When my wife told me about Ruth Ann’s invitation to her son’s graduation from his twenty-eight-day drug treatment program, while she told me there’d be an exhibit of his art that he painted by submerging himself in black paint and rolling on butcher paper, and while she wondered if Ruth Ann’s son’s paintings might be reminiscent of Franz Kline’s tonal contrasts, I was practicing bilocation, squeezing through the bars of my indifference to Ruth Ann’s son and my basic distrust of all adolescents. I made a midway correction, turned sideways just a bit, experienced a mild sensation of breathlessness, then poof, there I was in Paris sitting on a park bench with a pole in my hand watching a little red whatchamacallit bob up and down in blue water while the wind of my wife’s voice rustled the leaves at the top of trees. Of course my wife and I went to Ruth Ann’s son’s graduation. And of course we oohed and ahhed over his paintings and congratulated him on his new sobriety. But I’m happy to report, I wasn’t there. I was in Portugal sipping coffee at a sidewalk cafe.

—From Gilmore’s book in progress, Dharma Box, forthcoming from KYSO Flash in 2018

Bio: Dan Gilmore