HJ Talks to AV
Technology has grown far beyond the cookie-cutter experience of your grandparents and into a realm where knowledge rules and strength is no longer determined by the size of a man’s muscles but by the size of his brain.
Author's Note: One of the sillier ideas I had for a Xronixle sequel was to signify the change by expanding the character names from one letter to two. I was really pushing the boundaries of literature at the time. Snippets like these litter my hard drive, like my personal bookshelf of things that never happened in the Vinestead Universe.
Mark flipped a coin and stood with his hand on his wrist for a long time.
The weird thing about it was that she was more or less saying love me or kill me because there is no in between world where they can go on living but just as friends or distant friends or people that don’t talk anymore. Where did she get death from? As if her existence without Mark would be so horrible, as if his rejection of her company was somehow a death sentence.
His wrist trembled, half from the thoughts spinning in his head, half from the cold wind that was blowing up over the hill, dragging a frigid breeze up from the town.
It wasn’t even as if they had been together for very long. He had met her in the summer, as the heat was dying down, and the kids were returning to school. When everything was settling back into a routine, she had been there to turn his life upside down. That was five months ago and now she was collapsing under the weight of something that should have lifted her up, made her feel happy. He wondered how it had come to that, whether it was his fault, and what he could possibly do about it.
The naked branches of the trees clacked above him, thrown about by the wind, cold dead but still holding on, still believing that they are parts of something bigger, of something important, something where warmth still resides.
