Shorts II

Stories

The gritty wet city was rich with a million stories. Clandestine love under the bright blue umbrella; the giggling schoolgirls postponing the inevitable homework in front of shop windows; the drunk outside the seedy country liquor bar wasting a perfectly good life; harried working women with plastic bags hurrying home to be superwomen; the earnest man with an umbrella getting wet in the rain trying to keep his indifferent girlfriend dry. The gleam of the street lights on the puddles on the roads had an outlandish beauty. Even the lines of traffic had a kind of symmetry to them. The poetry in the city night was there for all those capable of seeing. It broke her heart that he was not one of them.

Longing

She is stunning in a way that makes him breathless. And the beauty is tantalizingly within grasp. He can feel that instinctive primal need to possess, to make her his for the world to see. He knows he is deserving, worthy. What is he waiting for, he thinks, stretching his hand out to feel that rich silkiness. And draws back. Temptation is a superfluous stain in his middle class soul.

Desperation

Do you feel sometimes like the world was terribly alive and bursting with so many lives to be lived? And that you have only today to live them all? That the flame had to burn so brightly because it had so little time left to burn? That anything left untried was a life lived incomplete? That today nothing deserved a no even if it meant you had to pay for it with tomorrow? Is this feeling what growing old was all about?