hot air balloons

George and Pattie had lived on the island all of their lives. There is a story there.

Some years ago, George's father and both of Pattie's parents had been missionaries, deciding amongst themselves to bring the gospel to the tiniest island in all of the Oceans. It was so small it didn't even have a name-- not a good name, anyway, just a gumble of numbers and letters that indicated its existence to some mapmaker somewhere. George's father, Richard, reasoned that the Gospel should be brought unto the least of these, and Pattie's parents, John and Cynthia, reasoned that the least of these must inhabit the island. In fact, in order for the island to be populated at all, the inhabitants must be of miniscule proportions! Poor as her logic was, all were in agreement, and her assessment turned out to be surprisingly accurate.

Richard parachuted, small George tied to his back, onto the island (nearly missing it at the twinge of a breeze), and John and Cynthia with baby Pattie were gently lowered to their destination by the tightly held rope belonging to a steam boat. They found each other instantly, then set about to find the natives. When they found them, it could be said that all were fairly disappointed. There were just a pair of human inhabitants-- an elderly couple, enjoying their last years in a hundredth honeymoon of seclusion. Their names were Paul and Jane, but that is not relevant. Jane was a Little Person, as they call them now, except she was different from the types you see today-- even smaller than the smallest, and more proportional. She wore doll clothes and her voice was tiny yet all that she said was well enunciated. Paul was the same, only less so. His voice came out more normal, and his eyes were less vacant. They were both old, and unhappy to see their last holidays interrupted by mission workers. Richard and his friends felt terrible, but they realized that they would have to wait for another boat or plane to come by before they could leave the couple be. Richard offered to share the Gospel with the Paul and Jane regardless, but they had already heard it. George offered to kill the threatening wild life so that Paul and Jane might be safe, but they had nothing to fear. Cynthia offered to help build them a house, but Paul and Jane liked the sky for a ceiling. And baby Pattie cried.

happy birthday to me

i feel like i notice things in him that are so particular, the way i notice things in everyone, except these are the things i could spend the rest of my life smiling at, or realizing the deep humanity and gravity of. a look, a gesture, a comment on something he has noticed and loved. many of these things are preconceived, for he is so self-conscious, and while some of those actions are endearing anyway because the intent behind them is usually so obvious, so readable, it is the candid moment that explodes my heart. my heart does not beat faster because of the unexpected, rather it rages for the excitement of understanding-- candidness is always a reveal, and when you see something real all of a sudden it's like you just found enough change to buy a candybar or found the missing piece to make the gadget work. the big picture gets bigger and bigger and you are more in awe because you are starting to understand what it is to understand, and what it is to understand a human person. a soul.

she, i can tell, sees these things too, and she sees these things in him like i do. this makes me glad, because sometimes i cry with worry about the idea of dying and the world losing track of me-- not me, i don't think i'm all that important, but what i love in people. that love will be invisible when i'm dead, and my loves will eventually be dead, too, and all of those quirks, passions, habits, all of that immensity will be gone. not only will i and those i love wither, the way we care for oneanother will also pass on. this is another reason why people get married; that is one small way for this bond between people/this declaration of love to outlast time.

i am also sad that she sees these things in him. it means i am dispensable. i can no longer say no one will love you the way that i could have.

Lots of relationships don't work out. Ours was no exception.

I think I read somewhere that more than half of the relationships in the world are doomed to fail. In my opinion, those odds are not improved by making that fact common knowledge-- it makes people feel like they have an expiration date. Once you realize that what you have is what you want more than anything, that is when you'll begin to see it slipping through your fingers. To love is to lose.

Mason Funeral Home closed the ninth of December, 2005, and it was not lost due to neglect. Mr. and Mrs. Mason had tried to make it work.

Billy had been out in the sun for far too long. He didn't know exactly what desert he was in, or whether he had been wandering in circles for days or hours, or how much further he could go without a drink or a morsel. He kept his ears on guard for the sound of the sea, any sign that he was near to home, but aside from the rising and falling of dust that had been pried loose from the deserts deeply cut ridges there was only silence. Not even the rattle of a deathsnake. He wondered if they had killed him after all, and if this was hell, or, worse, heaven. Since the attack, the sky was no longer blue in appearance, only a tantalizing greyish orange. There was only haze, and not a welcoming cloud to be seen; no moisture at all.

The days were only measurable by the vanishing of the orange into a darker orange, and the slight relief of cold sand at night. Billy no longer rested during these hours, however, and continued on, his lips silently forming the shapes of human words, phrases, songs.

She takes pictures with her endless supply of exploding flashbulbs and paints her face to match the rest of the parade. Sometimes the kinderen mistake her for a member of the clowns, and she takes delight in that.

Flashbulbs had a short life expectancy in those days. With a certain amount of stress they were known to explode-- to shatter and sometimes burst all over the subject of the picture. Eventually, smart people fixed this with a bit of properly applied enamel to strengthen the cracks in the bulb, and from there all manner of impressive technology was born. Of course, none of this concerned me when I was taking pictures. I was very good at snapping, but remained purposefully, dedicatedly ignorant of the mechanics of photography. At the time I didn't feel as though artists should know or care about those things, that we were more about expressing feelings and ideas all bottled in a single moment. Later, I was reminded that we all have our tools, and at the very least we should know how to manipulate them.

That was the year I had run away to join the circus. They called themselves a Carnival, actually, and traveled mainly Germany. It was my dream to capture the freakish, free-wheeling life from the beaten trail that I suppose everyone longed to live at the time but which the circus proved possible. Not only did the traveling band seem so beautifully free, they were far from the vagabonds that my family was always so quick to compare me to and warn me against-- their palette did not consist of browns and greys and the shabby, dreariness that I was running away from.

pink cigarettes

She had started smoking in a bar in Madrid in a desperate bid to stop herself from drinking to an outrageous extent. In Spain it seemed as though the moment a girl was seen to stop moving she was an easy target, the sitting duck of the bar, especially if she happened to be pretty and saucer-eyed like Patricia. Therefore girls took care to always have a glass in their hand or a cigarette wrapped up in their long fingers. It eased the nervousness and made them seem a little taller, a little older than the wolves on the other side of the room, or at least their match when it came to battle.