In 2006, I wrote this short short story as my entry in a contest called “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. The story had to turn around this photo. It’s odd, I felt awkward writing to a visual prompt, but the story took no more than a couple of days to write. I still like it, so I’ve dusted it off for your reading entertainment. Crossing the River By spring the pain had dulled. It was no longer the unrelenting ripping sensation in Jake’s chest, as if he were a phone book being torn in half for a meaningless party stunt. Although he still was ambushed by grief occasionally, and wept helplessly then, he mostly now had calm. At first that calm had been the vague sweetness of Prozac, but Jake was done with that. The counselors at the hospice had helped. They had gently prepared him last summer when the cocktail had stopped working, when in barely a month Howard had turned into a breathing skeleton barely able to smile, when the wasting and the lesions had rendered him nearly unrecognizable. Knowledge of what was to come had been nothing compared to the event itself. Then they had helped him through those first horrible weeks afterward, when Jake could barely tie his shoes without help, the emptiness in the apartment so final, so silently perfect. They had helped him with the gnawing, wretched guilt of being alive, healthy and HIV-negative – and after nine years, alone. Now it ...
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