Category: creative
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Woods Woman, Part II
“Snow White.” The syllables spun forth from the king’s lips and onto her shoulders like an unwanted mantle as he stepped from his sleigh. Well, she wouldn’t have to wear it long. Regicide was a capital crime in the realm; if she were taken she could expect little more of her brief free life than…
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Woods Woman, Part I
The woods woman hated winter. Game was scarce and shy. Chill winds skittered beneath the door and seeped between the windowpanes. And though she cherished her solitude, weeks cooped up in a tiny cottage as blizzard after blizzard howled outside could drive anyone a little around the bend. There was another reason she despised the…
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Reflections, Part III
The morning after his courting of Sylvie, Kleitos Leonidas rose before dawn began to pink the eastern sky, turned off the lights she habitually left blazing all night to annoy her neighbors and threaded his way through the oaks to the lake’s edge. The moon had gone down some hours before and had anyone been…
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Monastic Meditations
The New Camaldoli hermitage perches atop a mountain just south of Big Sur. The dozen or so Benedictine monastics who call the hermitage home earn a portion of their living from fruit and date nut cakes and a small bookstore and gift shop. But their primary source of income is a retreat house and guest…
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Wild Hunt, Part III
The brindle had been living alone with the Adam-children for six months when the fox hunters came. The Odin-daughter had passed on five seasons before and the Odin-son, lasting far longer than Cu Fail prophesied, three full seasons after that. He had warned the brindle of the Wild Hunt’s coming, but she had seen no…
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Epistemological Exercise
A branch of philosophy that investigates the methods, limits, and origin of human knowledge. A visual document of a moment in time: a cloudy eighth of May at approximately nine a.m. in Sand City, California when a singular number of crab husks littered the beach. What can be said about it? * * * These…
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Reflections, Part II
Sylvie should have been terrified at a strange man strolling uninvited into her house. But since she moved she’d suffered a scourge of frogs and a storm of owls, and he was handsome, and smiling in a manner a touch haughty but not at all malicious, and she found it hard to believe that a…
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Wild Hunt, Part II
Although she could no longer hear the Adam-daughter’s movements, the old black dog knew by instinct and subtle vibrations that she had risen in the early morning light. The Adam-daughter looked puzzled and tilted her head in the manner humans adopted for their ineffectual ears as she walked down the hallway toward the living room…
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Reflections, Part I
Sylvie poured Kat more chardonnay and resumed her casual lean on the wrought iron fence rail. The lake – Sylvie’s lake now – stretched out before them, dark and still except for the glittering, gaudy reflection of the house – Sylvie’s house – in the water. Shortly after Kat arrived from Studio City Sylvie had…
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The Old West Brick Road
Lee lost Faith the moment she touched her open-toed shoe to the Old West Brick Road. A gibbering fit, a stranger in a sedan. Witnesses saw her run into the Eldridge but she never came out. Not in an hour, a day, a week. In rare moments of honesty he admitted he lost her before…
smallstonebuddha 