Tracey's Secret

"Right now I am really mad," Tracey Flagler, my proverbially Nice Girl Next Door, had scribbled furiously in her diary. "I want a million dollars right away. I want to be independently wealthy so that I do not have to do anything. My life just seems to be so stupid sometimes that I no longer want eternity. Who wants eternal stupidity? Eternity sounds so exhausting! I want amazing things to happen. I want to see myself as amazing. I am angry that I have to work tonight. I am mad that I have to support myself. I just don't want to do anything anymore. I wish I were DEAD. I want to be free right now, and I mean right NOW, or DEAD."

Give me liberty or give me death - perhaps the two are one and the same, so let me have the cash. Tracey finally freed herself from going to work. I noticed that she had not fed the dozen or so alley cats that showed up at her door regularly. I glanced discreetly into her window from my bathroom window next door, saw her nude form on the bed, and surmised that she was sleeping. The next day I looked again; her body was in exactly the same position, and likewise the day after. Something was wrong with that picture. I went across the way, up the flight of stairs to her apartment, knocked on her door and looked into her window. Her body did not move. I tried the door; it was open; her prized cats, the fluffy ones she kept inside, did not race around as usual, but put their heads down and growled sorrowfully.

The odor was ghastly. It was a good thing she had put out plenty of food for her cats, I thought, or they would have eaten her according to the rule, Food eats food. A note to our landlord was pinned on the wall, asking him to get rid of whatever he found in the apartment. After official inquiries were completed and the apartment unsealed, he told Tracey's fellow tenants to take whatever they wanted before the Salvation Army truck arrived. I was the last to take my pick, but I found a fortune that had been neglected and tossed into garbage bags, namely her literary remains, along with several charming items that have occult properties, and other things I have described elsewhere. I found a book outline that she had penned on 35 pages of an Eden Roc Hotel note pad. The book would include a chapter on reincarnation, but she had written "DELETE" beside 'Ch.7 - Reincarnation'. Who knows where Tracey is now, or whether she exists at all?

Read all about Tracey Flagler's Secet Journey to The Source.

David Arthur Walters is an independent journalist who lives in the South Beach area of Miami Beach, Florida. David Arthur Walters is a poor man's writer-wunderkind who takes on the philosophical big guns of our age with sleight-of-hand logic and epistemological flourishes worthy of Foucault. But don't let that fool you. In a pinch he can write a play based on La Dame aux camellias, no doubt inspired by Dumas, and render sidewalk chalk-art tres chic after Picasso. Baudelaire could easily have been his drinking buddy if we were to imagine time in reverse, which Mr. Walters compels us to consider through the Ouspenskian lens of Eternal Recurrence and other stuff worthy of a Dali painting a la melting clock faces. Herein lies the genius of David Arthur Walters, jack of all trades and master jester of Nan, that far-off land in which lived the holy fool of William Blake's prodigious imagination. Writer, dancer, word-artist, satirist, and clown, David Arthur Walters brings it all to the page, compelling us to wave our hand-fans in astonishment at the nerve of the man, the impropriety, the utter genius of his whackadoodle mind. May his works live on in the annals of Time! (Melina Costello, Author of Seeking the God of Ecstasy: A Spiritual Journey of Sexual Awakening, Tutti-Frutti Town: Blinky Blueberry Finds A Friend)