Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

Here at last was our chance to succumb to new temptations (if one must think of such things as being so unabashedly sinful, so improper, so lascivious and corrupt, as to call them temptations), a long evening dawdling in sophomoric reverie beneath a bridge in the bustling neon funhouse of the Flats, twittering mischievously as we passed around a flask, our parched lips ready to accept the magical metamorphosis that would inevitably ensue, our hearts beating with the anticipation of the Kingsbury Run Killer, a ghost from the city’s past, our eyes darting back and forth from shadows to bright buzzing streetlights, searching for a sign of the cops, stone-faced Celtic henchman rumored to lurk behind the deteriorating concrete supports near the edge of the Cuyahoga River. An excursion into the forbidden, an escapade into the realm of “low rent,” of something less than the middle class mediocrity to which we had become unwittingly accustomed.