Nebraska Close

By R.W. Clinger

After retiring from his career in construction and trying to cope with the death of his wife, Isaac York experiences an infatuation for a lifelong male friend and discovers his world fills with sunflowers and a risqué transition. Isaac moves to Lake Samoy in search of a new life, to abandon his past, and to start a fresh relationship with a famous and sexy man named Nebraska Close, whom he falls head over heals for.

Nebraska Close, a professional photographer who is drawn to summer nights and a younger man’s skin, finds pleasure for a second time in his life. Unconditionally he falls for Isaac and mixes together his lust, photography of sunflowers, and homosexual longing.

Isaac's son, Nicholas, lives at Lake Samoy and doesn't understand his father's lack of interest in his mother's fatal illness. With the help of Nebraska Close, Nicholas confronts his father’s sexuality, and Isaac learns to love his son again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Feb 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611524628

R.W. Clinger

R.W. Clinger is a resident of Pittsburgh. He has a degree in English from Point Park University of Pittsburgh. His writing entails gay human studies, and includes the novels Just a Boy, Skin Tour, Skin Artist, Soft on the Eyes, Pool Boy, and The Last Pile of Leaves. He has published many stories with Starbooks Press as well as The Weekender, a novella with Dreamspinner Press. His gay mystery, Cutie Pie Must Die, is published with Bold Stroke Books. For three years he has held the position of managing editor for the literary magazine, The Writer’s Post Journal. For more information, please visit rwclinger.com.

Book preview

Nebraska Close

By R.W. Clinger

Published by JMS Books LLC

Visit jms-books.com for more information.

Copyright 2013 R.W. Clinger

ISBN 9781611524628

Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

All rights reserved.

WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States of America.

* * * *

Nebraska Close

By R.W. Clinger

Part 1: His Walden

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part 2: His Pleasure

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part 3: His Exposure

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

Such a dark blue summer evening that feels complex and sinister. He’s twenty-seven miles away from Lake Samoy in western New York, surrounded by the most beautiful and striking sunflowers. He deems it the peak of summer, although it’s only June. So hot, humid, and sticky. A time to easily fall in love under the ball of orange-blue sun. So windless out this evening. And so necessary to take photographs of Almond’s Field while holding his 35mm Nikon in both palms as a mosquito sucks the AB+ blood from his left bicep. He centers the sunflower in the upper left-hand corner of the Nikon’s frame, stops breathing, becomes motionless and catatonic, and snaps just the top of the eloquent flower, pressing a silver button consecutively, listening to the camera click…click…click.

Part 1: His Walden

Chapter 1

The life of my father was changed, absolutely. A forty-eight-year-old man who enjoyed black coffee at dawn, crossword puzzles, and the sight of flying squirrels gliding from treetop to treetop. An honest man who betrayed no one, believed in God but never preached, and regarded the land as holy, filled with a necessary spirit. Of German blood and he had the thought of being reincarnated, having the understanding that he was once a Holocaust victim in Auschwitz, dying at the young age of twenty-three. A drinker since my mother’s death in 1999, finding pleasure in Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, or Absolut. Someone I’ve always trusted with my secrets, a mirror image of my grandfather, Paul Charles West. A collector of National Geographic, connoisseur of Whitman, and inspired by the sounds of the wind, squawking chickadees, or the way the sun melted over the Pennsylvania skyline into a spray of burnt reds and composed blues. The only carpenter in our family who specialized in window repairs. My father: Isaac Robert West.

I was like him. A clone of sorts, except twenty years younger. Ink-black hair, flickering topaz-blue eyes, clean-shaven at all times, five-eleven, bow-legged, with the tiniest mole on our left cheeks. I created interior rooms using complex graphic computer software at Schmid & Taylor Design. I had a wife (Carla Benning) of my own, a son (Lock Christopher) that I spoiled, and lived in my parents’ house, the place where I grew up, happy and content, while writing this.

* * * *

Reflection: When I was a child my father would kneel next to me at the edge of my twin-sized bed, instruct me to bend my elbows and press my palms together. It was a position I found incredibly uncomfortable, but unselfishly carried out. Next to me, almost too close, my father whispered, Shut your eyes, Nicholas, which I did. And softly we prayed together, wishing hope, peace, and love throughout our family, passion in our lives, apologized to God for our sins, thanked Him for our daily bread, and said Amen together, in unison—as close as I ever felt to my father.

His smell was of a thick sweat and Marlboro cigarettes, a habit he knocked when he turned thirty-two. My father called me his joy, the pride of his life, his little hero. He said he was the happiest with me, a fulfilled father who could ask for nothing more. I was his strength and eyes of the world—his