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Showing posts from November 14, 2015

Saturday's Storyteller: "The snowflakes fell softly on the girl who wasn't there."

by Belinda Roddie The snowflakes fell softly on the girl who wasn't there. And yet she was there. And I saw her. She wore a simple purple dress, with a a skirt that turned to peppered gray from the drifting sleet. And it bristled against the dark brown sheen of her skin. Quite the opposite of my complexion, pale and nearly transparent in the cold winter. I wanted to push my way through the white wall then, to scoop the frail thing up in my arms and carry her into my cabin, to melt away the ice that crystallized around her arms with a small fire in the hearth. But I knew that if I tried, my fingers would only move through the curve of her hips and the bend of her knees, and I would simply be lifting air and frost and water and attempting to haul it into my sad excuse for a home. I knew her, long ago. She was an old student of mine. She had sat in a desk in front of me when I still taught history, the idiosyncratic ravings of archivists on old paper in old textbooks. That was b

Today's OneWord: Direct

I waited for the traffic cop to direct me across the intersection, but as he gestured, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the truck come hurtling toward the young woman in the black cap and yellow jacket. Instinctively, I blared my horn, and the officer managed to duck out of the way as the crazy man behind the wheel of the pick-up roared past, kicking up pebbles as he went.