Ali Shaw

It didn__ take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.

Sometimes Midas suspected that life was a film with subliminal messages. Things would move along with an acceptable degree of predictability, then be punctuated by some horrible childhood memory.

The winds shook off in unison and yipped beneath the gleaming stars.She gave him her lips. They kissed.And she was in love with the thunder.

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.

Have you ever hoped for something? And held out for it against all the odds? Until everything you did was ridiculous?

Writing is like going underwater - thank you for being there when I come back up.

In a flash of anger, Midas grabbed a sod of earth and hurled it at the water, which broke into a hundred chained circles. Picturing Ida like the body in the bog made his heart seem to wilt and blow away. His face screwed through expressions.

One day, I learned that a single look can change everything. And since then I have seen it countless times. I have grappled to understand it and failed. For instance, all it took was a look from another man for my wife to fall out of love with me. It baffles me that a simple alignment of eyes can cause so much devastation.