Travelers’ Guide To A Salvador Dali Planet: Novella

In a parallel universe, the line between realism and surrealism blurs. In this alternate reality, lovers dance in an art museum whose works have survived the fires of atomic perdition. There the phoenix of humanity rises like a ballerina in a Degas painting, ready to dance into a future where love’s wild spirit incarnates into the velvet fury of my midnight bride. When the commissars flee the mob rule they always feared, the Diaspora begins. Eros aims through the ashes in the form of a kiss. In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, in paradise or apocalypse, one man seeks to find his lost bride in the dystopian remnants of New Orleans. This is the quest for his Doomsday Bride, whose kiss is the promise of tomorrow when love and hope are all that remain. After the world burns, love strikes. She says, “I sure wish I’d met you before the pandemic. The pincers on dat crab dey call da blue plague can’t pinch no more but the vandals turned the empty houses into charcoal. My Maw-maw said that corona virus took more souls than hurricane Katrina both of which happened before I was born. But to my book learning neither of them emptied out the whole city like this little devil. How come I never met a guy like you who is willing to give a girl, a total stranger, a ride in the middle of a graveyard? Dat is the mark of a southern gent.”