(serial)

Separate

Atop a high hill, I look down at grief and carnage.

Above me, Mt. Tam's treeline arcs in dark spruce edges across the sky. Around me are stopped vehicles, bumper to bumper on this holiday weekend, hushed people, some with hands at their mouths, intent on swallowing their fear of mortality.

Below me, the shattered Cadillac, broken glass, smoking metal, eucalyptus buttons, a girl with shattered bones, holding a dead child.

I come down from the high hill, knowing this one precious moment of separation is done, and fall back into my skin. Eve, eyes open, cools in my arms.

Boy, am I hogging this thread. Where is everyone?

Another drabble:

Safe

Twice. I fell twice.

The sensation is an elevator, out of control, or so I remember: something in me snapped and the cage plummeting, out of control, faster than light and I thought, oh no oh shit oh man I am so very doomed, and then? There were his brown eyes, there to catch me, hold me.

Years later, that fall, but a different feeling - home again, home again, one foot on a banana peel and the other in freefall, into blue eyes and strong arms.

They shared a name, and my love, and the job of catching me.

Oh, Deb, I love that one.

(waving at Kristin)

Hi Deb! I'm glad you're back online. I'm verra excited, btw--I will have a shiny new writing web site in the next month or so!

A private site, a beta site, a publishing site?

Ummm...yes?

I bought my own domain, so a private site, I guess, but I'm going to use it as part of my marketing ploy this year to (eventually) attract an agent.

My hope is to make it interesting enough to get a little following...people who will maybe check in every week or so (I'm going to be self-publishing an essay a week--some humorous, some more serious). We'll see. I'm excited by the prospect, in any case. Finally I'm doing something tangible.

Also, Deena and Dave are collaborating to design and code it, so it looks to be very (extremely, amazingly) pretty, if nothing else.

Hee! Excellence.

I know from excited-over-new-website mode. My treehouse is moving into its very own hosted domain, I've bought us the first year, and Jess is doing all the technical stuff, because she is wondrous.

Happy.

I've been working on something similar for a year or so, Kristin, although I'm thinking of mine as being sort of a magazine with contributors. (The domain name is straightgin.com.) Stoopid working for a living thing, not to mention the whole cancer thing, has kept me from finishing it, but I plan to tackle it again as soon as I finish redesigning my business website. May 2005 be the year that we all make great strides towards our writing ambitions.

May 2005 be the year that we all make great strides towards our writing ambitions.

YES!

Mine is kristintaylor.net NOT to be confused with kristintaylor.com, which is (shudder) "God bless us! a thing of naught".