"Like Jonah in the whale, I was absorbed in a large mouth bass with a big hook snagged through his gills, when the barber's voice rang out, 'Which one of you boys will be first?' He was finishing a customer, an old man in a red plaid flannel shirt, which seemed inappropriate on this warm day. He shut off the electric clippers and as he turned to hang them on the wall rack, I noticed the crutches supporting the barber. I was attuned to the leg injuries of baseball players. Mantle was hobbled many times in his career and I once saw a player leave a game after sliding into second. His pants were torn and blood oozed through the gash. And football players sometimes stood on the side lines, helmet in hand, propped up on crutches. But much to my horror, as the barber maneuvered from behind the chair, it wasn't an injury to his leg. There was no leg at all." The One-Legged Barber. Each character from these stories, in his or her own way, struggles for a moment of lucidity. In circumstances, sometimes self-created, sometimes not, they are looking for an epiphany. Part of the dilemma is that the world will move on in its inexorable way. That is a given. And they know that. As do we. But the greater portion is the moment where an insight is achieved, one that burns like a match struck in a room of darkness. Only briefly, though brightly, you can understand the predicament. And that is all you have to hold onto, and you grip the match, tight, till your fingertips burn. I have been sitting on these stories, for reasons I cannot fathom, for the greater part of a quarter of a century. For similarly obscure reasons, I have decided to set them free. Maybe as the years wind down, one longs to leave some sort of legacy. But the fact that these old pages started turning up in bookshelves, in file folders, even in the laundry room, maybe signaled their yearning to be let go. So, like finding a bird in the house, I have opened the window and I'm shooing them out... There is not much here. Maybe I am a minimalist? Though frequently coins, dust, gravel, an absent god, or a miscreant grandmother shows up. perry neel http: //oneleggedbarber.weebly.com/