As Cristina looks out the window from the

As Cristina looks out the window from the small cafe, she wonders if she will ever find someone. Then as if she could hear Cristina's thoughts, a beautiful girl sat down.

Beautiful people are hard to come by. Ones that make you stop and stare at them like only they exist; when they gaze in your direction, you stare right back at them, transfixed.

Then you bump into a tree. That's the thing about beautiful people. Another thing about beautiful people is they don't do tax returns or the washing up. Life with a beautiful per

uck, big league...literally...they suck on coffee coolattas and coffee cubanos and Cuban cigars and sugar cane and sugar beets and Lady Ga Ga's pechos. Beautiful do whatever they

take to remain so but too many cigars & their skin became old & leathery like a dried tobacco leaf. Recuerda vistas of rusty cars, swinging hammocks among coconut palms, senioritas

in long soft skirts. It was surreal. Mexico and Costa Rica were the heaven this lonely old codger had needed. Shawshank had taken too much of me. Here I was free to be

a carefree senorita, even though I was a 58 year old married man named Steve. But that was my old life. Now that I lived in Central America my name would be Carlotta and I would

open a tapas bar. In neon above the entrance would read "Steve's" as a nostalgic nod to my old life. But as Carlotta, I would wear a red flamenco dress and flirt from behind the

feather fan I carry to hide remnants of my previous self...my beard. I loved my new life, my new name, my new vagina. Ah, it was wonderful being Carlotta! I adjusted my spanx.