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At The End Of The Fiscal Year

Ten months prior to being eligible for his company’s pension and benefit plan, after almost twenty years, Ben Ross was fired.

Celluloid Children

Grandma was a person of the Middle Kingdom. The center of civilized life. With one hand she propped up a star-gazer, and with the other she reached down to the bowels of life to offer a hand to the lost and bewildered.

Black Reaper

We couldn’t have been more delighted, Buck and I, he in the warm arms of Mr. Boston, me in the warm arms of life in the sunny south, at a time when the shadows were hazy, the sunshine was bright, and the smell of the newly cropped bermuda grass touched my nostrils, and the days awaited me breathlessly, endlessly.

Man Of Silver, Man Of Gold

That crumbling house with its rusty iron fence, like a disillusioned spider’s web, became important. Even its blotch of drained soil, discolored and long sterile, was a symbol of warfare. This spelled out a larger drama of the world I was just beginning to realize I was living in.

The Funeral

He remembered feeling sick with fear. She had been breathing with difficulty, the air making a rasping sound in her throat. She sounded different — almost impolite. Sounds that used to mean Nana were the floating notes of her harpsichord, the soft rustle of the pages she turned in story books, songs half hummed half whispered, and the small clicking of her knitting needles.

Wellspring

A Story From The Deep Country

The stillness soothes me, reaches out to my battered spirit, until I sense the borders of that peace that waits beyond words, beyond human interaction. Stillness, peace, wordless energy: this I need, I have come to find.

The Every-Other-Friday-Afternoon Bridge Luncheon

As far as I know, my grandmother’s only regret in life was that she died on a Thursday. “Damnation!” she cursed fate in front of her sister Gert, her four children, and her thirteen grandchildren.

Entering The House Of The ’Lord

For the first time I wonder if I have gone too far, overlooking too many potential danger signs in this landlord/tenant relationship, and maybe I should ask for my money back, take the lease form from the wife’s hands where it is lying and tear it into pieces, but then I decide that I am as worthy of two walls of windows and a murphy bed on swiss avenue as anyone else.

Stories

Along the banks of the river Sharaim hang silver bells that dance in the wind. The bells have always been there, and man has always heard their gentle melodies while travelling upon that river. No man knows who fashioned the bells and arranged them along the banks, for the bells existed before man’s curiosity came to be.

Two Stories

The Lord Shantih found himself at the Temple of Rahla where the statues of the gods are kept. Pilgrims journey from distant lands to touch these statues, believing that one touch will cure them of their ills.