Anna likes going to confession.

Well, no, that's not quite accurate. What Anna likes, really, is having been to confession. It's sort of like going to the dentist; not all that pleasant during, but afterward everything is clean feeling ( Read more... )

The mall is crowded, on a Saturday with only a week and a half until Christmas. Anna has been given very specific instructions from her parents: Stay with us.

And she means to. It's just one of those things that happens, in the crowds and the chaos. Anna gets distracted by a display of nutcrackers when her parents decide split up for five ( Read more... )

Anna Milton is supposed to be napping.

But her parents have discovered, in the two and half years of her life, that Anna is not much of a sleeper. There's always something more interesting to be doing.

And it's not like people can be made to sleep ( Read more... )

In the beginning --

(or is it the end?
the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end?
all of it. and none of it.
no matter, then)

-- is the word.

And the word, in this case, is

NO.

(there but for the grace of God--)
(I saw the angel in the marble . . .)
(--go I)
(. . . and carved until I set him free)And it hurts ( Read more... )

It’s been almost a century (35,482 days) since Anna watched a blizzard blow across the Plains on a January day. There’ve been other tragedies and horrors and “acts of God” since then, conflict and atrocities, sweeping epidemics and war on a grander and farther-reaching scale than some had thought humanity capable of ( Read more... )

Anna is watching the snow fall ( Read more... )

There's something remarkable about humanity's inability to be content with staying put, to go on finding ways to traverse the Earth ( Read more... )

Anna is watching the activity below her on Earth ( Read more... )

The sunlight comes through the window and falls across the parchment on the man's table, illuminating his calligraphy ( Read more... )

There's nothing much to mark out this spot in the landscape, too close to the city to be called desolate, far enough away to be deserted.

Except that then, suddenly, it's not deserted. There's a woman there, who neither walked nor rode to this destination, she simply arrivedThe wind is hot and dry, and she faces into it, eyes closed, pulls her ( Read more... )