Three Lifetimes_I Was Fifteen_New Normals_Joseph's Gift
Catalog Guide:
Three Lifetimes
The streetlights were little suns, rising and setting through her windshield every hundred feet or so. Esther flipped on her signal and took a right down a residential road. The phone on the dashboard blipped and blinked. With a practiced swipe of her finger, she accepted the notification and let the GPS begin to guide her.It wasn’t her normal neighborhood, but she’d been tooling around half the night with no rides. Usually the college campuses were good any night of the week; her luck must have just run dry tonight. No drunk frat boys needing a ride to the bar. No packs of girl...
I Was Fifteen
I was fifteen. When I think back on it now I need to remind myself that I was an actual child, sleeping at night in my pink bedroom, writing in a secret journal with a lock on it, teddy bears arranged on my bed. And what the heck, I have to ask myself, could a fifteen-year-old child know about love? I know the answer now, and it is this: depending on how you look at it, either nothing or everything. And anyone who has loved with the blinding purity of youth knows that those are almost the same thing. It is summer, still school holidays, and we are in camp with our youth group. We have been sl...
New Normals
I woke up, looking at the clock. I was going to be late if I didn’t get up soon, so I begrudgingly got up, mad at the world. It was hard to be late for something I just had to log in to, www.onedoor.ccbut it happened more often than not. At least it was Friday. The day before the weekend. A break from doing nothing but because I never leave the house anymore, I usually just feel more exhausted after the weekend. Burnt out. Tired. I hate this. I know everyone does. I brushed out my hair and put on an appropriate shirt, leaving my pajama pants on. I walked across the bedroom to my bathroom and splashed water...
Joseph's Gift
Joseph’s Giftby James Ross Kellyabout 1,030 wordsI DON’T KNOW,” my father said from behind his newspaper. Then rustling the collage of columns of print down to his lap, he looked at me standing in the room. I was shocked. A wide-eyed, speechless child on Christmas morning in front of a decked-out conifer tree with no presents underneath. Even after over sixty years I remember how I had not said a thing. I stood there looking at the blinking lights on the tree, with tinsel and little peppermint candy canes--but without even one present under our family Christmas tree.“It’s supposed to work,” he...