Tag: story

Twilight

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by Matias Travieso-Diaz

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Around the valleys’ slopes the sky is already darkening;
Alone, two larks still soar, rapt in the twilight’s perfume.
Come here and let them flutter; soon it will be their time for rest.
Would that we not lose ourselves in this solitude.
O, utter, silent peace! So deep in the sun’s afterglow!
How weary we are of wandering: can this, perchance, be death?
– Joseph von Eichendorff – Im Abendrot (At Sunset)

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Living had become difficult for Felix. He was feeble, arthritic, with an erratic heart and almost deaf. Many activities he had enjoyed in earlier years were now beyond his reach. Driving long distances was too tiring, and his daily runs had needed to be scaled down to strolls. Soon he would be relegated to one of those mausoleums where the elderly are stored awaiting the inevitable.

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Anniversary

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by William Cass

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Carl pulled on his brown cardigan, gripped his cane, and left the house.  It was just after 6am, the charcoal sky ink-washed over rooftops to the east.  At the end of the driveway, the old man paused.  He looked to the left at the streets he’d grown accustomed to taking on his morning walks, then pressed his lips into a thin, tight line, blew out a breath, and turned right.

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All Souls’ Day

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by Eric Vanderwall

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The Halloweens of those early years blend together and it seems as if it was one long night, and, as it seemed to my young boy’s mind, the whole world joined in, that world being our neighborhood. It was a long Halloween night, both wet and dry, both cold and mild, filled with expectation and disappointment, all condensed into pointillist moments that, out of the blackness of the forgotten, have, many years later, been brought forth to light. The days of October that preceded Halloween have all faded away, leaving only those few impressions of the month’s final night to encapsulate the entirety. Had I known in those early years how precious those times were and how irrevocably it would all be lost, I would have paid better attention. I would have tried to remember everything. Although nearly all those Septembers and Octobers have disintegrated, one memory of the second day after Halloween, All Souls’ Day, remains.

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Imitators

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by Chey Dugan

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I was admiring the aristocratic Grande Dame portrait on a Tuesday afternoon; a day when the Abruzzo Museum of Art History is hauntingly inactive and I’m free from the perturbed looks I get from the usual late-week crowd. I’m reluctant to admit, but somewhere along my embryonic development my Pavlovian wires got crossed and because of these ritual Tuesdays, I could just exist in my oddity. I would thank myself at the end of the week for getting this out of my system.

I was deep within myself and sure I was alone until you interrupted and said, I like what you’re doing with your face.

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Ten Years (and why I still talk about Nico di Angelo all the time)

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by Daisy Solace

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It’s 2013. I’m 11, living in Saudi Arabia, and anticipating House of Hades’s release with bated breath, counting down the days. It’s all I talk about, my best friend is getting sick of me. I’m insufferable, and I like it. I haven’t been into Percy Jackson for very long — just about a month by this point, but it’s found its space in my head and settled there.

As a kid who had always felt ALONEALONEALONEalonealonealone, it’s nice to read about a boy who’d changed schools so much that he has no friends, except for the one whose job it is to protect him. It’s nice to read about a boy who knows the truth: that the best people have the rottenest luck. It’s nice to read about a boy who, despite this, fights. After rows upon rows of pleasant protagonists, there’s a certain level of solace (pun intended) in Percy Jackson. He’s not easy. He’s not agreeable. He’s angry, rowdy, and, as Percy would come to say in the musical, impertinent. As a fellow impertinent child, I’m delighted.

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The Real Willy Wonka

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by Blaire Baron

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It is still dark and the early morning cacophony has yet to greet the day. The others have already left and Washington knows they aren’t waiting for him, not this time. With no Mum to wake him, he’s getting better at finding his clothes in the dark. Washington scoops up a sticky ball of yesterday’s ugali and pops it in his mouth before rushing out of the ramshackle maze. He zig-zags past sleeping mothers and babes. Everything here is laid bare, there are no doors and there’s nothing here to steal.

Some might call it a labor camp but to Washington, it’s home. Out of the maze now, he runs toward the line of humming shadows holding machetes. Washington grins up at one of his uncles.

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