What This Blog is About (with a Quote)

These lines are my vow—that by the stony centuries I am lost to, your sins will not be forgotten—I will not let history bring comfort to your bones after you took comfort from my friends and I. You chose to waste your great potential, and now your failure lunges back like an angry lion. Do not act surprised—it is only life, the life you said yourself was hard, when those words were convenient to you. You believed this life was only yours—only yours, guaranteed not by the merits you claimed to judge others by, but because of all the people of this world, you thought you were the best.

~ Lutum Hominus, 13^th Century Monk

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Richards

It was him or Tavvy. And Tavvy deserved to live. He deserved to live too but she had had enough. If his last act on this Earth was to spare her a little suffering he would die honorably. Kevin Claude was a good man and he wanted to end his life good. And giving up his life for another was pretty damn good. It was Mrs. Richards. She was infamous at this point. The rookies heard about her early on, speaking in hushed whispers, like she was a ghost or something. In fact, there was a theory, one which Kevin had believed for a time, that she was a ghost—a ghost who could write checks. She came in regularly—once a week, usually on a Saturday—and her appearance never changed. Same clothes, same hair. She followed the same routine every time when it came to collecting her groceries. (Checkout was always a little different each time.) That was what ghosts did, wasn't it? Played out the same events over and over? It made Kevin wondered if he was a ghost. He could take the repeti...

Krissy's Second Visit

Youthful footsteps echoed throughout the store's frozen section. It is not often a challenge to determine one's age from footsteps. The slow, stumbling walk of an old man, and the tap of his walker or cane, gives him away immediately. A hop and a skip might reveal that one is a child. But in the ages between 12 and 60, there is a singular type of step, one which is not easily linked to age due to the variance in height and weight of the teenage and adult population. In the cold of the frozen section, this uniformity was slimmed even further, because nothing leeches strength from the heart and legs like cold. But in the footsteps of the confident young girl who wore a Sun Valley uniform, one could sense her youthfulness. The cold didn't touch her and she wasn't afraid of it or hateful of it. And so perhaps it was the youthfulness of her step that revealed to the mysterious figure known as the Blue Phantom who it was who came to visit him, in his hidden lair behin...

Sometimes We Go Bad

Sun Valley Grocery wasn't far from the local mall. The name of this mall is unimportant. It was home to more than three dozen retail businesses, not counting the built-in carousel, the massage stands, and the various food and antique vendors who hosted their shows there. The businesses dropped and swapped out on a regular basis, though there were some mainstays that had been there for generations. Among these was a clothing store by the name of Harpin's. It was a family place, run by the Harpins since before the First World War. The family was even still involved with the business, unlike a lot of families who once founded such enterprises. They had about the same distance from the store's operation as a producer has from the movies they work on, but they did cameo now and again to see how things were going. People treated it with the dignity a small business deserved, though the growth of the great apathy disease had its impact there, too. What matters is that they...

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