No Limits

Tommi believed she could do anything, and had set out at age eighteen to prove it. As her mother taught her, “Life is short and the world is large.” And with this in mind, she found herself on a mountain road in Japan headed for the secluded Hotel Omodaka. It was the next thing on her list. Not a bucket list. She hated that term. It was so…finite. A beginning that ended with kicking the bucket. Not her. She simply kept a “life list” and grew it daily. “She who dies with the longest list wins,” she told friends. “Do as many as possible. No limits”

“Visit a hot spring in Japan” was her current undertaking. The logical next item was “Learn Japanese.” But being reasonable with her goals, Tommi did not set out to master the Japanese language. Any amount would do.

“Kon'nichiwa,” she said many times since arriving in Tokyo, but quickly realized that English would not be an impediment on her journey. Still, it was fun practicing the language, and the smiles it evoked among new friends along the way suggested that her American accent was both amusing and welcome. Arigatō was polite in any tongue.

The timing of her current endeavor left something to be desired, but it was too late to change her plans now. Winter in Japan was not unlike winter in Michigan, the place she originally called home. Moving to Key West had slowly changed her. Acclimating to a different climate was not something that happened quickly.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

It's Your Mother

Estelle, if that was really her name, fell asleep facing the window in her darkened bedroom in Minooka, Illinois. Flashes of light and distant thunder comforted her as it had when camping as a child. Nylon tent walls protected her then from the wind, rain and falling branches of an approaching storm with the illusion of safety. How different really were glass and vinyl siding to a limb with bad intentions? The lightning was intense and strangely colored, hypnotic and terrifying. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

She awoke to footsteps and the sound of a clearing throat.

“It’s your mother, Estelle,” said the man whose name was Greg. He handed her a cell phone.

Her first instinct was to scream, but the scene seemed so surreal as to be dreamlike. Instead, Estelle lay terrified, frozen as she had been as a twelve year old with night terrors, paralyzed. But now she was a single adult whose mother had been dead for years. She played along, assuming she would wake from a lucid dream and make sense of everything.

A man was in her room, at her bed, handing her a phone as if it was the most natural act in the world. Her dead mother was calling. Perhaps she had lapsed into a coma, or died, been reincarnated, or suffered a brain-scrambling stroke. But everything she sensed told her otherwise. It was reminiscent of her college philosophy course when the challenge was issued to prove that life was not a dream.

She reached for the phone, staring silently at the man.

“Are you ok?” he frowned, concerned.

Estelle nodded and took the phone.

“Momma?” She whispered into the phone.

“Oh, sweetie, you haven’t called me that in years. How are you?”

Estelle, whose name was Cindy, wanted to cry, sitting up and swinging her legs off the side of the bed, dropping her feet to the floor. The voice was not her mother’s.

“I’m. I’m. How’s Dad?” she probed as casually as she could.

“Oh, I think he’s out mowing the lawn, last I checked.”

Cindy’s father died five years before her mother. Who were these people, and why did they think she was Estelle?

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.