Random Story To Tell

— If love does not know how to give and take without restriction, it is not love, but a transaction. —Emma Goldman

Edward Wellman bade goodbye to his family in the old country headed for a better life in America. Papa handed him the family’s savings hidden in a leather satchel. “Times are desperate here,” he said, hugging his son goodbye. “You are our hope.”

Edward boarded the Atlantic freighter offering free transport to young men Continue reading

Condensed from “Eighty Acres”

Ronald Jager

–Year after year, it bears the fruit of blind faith…

That June evening I was about ten. As I stood on our front porch, my eye caught an unusual plant, not more than five inches high. It was the merest seedling, but my father identified it as a young apple tree. Immediately I adopted it. I would transplant it, care for it as my own, and it would thrive. When I was a man and farmed this land, it would bear Continue reading

The powerful thrust of jet engines drove me deep into my seat as the plane rose into the Georgia night. It was July 15, 1969, and only 35 minutes remained of a journey that had begun two days earlier and a world away. First Lt. Hugh Weldon, Infantry, United States Army, was coming home from Vietnam.

As I stared vacantly at the disappearing Atlanta lights, I realized I was different from the fun-loving youngster who had reversed this route a year earlier. Thanks to an unrelenting Continue reading

Kate Chopin (1894)

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Continue reading