This excerpt from another short fiction piece is simply about a sisters' love for her brother. It can also be a tale about the need to move on and away from old norms that sometimes tie our hands, disallowing change and healing. Sometimes life is not about what we want, but what is forced upon us. The trick is figuring out what feeds our spirit and deciding when it is ok to do more than just simply survive.

Against the Dark of Yesterday's
by M.James Cooper
...Lincoln, the man she called half brother in her head, he was a down-floating feather, rays of light stretching, finger-like, eventually reaching her skin through the bedroom window in the morning, or a glimmer in her morning coffee. Not sadness just remembering. The brother that had come about as a result of her mothers affair with a man with no name and no face. Remembering a time when her parents were estranged and all within the house walked in fear, breathed in fear and cried silent tears. Who would leave and when? For some reason he stayed and she loved with rediscovered intensity. Waiting, mother was, for the so-called other shoe to drop, and it never did. Lincoln was accepted into the family, the son her husband thought he would never have. Love is mysterious pain, holding back with restrained effort; it is resentment and surrender, complacent and unsatisfied. A common thing that seems so strange and hope-filled, especially when it enters in the form of a prepubescent boy. Gangly arms and knotted hair populated with fibers and dirt. No combing, no washing maybe. An adulterous mother returning home with a more than unexpected thing. Carlene was hoping for a bag of jub-jub candy or a pack of animal biscuits upon her mothers return, instead, she got him. He was not like Paula the older sister; selfish, never sharing her toys or her snacks. He was new and adaptable and full of giggles. His boney chest filling out in time, his crooked and damaged teeth rearranged and healed, his wheezing at night during sleep passed and then forgotten. Life, and the complexities of it, overstated, like rattling noise for the ignorant ears of children, but living isn't...