Goodbye

By Victor Allen

It was to be an idyllic weekend getaway for Richard and Elizabeth, but wicked fate has separated them forever. Or has it? Love may be eternal, but sometimes the very things that bind you to someone can conspire to keep you apart. A simple little, traditional ghost story, one of twenty six shorts in A-Sides. Enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victor Allen
• Release date: Feb 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370865284

Victor Allen

Born in North Carolina in 1961, Victor Allen has lived a charmed, black and white, and almost disreputable life. Turned down by the military at age seventeen because of a bad heart (We would take, his recruiter told him, the women and children before we would take you), he spent a wasted year at NCSU, where he augmented his scant college funds by working part-time as a stripper (what the heck? Everybody looks good when they're eighteen), a pastime he quickly gave up one night when he discovered -to his mortification- his divorced, middle-aged mother sitting in the audience. Giving NCSU the good old college miss, he satisfied his adventurous spirit and wanderlust by moving out West in his late teens, first to Colorado and later, Wyoming, and working in the construction trades. Uprooted from his small town upbringing and thrust into a world of real Cowboys and Indians, oil field roughnecks, biker gangs and pool sharks, he spent his youth travelling the country, following the work, settling at various times in Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Colorado, and Wyoming. Along the way he met a myriad of interesting people including Hollywood, a young, Native American man, so called because he wore his sunglasses all the time, even at night; Cinderella K from Owensville, Missouri (the nice laundry lady who turned his shorts into pinkies); Lori P., the Colorado snake lady and her pet boa constrictor, Amanda; the pool hustler par excellence, Johnny M.; TJ, Moon, and Roundman, good folks, but bikers, all; his little blond girlfriend, Lisa; Maureen, the very funny lady from London with the very proper English accent, who he met while living outside of Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, SC, and her daughter, Marie, with her practically incomprehensible cockney twang; the ever bubbly Samantha from FLA; and all the (well, never mind). :-). Plus way too many others too numerous to list. He has weathered gunfire, barroom brawls (I didn't get this crooked nose and all these scars on my face from kissin), a three-day mechanical breakdown in the heart of the Louisiana bayous, drunken riots- complete with car burnings and overturnings, Budweiser, bonfires and shootin' irons (it was all in good fun, though,)- ; a hundred year blizzard, floods, two direct lightning strikes, a hurricane which sent a tree crashing through his roof, and an unnerving late night encounter with a man who subsequently proved to be a murderer, surviving it all with a rather uncom...

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#Goodbye

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Goodbye

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2014

All Rights Reserved

Most people who fall in love meet at work and it was almost like that with Elizabeth and Richard. They were both employed by the hospital, she as a nurse in the third floor neuro wing, he in the first floor lab. But their bittersweet story began at Stubby Ledbetter’s Downtown Drinking Lounge and Eatery.

The bar scene really wasn’t Elizabeth’s thing. The music was too loud, the clientèle was too drunk, and the eight hundred dollar Jimmy Choo pumps she wore (a graduation gift from her brother and something she called her Choo-Shooz) hurt her feet and made her feel like she was weaving around on tottering stilts. But the graduation party was a well deserved reward. Out of the twenty-one who had started in the LPN curriculum, only three had crossed the stage at commencement.

The majority of the people in the bar she recognized, even if she didn’t know their names. They were fellow graduates with whom she had shared many classes: Lab Techs, Surgical Techs, Radiographers, Phlebotomists, even a couple of freshly minted RN’s. There was Jennifer, the head of the RN curriculum, a very good nurse and a very good friend. She had been unfairly tagged with the moniker The Grim Reaperess because of an unfortunate Christmas Eve on which four patients had died on her shift as Charge Nurse.

Like most bars, Stubby Ledbetter’s was dark, packed, and noisy. Between the boozy gibberish of the graduates and the hammering music, Elizabeth