This weekend, we tried explaining to Moms what a balk is in baseball after watching a replay of the quirky incident with Chicago White Sox’s pitcher Mark Buehrle at Progressive Field in Cleveland.

“It’s all about deception,” we explained.

Decepción.

She didn’t get it.

We felt bad. We should have started out with double plays, worked our way up to the more complicated stuff. It just wasn’t fair. We swore to make amends.

So, in her honor, we’ve decided to keep things simple this week. No subterfuge in the prose below except for the prescribed dosage. We scoured the net and found simple fiction — simple in style, that is, but hard on the soul, as all good writing should be.

Enjoy. — Robert Paul Moreira

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Chop, Chop

A few days ago a stiff breeze fell two hefty limbs that came crashing down into our cable box and did our Internet connection damage. We couldn’t stay on long. Every few moments the signal was lost. It was a miserable experience.

Most folks we know are addicted to their social networking sites, and to their online magazines, and to porn.

Recently, though, we’ve been thinking about seclusion. Cormac McCarthy stays pretty well hid and Charles Portis isn’t media friendly and where the hell has Thomas Pynchon been for the last forty years and the late J.D. Salinger was always locked away.

We wonder if this seclusion allows for better perspective.

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