Nobody's Property Chapter One: Living is Where It's At

November 2011, Las Aguas, Tenerife—

The music died, the recording ended. Rose gripped the edges of the small table, her life raft on a rough sea. She let go long enough to grab the small veined glass, still half full of wine, and fling it at the wall across the room. The wine made a shape like a veiled ghost on the white wall and splashed the tiled floor but the glass did not break. This forced a long drawn out howl from deep in her diaphragm, a howl that would have satisfied Ophelia. She crossed the room and stained her bare feet with the wine as she picked up the glass, threw open the windowed door to the patio, ran to the railing, and hurled the glass down toward the blue pool perched like a smile above the dark sea. Not the Pacific! More like Homer’s wine dark sea, something that justified the phrase “body of water,” an entity with a will to take under those foolish enough to tempt it, get close.

Ernest Rose/Shutterstock

The glass hit the retaining wall of black volcanic rock just above the pool and shattered over the pool deck. The sight dissipated her rage and turned it into something more manageable: worry.

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