The Land of Enchantment...

"…to all those lost souls who have forgotten to believe in the immensity of love." - Anon

By Patrick Alcatraz
Editor

TESUQUE PUEBLO, New Mexico - Her first name was Vanessa. I'm sure she told me, but I forget her last name. All I know for sure is that she'd come to New Mexico from Vancouver and was staying here with a friend of a friend in a walled compound not far from my favorite restaurant, a place called El Nido. She's the one who would send me roses. The girls upfront would take them and then walk them back to my desk in our small newsroom.

Notes accompanying the flowers always took me into the world of arriving romance, only I wasn't all that interested in her. Her friend actually seemed more appealing, although who really knows about women. You can walk in the rain with a plain-looking chick and have fun and, yes, you can take a pretty one to dinner and find she has no skills with silverware. You have to put them to the test, although her geography will tell you much about a woman. But Vanessa would come to my place.

Dinner was followed by a walk back in a shiver. This part of northern New Mexico is up in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains, so just about every night is sweater weather, the winter months requiring a bit more wear. We'd get frisky in the sack and she'd say no, don't do that and I'd see she wore no panties and I'd keep going and she'd say, "Here, let me read to you..."

Music's always helped me sleep after drinking. Vanessa would sing to me a bit. She wasn't a bad singer, but I never knew her songs. Taste is funny that way. I'd keep going.

"No-ooooo-ooo-oh!" she'd let-out when I'd stick myself in her. "Oh..."

Careless whispers swam into her ears while she readied and then began that special, willful embrace...

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