Amsterdam
Hilda von Bruyn sighed as she stared at the yellow tulips drooping in their yellow, smudged glass vase, with only the merest of golden afternoon sunshine caught in its murky water, and for what seemed the millionth time counted the totality of blooms-one, two, three-the number, she mused, of the Trinity, the Magi...the Fates.
Long Island Rose
For as long and as far as he could remember in his fifty years of wedded bliss Rabbi Herschel Abramowitz' beloved and doting wife Rachel always refrained from adding her special seasoned dumplings to his own bowl of steaming Passover soup, the curious reason for him always being their near-resemblance to kidney stones, a real shanda in itself because he had once quite enjoyed Rachel's dumplings.
The Fragging
Sgt. Mike Gorlitz gazed in melancholy awe at the moon's reflected twin shimmering amidst the speckled rice paddies of Nam Cam village, which abutted the serenely flowing Mekong nearby-all peaceful, yet for the restless grunts in his tiny unit bivouacking a few feet away he knew that all this peace was simply pure poison.
The Great Good Luck
You ought to know right off that everyone-everyone!-thought Sultan Mehmet ibn Mehmet was absolutely insane when he announced than an exact twin of the Burj Khalifa would be erected almost a thousand yards away from the first, and incredibly all for Marc Legrand, son of wildly famous wire-walker Etienne 'Bonchance' Legrand.
This Gelid Isle
"Cold mutton, cold beef, cold ham, cold veal, cold pies," muttered Parson Pringle as he dully surveyed the courses laid out on the long dining room table, glancing up briefly at the fierce March rains peppering the Palladian windows without before quite reluctantly settling his sights on the oily, flushed face of his rotund host, Squire Shipton, whom the former winced to note wiped his pudgy, offal-flaked hands across his glistening wet lips after fleetly jamming a few forkfuls of ham into his dark maw, yet at the same time marveling at the man's faculty in neither stabbing nor asphyxiating himself with that particular action.
DB/2017-2019
