Hands of the Bird and Other Stories

Every dream, pursued or not, comes with a price. Here meet a freed slave tested by isolation and drought on his forty acres in post-bellum Texas. And a street musician handed a mysterious gift in a dirty glass vial late one night, and though it transforms the way he plays, the gift comes at a frightening cost. Meet the great Jack Johnson fighting under the hot Havana sun in what will be his last bout, while an old friend of his freeloads his way on a freight train heading deeper and deeper into the American south. Or encounter a band of courageous adventurers as they discover one by one a crippling fear, until the last of them disappears on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. And ride with a young woman, pregnant and feeling alone, because her husband travels back in the baggage car of their train, as she seeks the solace of friendship with a oddly silent woman sitting ahead of her in the car. And then there is the store clerk working nights in a Manhattan Mail Box shop, once a gifted and promising drummer, but now he ponders how he lost his way from the back of the big time bandstand swinging a hot trio to the back of a stripmall storeroom sweeping up every night. These are the men and women who populate the early stories of Sandro Dariosto, author of THE LAST GOOD RUN and THE ADVENTURES OF BURTON THE RED.