Daring to be noticed for the first time in her life, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Jerome, her uncle's brother, took no notice of her. Her hands were cold and shaking. He continued eulogizing. "He was a great man, and there's no denying. We all..."
"No."
That got his attention. All of them, really. She clasped her hands together tightly, willing her voice to be steady. Jerome raised an eyebrow at her. "Did you have something you wanted to say, Candace? Why don't you come on up here and say it?"
She swallowed, hard. The idea of...
I remember when I first saw you. You were walking alone in a park, it was a cool evening it was so late that even the night walkers were in a bed, There you were walking alone in the park, skin fair hair so blonde it was almost white. You wore nothing but a patient's gown. I walk up to you concerned then frightened, you my dearest lamb were covered in a crimson tint. Do you remeber what you asked me you said "help me"
~
I met him on the beach. He sat, fully clothed, legs ajar with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth, ash dropping sullenly, almost petulantly into the faded crotch of his blue jeans. His eyes were a-glaze, his raybans askew and he hadn’t seem to notice me sitting down beside him.
It was night. Behind us various Reggaeton tunes blared from various speakers, set outside the rows and rows of cocktail shacks at the side of the beach, all selling cheap and strong and just how we liked to drink it. The sky was jet and pinpricked with...
"Tis a penny," said he, and bent to retrieve the copper coin from the sidewalk. Holding it between gloved finger and thumb, he inspected the date with a squinting eye and dropped it into his vest pocket.
"Aye, twy twirrly twee, a penny's enough fer you an' me," he sang and performed a pirouette for the passerby.
A woman, richly attired and ambling along with an aristocratic gate, stopped to consider the man as he continued to spin in circles. A member of the upper crust, she lacked that innate mechanism, honed by the lower classes, which steered one away...
“Pob lwc.” the elder of Saint Joseph’s had wished me, after his strange warning. I presumed he meant for my first Mass to be held, as traditional, at Midnight on Christmas Eve. It went well, the service, with a fuller than expected attendance, to see the ‘new man’, I presumed.
Later, sat still in just the candle light, I sighed, thinking I’d found a final home. It was then that the Bwgan Fawr sighed too. A man of middling years, he seemed, from one of the middling centuries, but as translucent as chip paper fat.
He pointed at the great...
Waves.
When I opened my eyes the image faded, something from a dream. The waves were pink, lapping against the beach and around my ankles. The pink was tinged with pale green, and the forms in the distance, all of them waist deep in the water were the last to delete from my waking memories.
I only remember one of the forms with clarity. One shoulder higher than the other, arms dangling at the sides, a feeble attempt to wave with the shorter arm.
There were tears in my eyes, and I ran my fingers through my hair, and I...
The sky was blue, the grass was green and the little clouds were as fluffy as the picture in a child's reading book. All was well with the world. And on her swing, she could see above the park, above the neat hedges and the flowering bushes. She could, as she swung higher still, see over the row of terraced houses and into the street beyond. Over the flowering cherry trees and the neat gardens with their blossoming plants, over the heads of the middle class and middle aged gardeners and housewives and shoppers and busy bodies of the suburban...
In hindsight, the solution was obvious. Of course it was. It always is. But at the time it seemed like an impossible thing, a thing that would never be solved. A thing that would haunt her and taunt her forever and ever amen.
The crossword in Mrs Grey’s daily paper may not, to others,especially perhaps her husband, have seemed like much of an importance, but to her it was everything. It was the thing that, for just an hour or so each day, made her feel clever. It made her feel like a proper human being instead of the tired...
I looked at the passport, and then back up at the woman standing in front of me.
"Are you serious?" I asked, a puzzled look on my face.
She looked sad.
"What is to be funny?" she said, her broken English somehow endearing.
"I don't know how they do things in..." I turned her passport over, and looked at the country name listed. It took up three lines, and many of the letters just looked like squiggles to me. "...your home country, but over here we do things differently."
"Is me!" she smiled, and I felt my tough exterior melting...
The two of them sat there, staring at their glasses. They each had their of Johnny Walker, black for one, red for the other.
The bar tender walked by, they almost simultaneously motioned toward their glasses.
The pour seemed slow, but they paid no attention to it. Garbed in black suits, with white shirts and black ties, they hunched over their vessels, as if protecting the precious liquid from some evil darkness.
"I just can't wrap my head around it, Gabriel."
"I know Joseph."
"I mean, today was one of those days you read about, you watch in movies, man."...