Here’s a short story vignette that I had posted on a private blog but I wanted to locate them all in one place. I don’t plan on developing the story further than I’ve brought it. It’s a sampling of life, a taste of a fictional happening. I’m reserving rights to this for myself so I would rather you link to it than copy any portion of it.

The woman looks distant, dwarfed by the people pressed around her, diminished by the children at her side. Like looking down from a building and knowing that the moving shape is a living, breathing being but having no further visual confirmation of that fact. The cries of the one in her arm, the argument with the two at her side and the conversation of the other two behind her add to the din of the mall; a din which she cautiously wades through, her eyes staring far forward, way beyond the banks of the noise.

Her eyes poke holes in the cracks of the crowd as she tries to make her way through. Few openings are found, few opportunities given. Sometimes she’s tossed to the edges, closer to the entry tributaries of busy department stores. Sometimes she freezes in the middle of the way, a river of people flowing around her while she swallows gasping for air.

She starts moving again but her eyes freeze mid-search and for a moment a person can see, churning behind the fear, a creature of fire ready to ignite and consume the oceans in the mall. The diminished woman grows in size, pulsating like a distant star threatening to implode and take everything with it. This woman who can do Something, this woman can Stand, this woman would dare Anything.

Only If.

Her eyes release the onlooker, they lower, timid again…the fire receding, the star lost in the sky and she freezes in the crowd rolling beneath the waves about her.