101 Words

The rain was pouring hard and I was soaking wet. Until I glanced in a certain direction and somebody caught my attention. It was you, you under that extraordinarily big yellow umbrella. I stopped walking and found myself just staring at you, and then you did the same. You ran towards me.

“You might get sick, let me share my umbrella with you,” you said. I don’t want to be sick, and so I went in. We walked quietly through the rain under your yellow umbrella until the rain stopped. We bid each other goodbye, and never did we meet again.

I always wanted to be a magician. When I was young, I’d spend my allowance on the tricks you could buy in the bags in the glass case at the drugstore. My parents supported my dream. They bought me several books on magic, and all of them said the same thing: To be great, you have to put in countless hours of practice. Countless hours? I had better things to do.

When I sawed the box in half, the box with the woman in it, I figured the rest would take care of itself. Oh boy, are people mad at me.

Love comes down to losing it in you.

It speaks behind us and you and I are waves and fog and I am dull and you are boring. Keeping time and losing it in you. Love beats time, you and I, and waves are falling and you’re no more than feeling and losing it in you. You and I and you ignore it. I felt everything and love beats time and you don’t owe me. Coming down to losing it in you. You know more and you’re no more and everything in between falls down in you.

Love beats time, goodbye.

“Fuck off you cocksucker!” Bob screamed in frustration. He continued muttering a blistering string of expletives under his breath, palm smashed against the center of the steering wheel, the bellowing horn drowning out his voice. As the cars approached the next intersection Bob made his move. Leaping from his car; screaming like a banshee with diarrhea; he charged at the car that had so recently pulled out in front of him. He rapped, hard, on the driver’s window. Bob’s screams died in his throat as he beheld the angry face of his boss glaring back at him from behind the glass.

The war had been over a year before we were allowed home. Some things hadn’t changed: the front window didn’t close and the dining room wall was stained where Giovanni “decorated” with crayons. But the house was a shell. Doris Holburn had our dresser. The Millers were using Giovanni’s bunk bed for their young twins. Mr Ainsley had Mama’s tables, although he claimed he inherited them from a rich aunt. Our dog turned up months later. I put every piece back until the house was exactly as it had been before the war. It made no difference.

Giovanni never came home.

This evening while browsing through my old vinyls, my fingers drifted onto Thin Lizzy’s ‘Sarah’. I froze for a moment, petrified by memory, caressing grooves as familiar and yet as faded as the memory of your emerald eyes and the taste of your ruby lips. We had dreamed to its song, your hand in mine – my girl, my Sarah. We would see the world one day and build our lives in the image of our hopes. That was before he parted us. Now I wonder where you are, but I will never know until I join you on Death’s grand voyage.

The ex-footballer’s wife was cold. Shrugging her shoulders in her mink, she stared across at the distant executive box and remembered sipping chardonnay in the warm. Her husband roared some obscenity at the full back, totally engrossed. He was no longer famous but she knew sometime in the game a camera would seek her out. Now he was the bait and she was the cheese, it was her turn to get some attention. She peeled off a glove and took out her cell. Googling her name, she found the website TWILF and smiled, waiting for the zoom lens to find her.