Kevin Lōttes (pronounced “lotus”) won the Bob Dylan Days first-place prize for fiction in 2008. He is the author of the story collection, First Person Last. He is the playwright of several produced plays, including The Leash of the Rainbow's Meow, The Line Shack, Paralyzed July, San Francisco Scarecrows, and Two Mrs. & Ablaze. His selected prose appears in The Good Things About America (Write Bloody Publishing). Monologues from his numerous plays appear in Classroom Scenes and Monologues (Dramatic Publishing) and in several editions of the Audition Arsenal Anthology Series (Smith & Krauss, Inc.). He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Two women, who have lived together since their husbands died, are brought asunder by a young waiter at their local diner. A promise between two "widows for life" is put to the test as youth and the possibility of new love interrupts the routines of an old friendship.
Hopper and Ozzie travel from the Midwest to the West Coast to find what is missing in their lives. The authenticity of their identity and their view of the world around them depends on it.
Returning home in a wheelchair from an ongoing war, a young paraplegic soldier is faced with the patiently abiding love of his life. Avowing to their own appetite for freedom, they struggle to recuperate their zeal and fervor for each other.
Set in a prison barber salon, The Leash of the Rainbow's Meow takes us to the burdens of an overcrowded prison, the pseudo-suicidal acts incurred, and a warden's rhapsody of emotional suppression, corruption, and a last desperate reach for release.
On a broken down porch swing, Grandma Nuckols sucks in air from an oxygen tank, smokes Camel cigarettes, and sings Patsy Cline, grasping at straws as she tries to articulate to her granddaughter the importance of what’s never been there.