He was a peaceful baby with a face like Buddha who grew into a sensitive toddler: enormous eyes that took in everything and missed nothing. When he fell he cried, but he always recovered after the usual spell of tears.
What a precious child, we thought. Life will be hard on him.
‘The yung stag stood there wi blud on his muzzle. Prostrated before him wis the defeated challenger. They didnae fight for the right to a wuman, nor the right tae land but fae the sake of fighting’s sake. A hatred bore within both stag’s hearts exploded that misty mornin. For one had been taught to hate the other and the other tae hate the first. In truth the stags both looked the same and lived the same lives. Yet one lay deed and the other munched on his flesh. The ecstasy of hate well realised pumped thru the yung stag’s veins. He felt strong and mighty and the monarch of that moment. Whit did his violence gain besides this fleeting high? Fuck all. He sustained a wound to his left shooder and part of his earlier impressive crown was snapped aff and jammed in the deed stag’s neck. Blood soaked his soft brown coat and he looked altogether minging. The meat of the deed stag was tough and manky. The yung stag was close tae boaking so he left the quiet scene of quiet violence.’
The thing about parallel universes is that there might be somewhere where you exist where you are a better person. But then there has to be another place where you’re the worst version of yourself.
Grace Walsh stood on the platform of the train station, imagining the dead. The tracks and platforms of the Bahnhof were cut into a hillside. On the far side of the tracks, the earth was held back by a concrete wall fronted with rough concrete pillars. The wall was the height of two Irish women, more or less. A graveyard crowded the brink of the wall, almost spilling over onto the tracks below. Above the concrete edge, Grace could see headstones adorned with bright splotches of flowers. The Viennese tended their dead well. At least you could say that much for them.
Lucas stopped because of the compliment. It came from a PR girl, who was canvassing Oxford Street’s dense lunchtime crowd.
“Yes,” she muttered, catching his eye. “Definitely.”
We stared at the gravestone.
Tess Jones
A bad wife, but an adequate mother and grandmother
Lawrence Seymour, a chronic asthmatic, died on the floor of his parents’ bathroom on the day of the party celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
On impact, the demon exploded out of the steering wheel airbag and ripped my husband away from this world.
Silence is the color
in a blind man’s eyes
Leo wondered if it was some kind of contest, if it smacked of more than what it seemed. He had heard the poem a hundred times, Chornby always walking around with the book in his shirt pocket or back pocket suddenly reading it to him, again and again, and Leo, the Blind Man of North Saugus, let the words sink in and become part of him, part of his sightless brain. Just like Chornby had become part of him. Chornby’s face he could not picture, nor eyes, nor beard, nor jut of chin, but settled on the imagination of Chornby’s hands and could only do so when he felt his own slim unworked hands, the thin fingers, the soft palms, the frail knuckles, how the fingers wanted to touch a piano but couldn’t, or a woman, but who wants a blind man?
Continue reading “Chornby and Leo the Blind Man by Tom Sheehan”
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