Sequence of Events (part six)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sequence of Events

Chapter One

A Personal Choice

 

vi.

 

 

Today the waves were dangerously high

And I chained from the path

Climbed until I saw the summit’s bleak shape

Echoed in a pillar of cloud

My view obscured

Stayed here by a warning sign

And this was only a dream

I have not been to the sea

Not since

Lacking faith I looked behind to see your eyes

Then I awoke

 

 

The hall light was on; a streetlamp glowed through the window. The room’s shadows in yellow and brown feinted at his tired mind. His thoughts wandered. He sought another line he might add to his poem for Talou, and gave it up. He had expected Phillip to be there. He had been pleasantly surprised (at first) to find he was not.

Stanley had met Freda at his father’s funeral; this death, coming a year after his sister’s marriage, an event to draw most of the Carpenters.

“I know what you will get.” Robert hunkered under a black umbrella. Stanley stood dripping rain from the brim of his hat. “And it will be no more than fifteen hundred.”

Delores with her new husband and the girl, all bearing umbrellas, crowded up.

“Stanley, you don’t know Aubrey. Aubrey, this is my brother Stanley.”

Stanley had glanced at the disregarded Freda, and could see nothing of her face, only a Chinese-print canopy, an angry gloved hand gripping a bamboo shaft.

He wondered now if Freda were attractive. He knew of no reason why, to the average man’s eye, she should not be. Dolores had sent him her wedding photo, written on the reverse: “This is my only copy.”

Meaning him to look at it and send it back, but he hadn’t.

He tested himself with Freda, as he did at times with women. She was a woman (and not a blood relative); he could appraise her in that light.

Was Phillip attractive? Stanley listened to the conversation in the other bedroom, and all he could make of it was his own name, and Desanges, Desanges. Phillip, he decided, had attractive manners. But these weighings of his reactions to others did not answer for Stanley the larger question. Talou had meant more to him. Talou held a place that was unique and apart from simple matters of attraction and affection.

 

 

 

6

 

 

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A Personal Choice

Sequence of Events (part one)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Stephanie Foster, 2017, 2021, 2026)