Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

HOW MEN ARE #14, 14th Street, Santa Monica LINK TO MORE FICTION HERE:  DIAMOND GIRL LAST DANCE KISSES AS DEEP AS THE OCEAN They carried sunshine with them; sand filtering out the bottom Of their woven bags from Guatemala, the smell of Coppertone in the air. Linda and Marissa went to the beach almost every day that summer, the summer they were seventeen. They'd walk down Wilshire in cut-offs and crocheted bikini tops, laughing at the sound of their huaraches  flapping against the sidewalk, tripping on the way the ground glass in the cement sparkled in the sun like a zillion tiny diamonds, checking out their reflections in the store windows. They'd cross the Pacific Coast Highway on the Arizona overpass, stopping only for a second to take in the buzz of the cars careening along PCH beneath them, barely breathing until they could escape the stench of urine and what that stench implied. Some smelly bum might be anywhere, pulling his thing out of his pants and waving it around

I only worked on a couple of movies during my short-lived career as a production coordinator. By a couple, I mean two. Literally two. The Favor was one of those movies, a film most of you will have never heard of even though it starred Elizabeth McGovern, Bill Pullman and Brad Pitt.  Brad Pitt was just a beautiful young man back then, only twenty four, with the beginnings of a resume; some small parts in episodic tv, nothing noteworthy. The director cast him based on some footage his agent had sent from LA up to our location production office in downtown Portland. It was from the as yet unreleased Thelma & Louise ; my boss had seen the video clip and trilled that he was delicious. And we all knew that instead of flying up from LA, he’d driven up in the cutest little sports car with Juliette Lewis by his side.  Brad played Elliot, an artist and Elizabeth McGovern's love interest, Emily, who runs an art gallery. The film is called  The Favor  because Emily's friend

WRITER A novel is in the works but for now … Some of my credits include  Beach Music   in the  Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine ,  Last Dance   in Purdue U's   Skylark Literary Journal,  The Arab boy who took out his eye  appeared under the title Double Vision in the  South Bay Reader.  The Good Men Project featured  7 Reasons Older Women Love Older Men  in their online magazine.  Doing Nothing  appeared in  Children. I  was a regular monthly contributing writer to 805Living Magazine for several years  while various other pieces appeared in LA Family, the national magazine Parents, and the Daily Breeze.  For more see  Out of Order . While you're here, can you please do me a favor? If you like what you read—or even if you don't— can you please let me know? I've disabled comments here because —well you probably know why and it has nothing to do with what you like or don't like about my writing! Find me! Please! On Instagram @ simcarterwriter About the work availab

# 9.1    Cherry Grove Road, Niagara Falls, Canada We hopped about quite a bit once we ’ d arrived in Canada from England via Turkey and Libya. We moved from Montreal to Toronto to Niagara Falls where we lived in a big old two-story house with a grassy lawn, surrounded by ancient maple trees.  A place where I was perfectly happy. As perfectly happy as a ten-year-old girl just discovering boys were another species could be.  Happy until my parents bought a house in Cherrywood Acres, a new development on the outskirts of town.  This is # 9.1 of the  “ On the Street  Where I Lived ”  stories. It ’ s a close up view of one day in particular.   Snow Day It was only a few miles from our gloomy old house on Ryerson Crescent to our family ’ s new split level across town in Cherrywood Acres but it could just as easily have been light years away. It was a whole different world out there in the barely built development where the cherry orchards used to be, everything bright a

  Alright class, carry on with your math until the bell. ”    Miss Allen gestured for me to come up to her desk while the rest of the class got busy with their math books. She told me not to worry about Walter. “ He ’ s usually such a nice boy. ”    Handing me a page of math problems, she asked me to give them a try so she could see if I was as far along as the rest of the class. The good news was that since we used the same SRA system back at Simcoe Street as her class did, I didn't have to take a reading test! I would still be in my same group, the second highest in the class. I ’ d always loved walking to the back of the classroom to the big SRA box and flipping through the color-coded cards, like I was a librarian. I always wanted to be a librarian. In fact, I secretly still played  ‘ librarian ’  with my little sister; we made Date Due slips out of my parents ’  bridge game score pad and taped them inside our mother ’ s books. We didn ’ t own that many, mostly just some old Re