The Dora Chronicles

By Zach Gault

She's almost forty, still a virgin, and her anti-celibacy campaign isn't going anywhere. Dora is the perfect girl who can't say no but no one is asking the question she really wants to say yes to. Not in the high school English office where the question is who the would-be Banksy might be tagging the hall walls with something a lot more sophisticated than his, or her, spray painted initials. And certainly not in the classroom where the kids are supposedly studying Edgar Allen Poe and want to know if a catatonic state has something to do with how cats react when you swing them around by their back legs. (The same kids who quite casually show by word and deed that they won't be suffering Dora's problem when they are her age or even by the time they get out of high school). On the weekends, the questions are from her agoraphobic sister who wants to know if Dora can pick up some things for her at the grocery and from her fat, lesbian, philosopher friend who wants to know which movie they will see that weekend and where they will go for dinner. (The friend who has her own agenda for Dora).But this is the internet age and it is also Boulder where a lot of unusual opportunities can come up for Dora who can't say no. Like driving out to the airport hotel to meet the rubber fetish man her sister invited out for the weekend but then couldn't get out of her own basement to go meet him herself. Or helping out a fellow teacher by being his surrogate girlfriend at a sweat lodge ceremony hosted by another New Age guru with his own agenda quite in opposition to Dora's own. And finally, there is the somewhat more than middle aged, divorced, ostrich wrangler with the one eyed llama for a pet who might have been the one to ask the question Dora wanted to hear but didn't take the time. All of this analyzed and annotated in Dora's extended argument with herself about how she ended up like this half way through her life enabling everyone else's alternate life style but having very little life of her own. The analysis is scathing because Dora not only knows herself all too well but she is also a cultural connoisseur well aware of all that has gone on around her while she continued to trudge on in her own rut so the annotations are filled with references to the styles, music, movies, and books that rattled the country as it turned over from one century to another. (Polyester pants to f**k me boots, Elvis to the Pogues, Ed Poe to Fifty Shades of Grey, Gilbert Grape and Eyes Wide Shut). Dora had seen and heard it all, taken it all in, but participated only vicariously in most of it. At thirty eight could she finally say no to them and then say yes to herself?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1980254125
• ISBN13: 9781980254126
• Release Date: February 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.9" x 6.0"