Sussex nights in early July do not stay dark for long, and by four o'clock gray creeps up on you from under bushes and from behind walls and soon you can easily make out shapes and features again. Half an hour later, it's as good as day.We had stayed up talking right on through the night against a shared, and much enjoyed backdrop of Joni Mitchell, Stealers Wheel, Ralph McTell, and even some George Frideric Handel, sustained by deeply held and shared beliefs. It was timeless talk. ...

This never happens to plumbers.The plumber's world makes sense. It's all about water and gravity and slanting pipes. You channel the water in, you channel it back out. You slant the pipes earthward a little. Not much, just enough for the water to head in the right direction. Gravity does most of the work.Mine is not a plumber's world and my world makes no sense. Marie is on the floor and my knuckles hurt.The plumber has an easy life. Copper pipes bring water in, cop...

Now, I have only three left.I had seven, the seven Reri gave me. I hid these where I thought they would never find them, but they are ferrets and have found four of them so far. Four, and now I have only three left.They can come at any time but they cannot hurt me.By law they can search any Reader's place anytime they wish, and they do. And I know they will come and search my place again and again, that they will keep looking until they are certain I have none left.

Five-Stars: "Ulf Wolf has created a magical tale that crosses continents and cultures, seamlessly weaving Scandinavian and Indian folklore and establishing an underlying message of universal connectedness. It is an engaging story of relationships: a son's to a mother, an actress' to the world, the myths of one culture to another. The novel is rich in literary detail: astute readers will recognize references to Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, and film buffs will easily identify Greta Garbo as...

There are as many Gods in this universe as there are beings. And the game we play is called "Touch." It's a form of spiritual hugging. Easy to begin, pretty much impossible to bring to a close.How it came about: Before the beginning of the universe, before there even was a universe, we all held hands—well, figuratively speaking. We touched, I guess would describe it (hence the name of the game), and touching we synchronized, and synchronized we decided (on three, everyone: 1-2-3) t...

The warm March sun had shone all day. Although the air remained frigid in the many shadows, out in the open the surface snow was now melting in its glare. Then, as commonly happens in early spring this far north, when the sun began to set and the shadows to grow longer across the snowy field, the partially melted snow surface froze and soon the entire meadow was covered by a crust of icy snow thick enough in places to support a walking man, thick enough everywhere to support almost any chi...

They say Jesus Kristus was untouched.You learn it in school, you hear it from parents, from grandparents—from them especially—from friends, and from preachers. You read it in the Bible: Jesus Kristus was the first to, and the only one ever to, escape, ascend, transcend, what have you, the Storm. He was the first ever to rise above it unscathed, as they like to put it on the late-night TV preacher-shows, especially now with a new Storm approaching, although unscathed means the same ...

When Thomas Boyer, Jr., the richest and most powerful man in all the land, detected that public consumption in all provinces had leveled out and showed no signs of breaking through what appeared a consumption ceiling, he sponsored a study to find out why. In fact, he sponsored many.Surveying messengers were sent far and wide and they, as charged, took the consumption pulse of every province and city in the land.When they returned with their findings they all said, "People n...

To say that Sam was obsessed with reincarnation would not have been too wide off the mark. His childhood experience pointed in that direction, but how could he be sure? How could anyone be sure?In his search for the truth in this regard, he discovered that early Church Fathers, like Origen, definitely held the immortality of the spirit to be a fact; as did many of the classic (and many more recent) philosophers. But did they know? Or just speculate? Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus. Did...

Spring was hard. The hardest. For this late in his life spring brought so many earlier springs to also touch him—a rush of them, each with a voice clearer than the next. Each singing faintly of promise, of rebirth, and not so faintly of fragrant and sunny mornings just above freezing but warming, warming, warming as the sun climbed well above the farmer's barn, huge and dark up there on the hill to the east.And in her tow, as she spread herself upon the northern earth: melting snow...

The finer strands sway in the warm, dusky air, perceptible only to the dying. No, perhaps not strands; they are more like the long, dark gossamer tendrils of a celestial man-of-war descending through ether, through the high, indiscernible stone ceiling, through scream-filled air, there to melt into wrists and ankles, chest and hair, and now silently to shift in the poor light, savoring the pain.There are other, coarser strands, though they are not strands either but leather thongs,...

His room was small and warm and he had now sat so still for so long and said nothing for so long that I would be justified in wondering whether he was still awake.He was though. His eyes were open and resting on his hands, on his hairless hands one on top of the other, who in turn rested on the cluttered table. He could have been inspecting them, could have been figuring something out about them, or pondering what to say next, or none of the above: it was anybody's guess.Th...