What Comes Next

It had been more than nine months since hed first noticed he was forgetting things that were ordinarily easy to remembera trip to the hardware store where hed found himself standing in the lightbulb aisle with no idea what he had meant to purchase; a time outside on the main street in town when hed run into a longtime colleague and had blanked on the name of a man whod occupied the office next to his for over twenty years.

Remember whats worth remembering. Ignore the rest.

The frontal lobes were pretty much the part of his brain that had made him who he was and now were going to make him into someone much different and probably unrecognizable.

Institut fur Psychologie

After a fight, people are mean. They want to hurt. They want to punish.

High school graduation. A snapshot stolen when his son hadn’t been watching. He was grinning, filled with everything that was possible about the world and none of the heartache or trouble that was an inevitable part of it.

It was a little like the great conundrum all parents know, that one day they look at the child they raised and he or she has grown up and entered into a world of their own that seems alien and incomprehensible.

A computer, Adrian thought, is like a funhouse mirror. It reflects much about who someone really is, when one sees past the contortions and blurred shapes.

There was so much to love, then,” Cassie said. Her voice had a lyrical tone.

“But it’s all gone now.”

Sometimes, when she slept, he found himself staring at her, and it was as if he could see her aging, her perfect skin fading and wrinkling, the tautness in her body loosening. He would imagine the two of them growing old together, and then he would think that was impossible; they would forever be young.