✍Red Women Conflated, 20 Years Post-K / August 2025
~ Fiction ~
Roman à clef, cher!
Created AI-free
by Leonard Earl Johnson
of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana
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Yours Truly in a Swamp
August 2025
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✍
Yours Truly in a Swamp
August 2025
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Red Women Conflated,
Twenty Years Post-K
by
Leonard Earl Johnson
© 2025, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
Best viewed for color contrast on a computer
or phone screen with a dark background.
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The Sunset Limited
outbound from New Orleans to Los Angeles,
and points between, is
Amtrak's designated Train #1.
It is America's first transcontinental train, with once daily departures from the Eastern Seaboard to California's golden shore (a land cruise, running time three days). It is also the first American train to carry a personified name, e.g.,
Sunset Limited.
"In 2005, Balthazar says, "Hurricane Katrina changed all that. All but name, number, and history."
Sylvia and Dillard are in the Observation Car having coffee and sandwiches they bought on Saint Claude Avenue in New Orleans. They are listening to Balthazar, who recently repatriated from an offshore oil rig job.
He arranged to join up with the two
Red Warrior Women,
for the ride back to Lafayette.
They met at the Amtrak gate, under the nationally acclaimed murals of New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal.
"In 1934," Balthazar continues, "Myrna Loy and William Powell appeared in the wildly applauded film
adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's mystery novel turned stylish black-and-white, post-prohibition cinema jubilation,
THE THIN MAN.
"In the final scene, outside Lafayette, the train fades down the tracks flashing a spare tire round sign on its last carriage, proclaiming: Sunset Limited."
Balthazar accepts one of the sandwiches and says, "Hard to believe that film was shot ninety-one years ago."
The train is stopped near Avondale. Outside the club car windows are mounds of trash marching off to landfill eternity.
Sylvia points at the towering stacks, and says,
"And ninety-one minutes ago we climbed on top of Mount Katrina,"
as the mountain of debris is locally known.
Katrina is Hurricane Katrina, which evacuated New Orleans, August 29, 2005
~ and changed Coastal Louisiana forever.
Doors closed, keys turned locks, and Life ended as lived before. Both for the dead (1,392+), and for the living who later returned.
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"The dogs barked,
but the caravan moved on.
"A Turkish proverb," Balthazar tells us.
Our train whistles.
We roll on...
Along the tracks at a brownish green spot on the West Bank past the Huey P. Long Bridge, lays
a ghostly yacht beached
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| Sea Oats |
Mast snapped off and lost.
Discarded vessel. Forgotten now, twenty years later. Hull so faded you can no longer make out her name.
Keel is sprung for sure. But there she sits, someone's lost dream sailing along on sea oats grown up to her gunnels.
Further down the line, next to the Mississippi River levee, we pass a small Cajun farmhouse, with outside stairs and unpainted cypress wood. It is surrounded by a flock of grey and white geese.
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| Foie gras |
"Some French Quarter tourist will eat one of those birds' liver tonight,"
Balthazar tells the women.
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"In ninety-one years the Louisiana Life we live will be lived differently and by new carpetbaggers who will likely love it as much as we do now.
"Though your little ship has no anchor,
"and my little ship has no sail.
"Still, we are here,
and better off as Sailors than as geese."
© 2025, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
LAGNIAPPE DU JOUR:
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............................................... Next Month's Column 
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posted by LEJ's Louisiana | 4:13 AM
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