Skuld62382@aol.com wrote:

You call THAT GOOD SPAM?  <snarl>.  This garbage is 
everywhere.  Any perpetrator of it should dry up and
blow away.  

Guide to E-Mail Evaluation:

If it says "IMPORTANT", it will be trivial.
If it says "FREE", it will cost you money. 
If it says "DO NOT DELETE", you should delete it immediately.
If it says "Response to your inquiry", you never wrote to them.
If it says "Remember Me?", you've never heard of her.
If it says "LEGAL", it will be criminal.
And if it says "GOOD SPAM", it will be bad spam.  

And now for something completely different.  A teaser:

________________________________________________________

Blue Sonnet...Tangent

Disclaimer:  The characters and situations of this story
belong to David Johnston.  All rights reserved.  


My back was turned to the light as I looked out into the
darkness.  The bridge on which I stood was a dividing
line between them.  On one side, a great city swarmed, 
blazing with life while on the other a few lonely sparks 
drowned in the blackness of the ocean.  

<Are you going to die?>  The whisper in my mind didn't
feel like a product of my imagination.  A little 
girl's voice, asking the kind of question children ask 
before we've finished training them into dishonest 
maturity.  

"Not just yet," I answered aloud.  Of course if she was a 
figment then she could easily know what was on my mind.
How easy it would be to just grab hold of the railing,
swing myself out, let go, and fall into the black water
flowing out from the city.  Easy.

<You can hear me?  And you're alive?>

"So far."  I glanced over at her.  She was sitting on
the edge, swinging her feet.  I might have warned her to
get back, except that I could see the faint outline of
the bridge through her body.  Whether or not it was 
evidence that she wasn't real, it was proof enough for me
that she didn't have worry about falling off a bridge.

She'd been following me since last night; haunting me
as I wandered through the city, trying to find the words
to say what I wanted to say.  Writer's block was keeping
me alive.  It wasn't that I wanted to die, so much as that
I couldn't stand to live.  The world around me seemed so
hollow that when I thought about it, I had to admit that
I was using it as a mirror.  There was little question in
my mind that it would be better off without me.

Before I went, though, I wanted to leave something behind.
The last scrap of my vanity was tying me to the world.
I was a poet, you see, and wanted to write a farewell to
the world that would move someone to think that the world
was losing something in me.  Just one poem to make someone
care.

Juvenile, I know, but self-absorbtion is the wellspring
of immaturity, and nobody is more self-absorbed than one
intent on suicide.  So for months I tried and failed to
come up with the right note to end my life, and somewhere
along the way, I started to see them.  Most of them weren't
as solid as the little girl.  Shadows and shimmers and 
things half glimpsed, wandering unnoticed through the light.  
I usually tried to ignore them.

<Can you help me?  I'm lost.>

This one was getting hard to ignore.  
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