About The Author

Defined by Romanian, Austrian, and Spanish ancestry transplanted into the New World by hopelessly migratory kin, the child Zolen Caló awoke in South Dakota. There, his starved curiosity sought nourishment in books. As he later traveled the world with military parents, he nurtured literary fascinations. He worked his way through Southern U.S. universities where he earned degrees in literature and psychology, after which he resumed his "hazardous adventures of a domestic sort." He has consolidated his search for lore into seven novels and six chapbooks of poem. He now lives south of the border where he writes and, with his editor wife, enjoys the company of his dogs, cats, equine, goats, and, occasionally, that of his two sons.

Abstracts From
Zolen Caló's Novels

From Ali Zán And True Love

    The driver was Father—known locally as Tracer Montrose—a North American, a strongly built man with dark hair, grayish eyes, and skin five times lighter than the Honduran cowboys with whom I was familiar. Somehow, from his gait and the way he held his mouth, I sensed him to be a determined man—not quite broken.

From Memory Work

     The psychic’s face sobered.
     "I think you’ll drown," she replied thoughtfully, "You could drown in the quiet waters of a river, like the Coosa outside our little mall here. Or you could drown in your bathtub after a drunken spill there. Or you could drown by the tightness of a rope you put around your own neck. All those opportunities open to you." She stopped. She eyed him certainly. "Or you could die the slowest and most horrible of deaths that mortals know."

From Just Another Georgia Romance

     "This must be love."
       She almost whispered but mostly breathed the words upon his chest.
       She lifted her cheek and turned her eyes upon his face, conscious of the draw of her nakedness along the bareness of his ribs.

From The Quixote Imbroglio

     "You always say I'm dirty, smelly, and stupid, Aunt Ballena. But neither you nor any other family member I've lived with ever let me go to school. I've lived in the back rooms of bars and tire shops and tool sheds and corner stores and carpenter shops all my life. I've never been outside of Tegucigalpa. I've never even been in a taxi. But I've been in bed with Uncle Juan, Uncle Luis, Uncle Francisco, and Step-Uncle Jorge."
     "Don't you talk about my husband like that!" Ballena shouted.

From Fingers Through The Sand

     "Isn’t love wonderful. The power of the unconscious mind—isn’t it wonderful? Here, having embraced in the passion of a desperate moment, lie, I find, the Unlikelies!" His eyes widened with self-manufactured surprise. "The Unlikelies! I like that; even if it is of my own coinage. Two antagonists, forced together by the artificial pressures of a summer theater play. You two, whom I’ve watched so busy hating one another that you could not see, as I saw, the start of love budding in your breasts. Oh! How incomprehensibly true!"
     The professor, now a little wild-eyed, a touch of saliva playing at the corner of his mouth, leaned toward them.

From Nearly Diamond

     "It’s a little early for a beer, isn’t it?" the bartender said. She sat a glass and a bottle before him.
     "Do I look like I give a shit," Hanford replied with a glare.
     The bartender redoubled her guest’s expression.
     "You have a pretty face to show it with such a rotten disposition," she answered.
     Hanford pushed aside the glass and drank directly from the bottle. When he put it down, most of the contents were gone.
     "What’s your name," she asked.
     "Hanford Stone."
     "Umm. I’ve heard of you."
     "Usually my fame follows me, not precedes me," he replied, "What’s your name?"
     "Shana."
     "Shana who? Don’t you people from Ohio own last names?"
     His reply came tersely and ended in a silent stare.

From He, Recalled

     "Damn, Chica. Can’t you stop with those whore sounds. You’ve got it sounding like a zoo in here."
     Chica sat back upon her knees and frowned at her lover, the chocolate of her irises concentrated into the most formidable of Indian dissatisfaction.
     "I was only trying to raise your spirits, Ware."
     "All you need to do is raise my desire, Chica. All else follows…and without the animal noise."
     Ware pushed himself erect against the head of the bed and tucked a pillow behind himself. He eyed the naked body of Chica, the Salvadoran prostitute he had rescued off the beach at Amapala to become his unavoidable companion.

From Earth, Dirt and Dust

          . . . Certain subtle things gone,
     Suddenly missed and totaled,
     Point to those greater things abused,
     And now gone, too.