Waving Not Drowning

A boy named Gren. A beautiful, long limbed, willowy boy with wide eyes, a high smooth forehead, and a dirty blonde mop of tangled waves at constant war with gravity. A shy boy. Spirited and curious but terrifically shy. Quiet. Silent. He's a runner. He runs and runs and runs. A perpetual motion machine smelling of black licorice and bazooka gum, lemonade and peanut butter, and the earthy, pungeant odour of sweaty young boy. Wormy when the ground swells after sudden rain. Old wood crumbling into dust after years of age, splinters melting in his hands they're so soft from rot. Every day he makes up stories off the top of his head as he gallops through the trails of giant redwoods, scaling walls of verdant green moss, ducking under canopies of ferns and pine, imagining the backwoods his own private kingdom. He communicates with the birds and deer and frogs and spiders and tiny red squirrels and they animate his tales in play by play fashion. Gren can't tell who's leading w...

He told her to slow down. Be careful, he warned, you'll flame out. I know, I remember what it's like to begin. Best intentions easily go astray. You'll run out of ideas, get trite, repetitive. Trust me, this will all get very boring very quickly. She closes the browser. Elizabeth knows that the only way to quiet the demons is to eradicate them, physically. Walk away from technology, turn off her phone, shut down his lifeline to her brain and by consequence her heart. They're just words, she says aloud, to no one in particular. Huh. She sips her tepid four dollar coffee attempting to appear lost in thought while the fey beanpole of a barista tidies up the detritus around her. Every day, every single day she writes. Then she rewrites, then scores it, records it and posts. Every. Single. Day. Two hundred and six so far. A body of work that documents in detail life after the fire. Total immolation. Complete loss. A rather charred and warped tabula rasa burned into her body....

It's a long drive, up north. Past a myriad of small communities, tiny one horse towns with similar sounding names, ending in brook or hurst or steed. The occasional signs of big box stores and chain  groceries glow in the dark off an exit ramp in the distance. Last chance for food, shelter, gas and family size jars of dijon mustard and 46 rolls of toilet paper for 34 miles. Hawks circle above, banking, soaring, catching updrafts and hovering effortlessly above the treeline. There's rain in the air, a faint shift in barometric pressure. Should've packed a tarp. Should've packed her life, jammed her belongings into boxes and bags and thrown everything she's ever been into the rental car.  Never come back. No real sense of where she's heading or why she's leaving except it's something she can do. Volitional, for now, at least. No set schedule, no dependents, no rhyme nor reason to anything anymore. Despondency, ambivalence. These are foreign words now tatto...

She wouldn't let him be who he was. Suzanne is so meticulous and rigid in her space that he felt  unwanted. Too messy and disorganized, too dynamic. Jory asked if he could have his old space back but Karyn had made her home there now and wasn't about to move again. She'd refinished the kitchen floors and resurfaced the cabinets and hooked up a portable washer. He did end up finding a really great apartment, a gorgeous 5 1/2 in the Plateau that came with appliances and had a great little garden with direct light. Rare here. More importantly, he can build his art there and make a joyful noise without feeling like a child being scolded by his mother. Strange how people suddenly become un-engaged. Jory tries to remember what it was that pulled them into each other's kinesphere, spinning tight circles in a rapidly increasing rhythm until they spun out completely, adrift in solar systems universes apart. Light fades. Meaning distorts. Truth wins out in the end, however discom...