Kurt scaled the cliff and drew his sword. His foe was nowhere to be seen. Fighting climate change was harder than he had expected.
Tag: sword
Fiction: Upon the Altar of God
Father Ramon stepped to the pulpit to deliver his Sunday morning homily. The familiar faces looked up at him with the familiar expressions: expectant, sleepy, thoughtful, judgmental, and blank. This Sunday, though, the old priest knew he would give them a lesson they would remember.
“You have noticed the sword on the high altar,” he began. “It has lain there for two weeks, now. I have told no one the story of how it came to be there, but I will tell you now.”
The sleepy and blank faces took on more life. The judgmental remained judgmental, as if daring the priest to be interesting.
Fiction: The Orient Club
There were seven public rooms in the museum, and Jalene Naysure had seen them all a thousand times. She had gotten friendly with the curator, Aileen Royer, and had been in the private office many times.
That left one room Jalene had never seen, the one that was off limits to everyone but the curator. It was an oddly placed addition to the house and was accessible only from the outside. Someone unfamiliar with the floor plan wouldn’t have known of the room just from walking around inside. It was behind a bare wall decorated only with a little molding and two brass candle sconces.
“I’ve never been in there,” said Arnold Pinkhause, a retired volunteer fire chief and one of the volunteer docents. “Cora says it’s just storage.”
“Oh, odds and ends,” Cora Belling, chief volunteer docent, told Jalene. “Junk, really, but junk no one’s made the decision to get rid of over the past fifty years. I’ve never been in there myself, but there’s nothing worth looking at in there.”
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Fiction: Interesting Company
When one lives on the wrong side of the edge of the desert, and when one is as aged as I am, one accepts that he will see certain things that other people would not. Mostly this is good, as the things I see are interesting.
I was sitting in my chair in the shade of the little porch I added to my little wooden home, which is built well enough to keep out most of the wind and sand and rattlesnakes. This is where I often am when I see interesting things. This day, I saw in the far distance an upright line. As I watched, the line grew and became a man. Although he walked upright with dignity, his gait told me he was tired. By the time he reached my little home I had water from my good well and a plate of food from my little garden ready for him.