--THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF WAYS TO FORGET

…How's weekend?  I hope it's the best ever.

…I got my copy of the print anthology of “Crack the Spine.”

I had two short pieces in it.
This was one:

     Bad Fruit

            Each day she comes to the same place, bringing a knife and nothing else. 

It is not a mountain but a hill.  After all these months of climbing up and down, she should be in better physical condition, yet she’s always winded by the time she reaches the top.  He is never there, but one day, after so long, after so many attempts, he is.
            His back is turned towards her.  He’s picking wild huckleberries from the scraggly bushes on the slope.  The sun, looming large, is a bright blister filled with pus.   There is no wind.  Sparrows--usually a mainstay here—are now nonexistent.
            He’s focused, picking the fruit.  This irony is not lost on her. 
            The knife feels like a heavy slab in her hand, cold instead of hot.  She tests the blade, and though it slices her thumb, drawing a red rivulet of blood, she is numb.
            All these years she has waited to have her revenge and now this: a stupid dullness.
            But once she is halfway down the hill, he calls, “Sister!  Sister, wait!”
            His voice--a vibrato cobra--lassoes her neck and instead of running, she stops, waits, the knife now molten in her hand.

…Here are a few things I like:

"She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful." Terri St. Cloud

"Art is meant to disturb." Georges Braque

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” Ray Bradbury

"God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers." Jewish proverb

"Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content." Helen Keller

"Every man stamps his value on himself... man is made great or small by his own will." J.C.F. von Schiller