[b]Neil Gaiman
Truly, life is wasted on the living…[/b]
Is it possible to take it that far?
She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.
Of course 9 times out of 10 she’s a he.
There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.
And who among us doesn’t?
The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.
Let’s at least agree it’s not a cliche.
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.
As opposed to, say, philosophy.
[b]Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that’s a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months’ pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.[/b]
Actually, I didn’t know her. But that sounds like something the Gestapo would do. In fact, it sounds like something certain folks here might do.