{"id":17182,"date":"2022-06-17T07:00:06","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/?p=17182"},"modified":"2022-06-09T20:22:47","modified_gmt":"2022-06-10T00:22:47","slug":"free-fiction-love-story-bruce-mcallister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/free-fiction-love-story-bruce-mcallister\/","title":{"rendered":"FREE FICTION: &#8220;Love Story&#8221; by Bruce McAllister"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"8765\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/dungeon-count-verlock\/cd-genfreefiction\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/CD-GenFreeFiction.jpg?fit=830%2C120&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"830,120\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Cemetery Dance Free Fiction\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/CD-GenFreeFiction.jpg?fit=830%2C120&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8765\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/CD-GenFreeFiction.jpg?resize=830%2C120&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"banner that says Cemetery Dance Free Fiction\" width=\"830\" height=\"120\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/CD-GenFreeFiction.jpg?w=830&amp;ssl=1 830w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/CD-GenFreeFiction.jpg?resize=350%2C51&amp;ssl=1 350w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/CD-GenFreeFiction.jpg?resize=768%2C111&amp;ssl=1 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>Love Story<br \/>\nby<br \/>\nBruce McAllister<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When I was forty, I had a girlfriend who was a lot younger. She had red hair, like me, and the difference was enough that some people thought she was my daughter. It didn\u2019t bother me then, but it does now, with all the time I have to think about it in this house, trying to hear what she might say.\u00a0 What was it like for <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">her, <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">our being together? Did she feel as important in our relationship as she was to me, or less, because I was older? Was she unhappier than she seemed but didn\u2019t want to tell to me? Did it remind her of other relationships she\u2019d had? Maria didn\u2019t have much money, but she was scrappy, and for about a year she bartered with a guy for what she needed &#8212; car repairs, appliances, a TV. At one point, she agreed (I told her I\u2019d help &#8212; I wanted her to know how much she meant to me) to clean the inside walls of a house off \u201cE\u201d Street, that really tough part of town. Iron bars on windows, cracked stucco, dead lawns, dogs with scarred faces, all of that. There were reddish streaks on one of the walls in the house. We scrubbed and scrubbed, but they wouldn\u2019t go away. A neighbor, a big woman, dropped by twice and stared at us, especially Maria. We heard later that a young red-haired woman who looked like Maria &#8212; no husband, a young daughter, miserable in life &#8212; had been screwing the husbands in the neighborhood and finally been killed by two of the wives and in this very house. With knives. It was her blood on the walls, we were told, and no one could get it out. \u201cIf you can find someone who looks like her and make them do it,\u201d an old woman on the block had said, \u201cit just might work.\u201d The wives wouldn\u2019t let us leave until Maria tried, so she did, and I helped. But even though we scrubbed so hard the drywall finally came off in our hands, we couldn&#8217;t do it, and when we couldn&#8217;t, when the blood was still there on the walls, the wives killed us, too, with the same knives and with that old woman\u2019s blessings. \u201cYou\u2019ve both got hair just like hers,\u201d we could hear her saying as they cut.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcallistercoaching.com\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bruce McAllister<\/a>\u00a0is an award-winning West-Coast-based writing coach, writer in a wide range of genres, consultant in the fields of publishing and Hollywood, workshop leader and an \u201cagent finder\u201d for both new and established writers. As a writing coach, he specializes in all kinds of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and screenplays.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Love Story by Bruce McAllister When I was forty, I had a girlfriend who was a lot younger. She had red hair, like me, and the difference was enough that some people thought she was my daughter. It didn\u2019t bother me then, but it does now, with all the time I have to think about &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/free-fiction-love-story-bruce-mcallister\/\" class=\"more-link button bg-gold white\">Continue Reading!<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;FREE FICTION: &#8220;Love Story&#8221; by Bruce McAllister&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[316],"tags":[1737,317,1622,2701],"class_list":["post-17182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-fiction","tag-bruce-mcallister","tag-fiction","tag-free-fiction","tag-love-story"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>FREE FICTION: &quot;Love Story&quot; 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