The farmer, his wife, the plough boy, and both maids set off towards the barn, with the old woman hobbling after. She muttered incantations as they walked through the village, then whispered to herself:
"All shall be well. All manner of things shall be well."
When they were within, Will took Pog's hand. "Will ye dance as we did at our wedding?"
"Happen I will, Master." she replied with a courtesy. Meg saw, if none other (saving maybe Will himself) the years fall from her face.
Mary didn't wait to ask, or be asked, but simply grabbed and pulled Tom's...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
After a carefully judged amount of time she stood up and retied the bow at her waist.
"Sure, you stood me up at prom, Adam," she said, "but THIS is for calling my dissertation 'feeble-minded and a stunning waste of recycled pulp' in front of my advisor."
She retrieved her bike and stuck a hardbound volume titled "AN OPTIMIZED PROGRAMMABLE BINARY ARCHITECTURE FOR A SCALABLE DIGITAL THEOREM ITERATOR" into the handlebar basket.
Then, whistling, she hiked up her skirts, straddled the seat, and biked off into...
My great-grandfather was an explorer, an occupation prevalent when one had more to explore. On the the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, he learned to speak Haush, a language near extinction since the 1920s. He taught the language to his son, who passed it on to my father. While we played catch on the front lawn, my father taught it to me, a word relayed with each pitch, returned with each throw.
Three generations dead, I exited the train at Buenos Aires.
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. It wasn't a normal doorway because when I say doorway you think of things like wood and brass nobs and, possibly, hinges.
This had none of those.
And it was hardly a red gown, because you are likely thinking of something you'd take to a ball, or if you're the really twisted sort, and I can tell you are, there's an image of a piece of clothing given out to a somewhat disturbing institution, or asylum, for those less inclined to modern verbiage or intent on...
Josh ground his teeth in frustration. The other kids on the playground were really getting to be a nuisance.
He'd heard all of their excuses as to why his team always won the soccer games. He'd been held back a year, he was bigger and stronger, he'd been to some special training camp, he was a mutant, etc. They kept making excuses, saying that he wasn't playing fair, that he fouled, and so forth, even though he was always careful not to. They just couldn't deal with the fact that he was better than them.
But now it was really...
There's nothing like a few moments watching television while eating popcorn and drinking lemonade. Kelly absolutely loves watching television.
Unfortunately, she works second shift and misses a lot of her favorite primetime shows. Thank God for TiVo, right?
Right.
She can fast forward between comercials, record anything she likes and relive all her funny, tear jerking, pulse racing moments at the click of a button. So long as she has the room on her beloved TiVo, Kelly can rule the world.
Right now, she just wants to pause. All that lemonade and popcorn from the begining is starting to catch...
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."...
“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...
she didn't look at him. he had been absolutely horrid. he had simply taken off to the other corner of the world and hadn't even thought to come back and see her first. "Oh, darling. I missed you so much. Sweetheart - is something wrong?" "No - it's nothing." he begged her to tell him what wa wrong. she looked at him with her intense stare. "Why don't you guess? You can't just leave me like that! You said you loved me!" "I do love you.." "If that were true you would have come and seen me before leaving again....
Sadie didn't believe Mother when she told her it would be a greater adventure than the ones she entertained in the garden. Mother squeezed her, kissed her cheek, and they all laughed once upon the summit. The air was so cold and dry it cracked the skin of her cheeks and it chapped her lips, yet it felt thin and clean, like the waters from the stream.
The ladies breathed heavily, hands on their lower backs, stays pinching them into a dazed sort of happiness. The men gallantly offered arms for them to lean on.
They lingered a bit longer...