The Lutes Of Beacon Island
By Alan Ira Gordon

"I got the Black Shakes real bad, May Louise."

The first lucid words I’d heard from Abel in two days. He looked like crap lying there all gaunt and drained on his sweat-soaked mattress, seemingly closer to seventy years old than his true forty-five.

I turned back on the video player at the foot of Abel’s cot. The old Disney movie Fantasia kicked-in. Abel sighed deeply as his favorite scene flickered on, the calming zen-like Ave Maria sequence. Near the end of the film, right after that nightmarish good versus evil battle scene of Night On Bald Mountain.

My daddy Abel. Paratrooper veteran of the last terrorist war. A chronic Black Shakes disabled vet. And when it all boiled down to it, the best keeper and protector of the Lutes of Beacon Island that there ever was.

We are the remnants of a very dying breed, "real fryin’, dyin’ New Englanders," Abel liked to say. In all my seventeen years, I can’t say I’ve ever met nor seen more’n a handful ‘a folk. After two and a half greenhouse centuries of rising tides and frying ecologies, not many are willing to hang-on along the coastline. The focus of the world’s moved way In-Land, and I suppose its for the best...

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