He Carried His Faith And Also His Doom, or The Survivor

After the massacre, he ran deep into the woods following the overgrown path along the river, clutching his sister, wrapped in bloody swaddling cloth, to his bony chest as the thickets whipped his raw skin. She lay silent and still in his shivering arms as he collapsed against the mossy back of a boulder wedged against the rotting shell of a once mighty oak. An unnatural chill rushed through the still air as the sound of snapping limbs approached from deep in the shadows of the evergreens. As the terror overtook and consumed him, the boy whispered an indiscernible prayer.

The Dancing Lovers

Sitting alone at the large, round table adorned with white silk linens and a bouquet of roses at the centerpiece, he watched her dance with another man from across the crowded room, spinning slowly in hypnotic time to the pulse of the brass and woodwind ensemble on the raised stage at the side, her eyes meeting with his in a fleeting moment of longing and nostalgia for an uncollectable and unforgettable life now lost to them both, of moments in time when they also danced and knew the pure and novel sensation of love that looked neither forward nor behind.