmother at her house.

Fiction: That Night(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

After such an enormous repast, they agreed to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed, not, as you expect, reconsummating their union, but recovering delightfully from the premarital stress of the last eleven months, naptime passing like a dream, alternating with half-waking fondles, kisses, and trials of various nicknames and lazy talking that sometimes made little sense when sentences ended in snores, Paula sometimes wondering if she could tolerate eggs and who knows what all else cooked in bacon grease, Billy worrying what new joys butter would bring to his digestion and to his cholesterol numbers.

Fiction: Scrambled Eggs(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“Good morning, Sleepyhead! How did you sleep?”
    “I slept well. Very well! What are you doing up so early?”
    “Fixing you breakfast. I was gonna serve it to you in bed.”
    “A heavenly aroma of bacon awakened me, and rather rudely, I must say, as I had been in Tahiti, worried that the gray old boards would send splinters into my heels and ruin our honeymoon.”

Fiction: From Chapter 6: New Orleans (Part 7)

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all published parts

“But back to Peggy. You’ve given the facts, but what’s the real story? I don’t see the woman. Did she sleep with the new president?”
    “She must have. I don’t know. She had his ear, and what secrets did he reveal? Secrets of state.”