No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
The urn is shaped like a wide-angle lens. Leona can’t help but chuckle when the undertaker’s assistant places the alabaster thing on the spotless counter top. It’s exactly one week after the funeral ceremony. She already knew about her dad’s choice of urn, having seen the picture in the catalogue. Yet it looks more ridiculous than she had anticipated. A prop instead of the real thing.
Before landing a fresh job and quitting the service industry altogether, Mary’s life revolved around shelf talkers, the diligent tallying of registers, and stock replenishment. Clocking-in-and-clocking-out.
Lance loved this neighborhood from the moment we drove through the gates twelve years ago. The ancient trees. The big lots. A fantastic K-8th grade school. The award-winning golf course didn’t hurt. It felt elegant but grounded. West coast country, as described by our real estate agent. If you bought a house here, you had the kind of wealth that didn’t need proving. Women wore high-fashioned brands like Chanel and Hermes but not the crap with the logos – the real stuff from the Paris runways.
and when he told me to step back to see the wider view to look for any people that I knew to see what they were doing I saw one yelling at another
Pascoe probably had much better rings in his shop in London; he was probably humouring her; still, she liked the one with the alexandrite eye (“emerald by day, amethyst by night,” the jeweller had said) and she had not wanted to wait. A week earlier, when she had gone to help him on his latest trip to Moscow, she had felt he might soon peter out. Then, when he made this last-minute detour to Kiev and proposed, she wanted to get the rings without delay.
The years have flowed faster than on our side, Like the city rain herding fallen leaves Towards the black iron gratings, Then downward , to fatten London’s hidden rivers.