Love hurts. This romance anthology features a mix of five short stories and poems, each which tells a tale of lost love. Every character must discover for themselves whether a rose is worth all those sharp thorns.
A man and his wife battle over bags of carrots. A sot wrestles with his one true love–a wine bottle. Three women mourn the loss of the only man who could defuse their roiling emotional powder keg. A besotted youth clutches his first blush of passion. A fading photograph stirs memories of a fishing trip and the love that got away.
Genre: FICTION / Romance / ContemporaryMy marital woes culminated with a grocery load of carrots–we had never needed entire bags of them before. I expected a hutchful of rabbits to come hopping in procession into the kitchen after my wife. None arrived and I realized as she bricked up over my soda and my cookies that she meant to make a bunny of her husband. It makes your nose want to twitch and your ears flop; two steps out the door and I could see myself digging burrows in the backyard. I resisted the sudden natural urge to bolt down to the basement and my television to dig up a smaller private fridge.
“So this is why you wanted to do the shopping this week,” I politely snatched the produce from her hands and began to scour my fridge. She had started a third tier and avoided touching as if I were the one with pruned, orange-stained fingers, before returning to her grocery bags.
“Not the only reason!” She dropped something back into the soggy brown paper bag and withdrew her hand as if accused, cradling it under her breast.
“You’re taking them back,” I said as I continued to remove plastic bag after bag of pungent rabbit food.
“No,” Vivian replied, “I’m not.” She began loading one grocery bag at a time, to save me the trouble of unpacking them. As if I couldn’t smell it! The kitchen had assumed the stale aroma of a day-old salad bar. Her hands reeked. We used to hold hands, back when she trusted me to buy the groceries, before the orange fingernails. She didn’t treat me like a bunny then: I was her buck and she my doe, nuzzling nose-to-nose, and there were no carrots.
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Italian
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Already translated.
Translated by Andree Celeste Brentini
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by María del Carmen Sánchez González
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