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Showing posts from November, 2014

"Dancing with a poem humming in your head"

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There was one night when a man came in and bought a bottle of storm clouds. He claimed to be a poet. "I needed the rain," he said. "I couldn't write in this goddamn heat." "What did he pay for that?" I asked. "That's just a week's supply of storm clouds," Ana said, "so I only asked for six months of his life. I'm going to use that for my sunflowers. That way, they wouldn't wait for a long time--isn't that fantastic?" I hoped the man wrote good poems. Loss, I believe, is a theme in fiction that's difficult to capture resonantly in prose but authoress Eliza Victoria's anthology was essentially able to bottle it in a condensed volume that features sixteen tales ranging from horror, science fiction and fantasy. Curiously entitled A Bottle of Storm Clouds , the thematic bulk of Victoria's short stories is usually about losses and the dangerous and often pitiful coping mechanisms creatures of brevit

"I am no bird. No net can ensare me"

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Unlike the titular heroine herself, I would much rather be DIGNIFIED than HAPPY . I have that much pride and entitlement, and I admit openly that my autonomy and self-reliance were the most useful tools that kept me ever so hard and strong that you cannot break me--especially my heart which only cracks in some places but can be readily restored, more fierce than before. Reading this novel and Jane's story with her Mr. Rochester has brought me sheer, reckless joy and yet at times the deepest of sorrows as well. They say the most unforgettable books we've read serve as a looking-glass where all our fears and desires are reflected back to us and we dare not flinch away from. Well, I gazed into Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and saw again the first person I was ever in love with. The girl I loved with passion was simply called Lei who was only thirteen when we met while I was five years her senior. She was my Jane and I was her Rochester...and she was the only one in the