Wing Walking

"Did you ever see one of those air shows they put on at county fairs? A high flying act where a woman in goggles and overalls climbs from the cockpit while the pilot puts the plane through loop-the-loops and snap rolls? . . . You know the trick that keeps her from falling? She never lets go with one hand until she's got a firm grip on something solid with the other." The hard part for Marta Sinclair, heroine of the title story of Don Meredith's collection, is to discover what is solid, what illusory.

This dilemma occupies Meredith's fiction. With a style pitched to the nuances of character and setting, the stories in Wing Walking move from California's posh suburbs through the small towns of rural America to the coast of Turkey and the Tuscan hills. The characters are as diverse as the from little Zatha Monroe struggling to play Mozart's D Minor Concerto on a garden hose to the shenanigans of art historian Eduardo Volpe, "skeptic, scholar, aesthete, renowned spelunker in the deep cave of the Italian Renaissance." These ten stories cover a wide range of character and feeling, but the author remains focused on the difficulty of distinguishing reality from illusion.

From Desert Music
That's Gladys Rose on the carpet, legs above her head, the pink balls of her feet pressing wallpaper of purest eggshell blue. From his vantage in the dinette, Barney sees that despite the puffiness and the blue squiggles of her veins, Gladys Rose still has pretty good legs.

Gladys Rose wants to know what Barney plans to do with his retirement. This afternoon, down at Ferucci Casting they gave him a Hallmark card, a gold watch and a pat on the back. The card bore twenty-seven signatures. The watch is gold-filled with Japanese works and has a digital readout he can't see without his glasses.