Paragraph: (Fiction-stories-masc-captured_moments-1.txt)
Sent 1: Let me begin again.
Sent 2: I like life on the resort worlds -- always have and, after the upcoming mindwipe, always will.
Sent 3: Last year, I rented a small house on Vega IV, a sea world, all islands and reefs and archipelagos, turquoise waters and aquamarine skies, sunrises like symphonies and sunsets like stars gone supernova.
Sent 4: There's only one city: called Nuevo Acapulco in La Enciclopedia del Empirio de la Humanidad, it's N'apulco to the locals.
Sent 5: The N'apulcans are mostly emigrants from Polaris II; the only difference between them and their Carribbean ancestors is that the ancestors fleeced NorAm tourists.
Sent 6: Now the N'apulcans profit from their Hispanic siblings.
Sent 7: I don't mean to sound cynical.
Sent 8: I suppose I wish to show that I'm still capable of a certain authorial distance, a semblance of dispassionate observation.
Sent 9: The following events may indicate otherwise.
Sent 10: In fine tourist tradition, most homes on Vega IV are named.
Sent 11: Mine was The Sleeping Flamingo, and its outer walls were coral pink.
Sent 12: Were they mood-sensitive, they would have changed as I first viewed them.
Sent 13: The rental agent, an attractive N'apulcan named Tasha Cortez, was not mood-sensitive either.
Sent 14: She said, "It's beautiful, isn't it, Señor Flynn?"
Sent 15: My instinct was to gesture curtly with a cupped hand that she lift the wind boat and take me elsewhere.
Sent 16: But she was young and attractive (as I have said and may say again) and eager and so happy to be assisting the infamous Bernardo Flynn that I merely raised an eyebrow in mild scepticism.
Sent 17: And then, because a playwright cannot resist a promising line, I said, "Your Sleeping Flamingo should be put to sleep."