Peach Tree Grove

There was a figure standing in the shadows, a silhouette still in the corner.  Elenore approached the window slowly, her eyes never leaving the dark figure, and with one motion, down she pulled the velvet curtains in a sweeping trail of dust.  Her lips parted in wonder as she slowly stepped forward. The figure was too still to be human, posed lightly, ever so delicately, on the toe of one foot.  She was a doll.  She was a doll unlike any Elenore had ever seen, the most beautiful toy, the most beautiful figurine she could ever have imagined, brushed a deep midnight cobalt, gold flaking forward on her brow and cheek bones, her hair tumbling back over her shoulders. She had been made to be small girl about Elenore’s age, with slim, elegantly structured limbs, a perfectly sculpted face, and thick, dark lashes closed in a curling line over eyes large enough to look unnatural on anyone but this already impossibly lovely doll.  Elenore stepped forward and slowly traced...

          I want to be a thief, a gentlewoman with downward-tilted hat and elegant gloved fingers, gloved fingers that left no marks on the sparkling glass case where the jewels rested only a moment ago as I disappear in a puff of smoke, an immaculate fantasy, a beautiful phantom; daring, flamboyant, impossible.  I want to be a detective, tapping, smoking, my suspenders shrugged off my shoulders, pacing a floor littered with newspaper clippings and grainy photos fluttered down from their pins, possessor of more luck than my Irish ancestors, more dogged than any hunting hound, a determined devil to any man with a clenched smile and a smoking gun. I want to be a knight, a dragon-slayer, a lone samurai with a humble heart and only a honed blade and an unbent back left to me, a disaster to the demon-dragon with forked tongue and spiteful fire, a shield to the innocent and the worst of nightmares to the wicked.  I want to be a maiden pure, unstai...

Isaiah leaned on an empty bus stop, empty now of its usual crowd of commuters. Between the fingers of one hand he held a smoldering cigarette, and with the other he wrote in sharpie on the wall.  “You know those things’ll totally destroy your lungs.”  Isaiah straightened. A teenager stood next to him with earbuds in hand, out for her morning run. She gestured to the tube between his fingers. He didn’t say anything, just turned to face the road and took a long drag of his lung-destroyer.  “I mean it. You should look it up on Google. Those pictures’ll get you off them in a snap.”  Isaiah turned to look at her again but didn’t answer, just held her eyes steadily. She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze for several seconds, until he finally turned his eyes back to the road. She shrugged, relieved that he had turned away from her. “Whatever. I was just trying to help.” She glanced over at what he had written.  “What is this stuff anyway? It doesn’t make any sens...

What a tiny cog I am in this great celestial machine, spinning and whirling amidst a hurricane of trillions of stars. What a fragile little soul, flickering in my tiny world above the clay and the copper and the iron, a flame half as bright as the last dying ember of coal in the cold furnace.  I dance here in the whirlwind below a thousand million swirling spheres of iridescent flames. I dance here, one of trillions of fragile little soul-fires, some red and impotent with rage, some pure and white-hot with sacrifice.  Here I dance, dancing to make myself hotter, dancing till I am made even greater than the great swirling explosions in the sky, dancing till I am made even greater than the powerhouses of His enormous celestial machine.