Pahuac rested his head on the sacrificial stone. He would have to go through this if he wanted to find his way back home. Why couldn’t he remember?
Tag: life
Lessons by Carole Glasser Langille
Setsuko was twenty years older than me but she looked my age or younger. When I was first at university my brother came by and started talking to me when Setsuko was giving me a violin lesson in my practice room. He thought I was performing in front of a friend.
Unprecedented by Adam Kluger
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote,” if you are strong there are no precedents.”
Manfred Gogol lived “off the grid” and was a person of many small mysteries, like Gatsby. Gogol’s wealth wasn’t money, though he somehow had acquired plenty of it from a mysterious trust fund that was established very early in his life. It was, in fact, his enviable ability to be completely mobile, free, unattached and without any marked responsibility whatsoever that was most singular.
Silas Tully, Mechanized by Tom Sheehan
Silas Tully, enjoying early sun and early coffee, heading into another quiet and lonely day, dropped his newspaper and picked up the phone on the first ring. Old pal Jud Haley said, “Si, something screwy down here at Butch and Tony’s. I think my car’s been stolen but nobody wants to believe me. Damn it all, Si, the car they’re about to fix is not my car.”
The Palm Reader by Julie Howard
“Ahhh.” The palm reader sighed heavily. Such was his power that we all exhaled lightly with him, and then leaned forward to hear what would come next.
The 3 a.m. Litterateur by Tony Conaway
The snow reflects the moonlight and the sound of my boots. “I am,” I mutter to myself, “Zhivago, tromping from Yuriatin back to Moscow in the unforgiving Russian winter.”
She has a chain link fence around her place. It’s little more than waist-high; meant to keep her dogs in, not people out. In my condition, it only takes me about fifteen minutes to traverse it. After several attempts, I manage to fall on the inside of the fence.
A Weird Duck by Adam Kluger
For some reason, Franz still refuses to answer any of my phone-calls, e-mails or texts.
Not the type of behavior one might expect from a friend of over 30 years.
The Bard of Oracle Park by Leila Allison
Oracle Park has one tree. It’s a little non-fruiting cherry that seems nervous because cherry trees usually grow in numbers. They typically line parkways and chatter amongst themselves like a backstage gaggle of pink-clad chorus girls. By itself, however, a cherry tree seems fretful. Now, a lone wolf oak is expected—for it has a greedy nature that sucks up the best of the soil and hastens the death of the grass around it. But not the cherry; they are used to sharing resources as though they are swapping garters and smoking off the same cigarette. One suspects that without intervention the little cherry in Oracle Park may die of anxiety, or from overdosing on too much sunshine and minerals. If this one survives, it will most likely grow to cast an uneasy shadow.
Liquid Memory by Christopher Dehon
I pulled up to the 7/11 and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ordered an Icee. I mixed Coke and Strawberry into the biggest cup they had. I remembered when Cheyenne and I were in middle school how we used to mix this with the vodka her mom never bothered to lock up. The girl behind the counter looked like she’d recently graduated from high school, although she held herself with a toughness beyond her years. She’d either shrunk her uniform shirt on purpose or lied about her size, because I could see her belly button ring on her washboard stomach. I looked at the half-eaten nachos behind her and figured she only had a few more years to look like this. She didn’t ask where I was going or where I’d come from. When she handed me my change, I noticed the frenzy of old cuts on her left arm. These weren’t those superficial, privileged, symmetrical cuts girls in my high school had. These were frantic and left her arm looking like an old cutting board. These were the cuts that you get when your uncle’s bent you over a couch for a year and no one believes you. I thought about giving her a hundred dollar bill to impress her. I could tell her where I was headed. She’d be touched and give me her number, and then…what? I threw a pack of Cheyenne’s brand of smokes on the counter, paid with a twenty, and left.
A Witness by Dyaus Rai
Jim sat in the living room with his gun on the coffee table staring at the wall. He had just locked her in his bedroom and was contemplating his next move.
