One of the rare times that I tripped, I happened to do so over the heads of a pair of gods, which I had mistaken for a pile of stones. Though they were sunk to their shoulders into the ground, they smiled contentedly at me. One had moss growing on its round cheeks and the … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – Resting Gods
Tag: fantasy
The Hopeful Wanderer – Dying Flowers
Glass tubes glinted in the afternoon sunlight pouring in through the front window. Each tube contained a bright colored liquid, several flower varieties soaking up the colorful water. Only, their blossoms were the wrong color. As I examined them, yet another bloom changed, a pink carnation darkening to brown. I turned to the florist hovering … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – Dying Flowers
The Hopeful Wanderer – Soul Glow
There was a star caught in a tree. Branches hung over a neighborhood sidewalk and the first breath of fall had convinced some of the topmost leaves to begin drying out. It was in this cluster of yellow foliage that a golden spark twinkled. I stood below on the cracked sidewalk, head craned back. "Did … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – Soul Glow
The Hopeful Wanderer – The Cost of Skepticism
"It collects starlight, you see," my host explained. She sat across from me at her kitchen table, the two of us admiring a geometrically cut crystal orb dangling from the top of the big picture window overlooking her dining room. Weak afternoon sunlight filtered through the orb, scattering little rainbows across the table's surface. I … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – The Cost of Skepticism
The Hopeful Wanderer – A Home Fallen
Tiny lights burned yellow and dim from within the needles of a fallen Yule tree. It lay in the snow where it had crashed, sprawled across the path ahead, branches sagging into the powder, crossed boards of the base sticking up like stiff toes. Several sets of footprints tracked where passersby had walked around or … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – A Home Fallen
The Hopeful Wanderer – Moon Mother Mourning
She carried the moon with her - a rounded orb of lunar rock, lit by the invisible reflection of a missing sun, somehow an echo of the real thing hanging in the night sky. She cradled it in her palms like an offering and whispered, "Where is my sun?" So many had heard her question … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – Moon Mother Mourning
Book Review: Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
Foundryside explores what might happen if a master key could open any lock because it could converse with the laws and rules of reality, as well as what might happen if it came across a human who could understand and talk back to it.
The Hopeful Wanderer – A Migrating Forest
Worry had just begun to gnaw at me when I felt the thin silver chain wrapped around my fingers twitch. In what I thought looked like an ancient river bed, I paused, swinging the pendulum hanging from my hand back and forth. Slowly, slowly. At the bottom end of the chain hung a smooth orb … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – A Migrating Forest
The Hopeful Wanderer – Fifteen Minutes
Fifteen minutes of hope. That was all it took to drive me into standing in line for a week, winding step by step through the bottom of a valley alongside hundreds of other travelers from the world over, all sharing that same hope with me. No one maintained the line, yet in it we stood, … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – Fifteen Minutes
The Hopeful Wanderer – An Abandoned Bonfire
Orange sparks drifted upward into the night sky. Below them, flames fed upon fragrant pine boughs, leaping high and higher. The popping hiss of logs and branches lent the dancing flames voice, like a smoker singing to the tune of the whistling wind. I had questions for the builder of this bonfire, for those fluttering … Continue reading The Hopeful Wanderer – An Abandoned Bonfire










