"Sam!" the guy shouted. "This is it!"
Sam followed, but he wasn't sure this WAS it. How could it be? They'd been waiting for this for hours, for days even. How could it be?
"Get the nebulizer," he said. "And be quick."
Sam could never remember what the nebulizer was or what it was for. He didn't think it had anything to do with the surrender, but he didn't really know and so didn't like to say.
"Got it," he said, handing a doohicky over to the ambulance driver.
"Thanks, man," he said, not even looking. The guy was intent...
"Vanquished, you say?"
He murmured it, holding up the worn little book in the dusty light, crooning to it. He held it gently, but peculiarly—*that* wasn't the way her mother had told her how to hold old books. He held it like a creature, like it was a little, wounded thing in a forest.
She darted back behind the end of the shelf as the strange man stiffened, and held her breath as he slowly turned his head to look down the aisle. His eyes were wrong. His clothing was wrong, too, she knew it was older than it should...
She'd always come running when I called. At first I only called her when I really needed her, but after a while whether I needed her or not didn't matter; I started to call her just because I could. I didn't realise I was doing it until she called me on it one morning. I'd woken up at 5am and the first thought in my mind had been her, the smell of her, the taste of her, the feel of her. It hadn't occurred to me that she might still be asleep and that she might not appreciate me calling...
Plain Jane never shone so brightly as when she held a pair of knitting needles in her long slender hands.
Her aunt had taught her the craft, hoping to initiate her into the family business, but eons later Jane still only filled in when the older woman was forced to take a few days off. Jane couldn't blame her. Holding that much power in your hands was intoxicating. No wonder she never wanted to retire.
Still, progress and time marched on, the strong became weaker, and the elderly were superceded by their more youthful contemporaries. When Jane suggested destinies be...
He exited the train at Buenos Aires. That was as far as his ticket would take him. He wandered around the city for a while afterwards. It wasn't much, so he boarded a flight to London. The flight stewardess was pretty, but not overly so. Her hair was perfectly tied up in a bun and her lips were pink, straight out of a Barbie Doll. He smiled at her. She smiled back. That was as much as he would allow himself.
When he got off in London, he walked to where his house had been. He stared for a while...
Augustine - certainly not a saint at this point in time - sat in the garden reading. According to the custom of the time, he read aloud. He read his new passion, the letters of St Paul and the Holy Gospels. Today he was reading in Galatians. Freedom was God's gift to the Christian. Augustine searched his heart and his body. He was not free. He was attached: attached to his mistress and his son, named ironically Deodatus (God's gift); he was attached to the enjoyment of sexuality; he was attached to his comfortable lifestyle. He was imprisoned by his...
And then there is the approach of Autumn and September impatiently tapping at the window, intimidating August, chasing it away. I reach out my hands in an attempt to catch hold of it, but it is already overshadowed by distance, one step removed. Only yesterday it was April and there was the whole of Summer; it was a time of promise and hope. I naively believed that I deserved it, that I would be delivered unblemished months. It was such a bad winter, so very long and cold.
But here I am on the edge of the season, dragging so...
When I lost my mother in the store, I was only three years old. I can't remember what happened but I still wake up in a sweat most nights, an innate sense of abandonment, as though I have been on a mission to the moon, stepped outside the spaceship for a walk across the lunar landscape and left behind. Terror.
Mother never recovered from her fear. She spent the rest of my childhood in a daze from a mix of prescription pill cocktails, agrophobia and alcohol. Dangerous combinations.
She was currently in a secure medical facility, unrecognisable from the pretty...
The young man stared down at the small book, his middle and index fingers pressed down to keep the pages from turning as a breeze wafted over him. It was a strange book full of nature scenes and Japanese people in studied poses. But, what really caught his attention was the bare-skinned, almost European looking woman peeking out at him from a curtain. Her gaze seemed to pierce him and he almost felt that he could reach in and pull her out of the page.
"Hello." He blinked. The woman on the page spoke again, smiling at him. "Hello there."...
Massachusetts was beautiful; I was 5 years old, and it was summer. I collected wishbones, crab skeletons, a jellyfish in my shoe. I swam, played, and had the time of my life.
In 1991, at 4 years old, the carousel in Martha's Vineyard was my favorite place to be in the whole world. My dad let me ride it for what seemed to be 100 rides. The horses had those horns on the top that made them look like Unicorns. There was a game involved; the object, to collect a brass ring and place it atop your horse. I won....