Browsing Category: Short Story

               “There is only so long that a person can keep her enthusiasm locked away within her heart before she longs to share it with a fellow soul, and Alma had many decades of thoughts much overdue for sharing.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things                He had a quietness that listened, and eyes that […]

               In quiet room, Annie read by light of showing sunrise, golden as it broke, and enrichment of aura from lamp of soft-white glow that, near, illuminated self and page before muting into oneness with room and sun as it dispelled into room beyond.                Outside, Annie looked on the shadows of trees silhouetted in […]

          Emma was composed in warmth of an autumn love that took and beget as Life, making entry into world under announcement of Perseids’ star-fall and light of colored trails in sky-celestial rain from Heaven onto earth.           As with Bethlehem in history told, there are some souls born, modest and unannounced, by world that […]

        He rested on the porch reading with the falling sun listening as crickets and cicadas resumed their songs from night before, their sunfall scratch and cadence that seemed eternal, ever-present in night dying light and eves, building strength as summer days waned, a false forever until—one day—it was gone as becomes to […]

               In turn of fall and come of summer’s end, he boarded a flight to the west coast where a bus waited and took him to an asphalt tarmac under San Diego sun where, arrived, he was rushed from seat and raced blind into beginning of a new life-chapter.                Before departing, she handed him […]

               From almost-first meeting of eyes, they spent the early of that summer flirting in way known only to the shy, where meekness and caution combined with heart-ambition attribute great sign to what, in truth, is small.  In veiled guard, they are expressions still that, to most, appear as nothing and whose discernment of greater […]

               “He, Will Barrett, had learned over the years that if you listen carefully you can hear the truth from the unlikeliest of sources, especially from the unlikeliest sources, from an enemy, from a stranger, from children, from overheard conversations…Are not great discoveries also made at the unlikeliest moments…”—Walker Percy, The Second Coming                Tide […]

               They hunted mushrooms in the early spring among down of leaves and fallen trees.  Later, they returned picking wildflowers from prairie that touched woods’ edge.  In summer, after rains, they walked the creeks in search of arrowheads and relics from cultures before; and in fall they walked the woods, taking in the colored scene […]

        In the commotion of crowd, his mind was elsewhere, sitting off from the greater group as he smoked slowly on cigar.         Often quiet herself, she watched hm from the edges of her eyes, and when the crowd and focus moved away, she approached him in his thoughts.     […]

               “And in the darkness of this second and far more desolating interruption, he seems to have had another dream in which a voice said to him, ‘You have mistaken the meaning of vision.  Return to your town.’  And Francis trailed back in his sickness to Assisi, a very dismal and disappointed and perhaps even […]