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Franki Elliot is a 20-something author from Chicago and blogs for us every Monday.  Curbside published her first book Piano Rats (October 2011).  A typewriter is her weapon of choice.  For more Franki typewriter stories visit http://frankielliottypewriter.tumblr.com/

The boy was walking about the village when suddenly he reached out to the air, as if to grasp an invisible arm. He fell back, seizuring. His father rushed forward, and lifting Collier's head, fanned his face with the palm of his hand. Of all the boy's maladies, the man most despised his son's epilepsy for its utter cowardice, and stealth. Ever again it struck, only to retreat to its lair, and wait for an unsuspecting moment to lift its hand again. Surely Caesar, experienced in its comings and goings, was deceived as he tumbled to the Senate floor. The father was beside himself with worry; there was neither telephone or electricity in the village and its huts were as nothing for shelter. When he returned to the city, he would purchase the Imperial and burn it to the ground. He helped Collier to his feet and they sat together within the walls of a kapok tree.

His arms wrapped tightly across his chest, the hurricane spun and neared San Juan. The waters of the bay below the village changed direction, as though beating an escape. In the lobby of the hotels in the city, wooden shutters were nailed over the windows, and they were blind. At the front desk of the Imperial, the clerk noted that father and son were missing. He hated Americans; he had begun his long career at the hotel as a waiter, and watched turistas blanch when they were served sopon de pescado, with the head and tail of the fish intact. Any of the starved of Puerto Rico would have wolfed it down. There was nothing to be done; he would send a car and driver into the hills when the storm had moved away.

Hurricane - Part II

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Charles Bane Jr. is an American Poet.  Curbside Splendor published his first book The Chapbook (July 2011) and will publish his second book New Poems (October 2012) via Concepcion Books, a new Curbside imprint.

In Curbside Sounds we feature authors we dig reading their work or telling a story while sitting on a curb or their favorite bench, at a bar in the middle of a lazy afternoon, and sometimes even at a recording studio. For this installment we've got Illinois-based writer Okla Elliott reading his story "The Queen of Limbo" outside on a stoop at the corner of Throop and 18th street in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. 

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The Queen of Limbo by Okla Elliott by Curbside Splendor

Okla Elliott is the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in such literary journals as Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, and A Public Space. He is the author of a collection of short fiction, From the Crooked Timber, and three poetry chapbooks. He is also the co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.  Website: http://asitoughttobe.com/author/oklaelliott/

"The Queen of Limbo" will appear in the forthcoming Another Chicago Magazine (ACM) Issue 51, due out in late-August. It is also in Okla's recently published collection of short stories entitled From the Crooked Timber (http://www.amazon.com/From-Crooked-Timber-Okla-Elliott/dp/1935708473).

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Franki Elliot is a 20-something author from Chicago and blogs for us every Monday.  Curbside published her first book Piano Rats (October 2011).  A typewriter is her weapon of choice.  For more Franki typewriter stories visit http://frankielliottypewriter.tumblr.com/

On a road far above sand and water of Navaho stone, the car sputtered and came to a halt. Collier's father burst into rage. The driver shrank before the fury, and like the boy, climbed balefully from the car. Nearby there was an open space and what passed for a village. Collier walked a few steps forward and looked about, at chickens pecking in the dirt for grains of corn and kettles of asopao simmering over burning wood. Nothing in his make up was atuned to the lives of the poor and he stiffened, as though he were readying for inspection. It was taken as a good sign by the men who peered at him, though they were interrupted listening to the song that had met the boy's ears. It was a song of hurricanes, and of paddles far away on the Orinoco that began a journey now lost to record. The song had many Taino words. Collier's father approached and still furious, muttered that he would wait at the main pass and find a passing car. He touched his son's shoulder.

Far off, in the Atlantic, a fierce storm gathered its army. Collier's father stood impatiently in the open mountain road, unaware of the hurricane Like him, the storm was a father also, and yearned to return, from Africa, soil that belonged to the village and the mounds of they who had been forced to leave the continent and settle on an island in the Caribbean. This was only just, and the gale gathered up orange dust to rain upon their sleep who had cut the sugar cane. When the villagers sang of him, the storm listened and ran to them across the open sea.  It knew the village where Collier looked about at thatched huts and heaps of plantain, and longed deeply to strum its palms and cool the brow of its fires. The storm grew mad with grief.

Collier took off his coat and folded it neatly on the ground below a tree. The wind was picking up, he felt a twinge of alarm. He wished to be in the comfort of his bed and to smell the now -- wished for odor of flowers in the hotel lobby. There was a last resignation inside him, a last, flickering desire to find an oil lamp of hope. He wished, as his eyes closed, to know the sensation of good health. He conjured images behind his lids of footraces through the park and soirees where pretty girls were in abundance. He saw himself going to work with a briefcase, and lifting his children in the air in his spacious home as his wife, kneeling on the floor beside newspapers and pots of tea, looked on. Collier's dream of this wafted overhead.