A KNIGHT JOINS THE 1ST PAGE BLOGFEST

I am the last to go. Not a first for this knight without armor.

Kelly Lymon of Kelly's Compositions is hosting today's First Page Blogfest. Thank you, Kelly! Visit Kelly to join in or to link to the other entries. http://kellylyman.blogspot.com/.

Since I dragged in after having driven 255 miles on rare blood runs, I may be too late. Still, I've won, and I've lost, but I've never quit -- so here is my first page for FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE :

It rained lies and death today.

I stood knee-deep in water outside my French Quarter jazz club, Meilori’s. My soul seemed stretched tight across my chest. Everything I saw and heard in the shadows spoke to me ... in threats. The sudden, short explosion of an unseen gun. A quick, sharp scream in the distance. And the blue spurt of a lighted match at the far end of the street. My city bled slowly in the ripples of the flooded streets.

I leaned back against the door to my club as if for reassurance that something solid still remained to me. That it had survived Katrina was a mixed blessing. It was all that was left to me of my wife. Staying here was both penance and purgatory. Meilori’s was the kind of place in which almost anything was likely to happen and in which almost everything had. Inside, the fifty-one survivors of Katrina that I could house were huddled in shivering, too quiet clusters. Words have no meaning when a city dies. Nothing much does.

Somewhere distant in the hot, red darkness a shot rang out. Another called out to it like a wolf. But it came from a different direction. I smiled bitter. The predators had crawled out from their boarded shelters. They knew the restraint of law had died this day. Soon they would come for me.

You see, I had enemies in the night. And not all of them were human. But that was all right with me. I had lost my humanity a long time ago, along with so many other things that mocked me in this hollow night.