Supermarket Sadhu by Barry Rachin (books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

Fanny replaced the worn string on the gyroscope with a fresh length of cord. Setting the rotor in motion, she balanced the toy on the tip of a pencil then, flipping it end over end, stood the gyroscope upright on a taut piece of twine which she anchored between the bedposts. Where human nature proved both erratic and unpredictable, the laws of physics produced consistently replicable results

A decision was reached.

Fanny would become a supermarket Sadhu, traveling about the country, visiting religious shrines and holy places. Well, not really. She could work in stores where the grocery chain had outlets, while sharing an apartment with roommates. She would ask the admissions department at Boston College to hold her spot in the freshman class for one year, alluding to some vague family crisis. Perhaps Norman would be safely tucked away in a federal penitentiary fabricating Massachusetts license plates - his first real job. The money she squirreled away over the past few years for college – Fanny would leave that in the bank gathering interest.

Of course, most Sadhus made the break much later in life, but this was a finite yearlong sabbatical. In this the year twenty-ten, the universe was in deep flux. Retired Rhode Island firefighters grabbed generous clothing allowances so that when their forty-inch waists mushroomed to fifty, they wouldn’t look totally foolish; US soldiers were being blown to smithereens in the lush poppy fields of Afghanistan; Chinese women, who looked like they just floated into Boston Harbor on a sampan, applied for social security, demanding benefits with such galling tenacity that an army of native-born bureaucrats were stood back on their heels.

But none of this mattered. Maybe the new frontier, the untamed wilderness, was situated between her ears. It was a pristine state of mind, not some topographical, x-marks-the-spot smudge on a roadmap of North America. It had more to do with some foolish claptrap purchased second hand from a deaf, dumb and blind woman about life being a wondrous adventure or nothing at all.
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Publication Date: 12-13-2010

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