It was a mistake to have come to Central Virginia, but not, I think a mistake to have stayed. Stuart had seemed so right when we found ourselves in New York as we both were completing our English doctorates at Colombia, but in the four months between when he had taken a position in the English department at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and w...
"Hold. Help me up, I . . ." Li was wheezing from the climb up the lower reaches of Paradise Mountain—Tien Tang Shan—with little faith that he could climb as far up the challenging path as the parting stones. He had reached out for the arm folds of Junjie's scarlet-red silk robe, but the youth skittered away from him, farther up the rising stone path, anxious...
Chapter One I knew I was dreaming. I had to be dreaming. I was running towards a burning tree, but the closer I got to it, the more it seemed like it was burning water. A huge burning waterfall. Josh was just about to jump into the pool of water when I woke up. I quickly pulled myself upward and looked to my right. Josh was sleeping next to me. His face wa...
::Thanks so much to Niqqi_6 for editting It was hot outside and we had nothing to do. We sat on the front porch in an old shack of a house. It was one story and looked to have been built sometime in the 1930s as deep in remote isolation as possible. Twenty years later the house had long since been without tenants; until about a month and a half ago when Ja...
It was way too hot to be doing anything except cooling down. I'd spent the day running a class in a room with nothing but fans and then come home to a hot stuffy closed up house. I needed to cool down and that was why I'd gone down to the Lake baths. Swimming in the cool water seemed like an ideal solution. There was a breeze coming in off the lake and th...
[This was written for a "bend the story of a song" exercise. It's a flight of fancy on a take on the Act I duet, "Au fond du temple saint," which immortalizes Georges Bizet's opera, Pearl Fishers, from the aspect of the Pearl Fishers being staged as a homoerotic production. (It is best read accompanied by listening to a recording of the duet.)] * I am alre...
Global warming was certainly making the weather more extreme. In Darwin we were already getting warnings of another cyclone building up, and it was only days since the previous one, Nigel, had crossed the Northern Territory coast 300 kilometres to the west. Half way to the Western Australian border, in the middle of nowhere, and had fizzled out without doing...
The Twelve Maidens "Dancing is forbidden on the Sabbath," said Brian, reading from the guidebook. He stood, in the warmth of the summer evening, amidst the blue meadow cranesbills and the creamy-white meadow-sweet. Their almond scent loaded the air so that it seemed drenched with sweetness. Joe looked over the hedge at the field beyond. There was a group o...
Zelion glared at the pages in the book in front of him, the words blurring together. He had been studying for three hours straight and he needed a large cup of coffee to keep him focused. He sighed and sat up straight. "Still at it, huh?" Hex walked up to him, sitting at the oak table that stretched across the entire library. "Yeah," he grumbled. "But I co...
Its' pitch was grating but musical and, despite the increasing volume of pain weaving through it, the sound just barely managed to drag me from unconsciousness. That sound, that awful sound so full of agony and anger, flung itself into the air where it hung suspended for a time, stubbornly refusing to die until it had permeated every corner of the earth. Whe...