Lubrican's Short Stories - Volume Five

Volume Five of Lubrican's Short Stories starts with "The Tomboy Blues," in which a man watches his young neighbor girl grow up. Then, a happy accident with a can of paint lands him in a situation with her that blossoms into something he had only dreamed about up to that point. She's happy, and he's happy, which makes for a happy ending.

The second story in the book is actually a book length story in its own right. "Uncle's Lighthouse" begins darkly, with a young woman thrust out into the cold, cruel world by the death of her parents and the jealousy of the town women. A harrowing journey introduces her to a young ruffian, and then takes them both to live with a man who the world has called her uncle, but who she has never met. It turns out he's not her uncle at all, but by then she has nowhere else to go. Gradually, life on the isolated island, in the lighthouse, changes her point of view and she finds happiness and fulfillment in an unorthodox arrangement with the two men she loves and trusts.

Book three in the volume, called "Her Cherry Is Gone With The Wind" is a companion story to "Getting Into The Scene", which is in volume two of the short stories. In this tale, two high school students (properly eighteen years of age, mind you!) get roles in a play that require them to become close friends ... very close friends. In fact, they become the closest of friends. With benefits. You get the idea.

"Molly Springs A Leak" wraps up this volume with a lactation story, set in the 1950s, in which a pregnant young woman is sent off to live with her older foster brothers, to have the baby out of view of proper society. One of her foster brothers is also an outcast, by virtue of a medical condition few people understood in those days. They depend on each other when no one else will help them and, in the process, become much closer than society would approve of foster siblings being. But since society has done nothing for them lately ... in the end, they could care less.