His wife, holding him

     I wanted to get back into writing, but I needed to start small. Here is an old exercise from Dr. Mary Brown: a 100-word story. Please let me know what you think. I recently posted a draft of this on Facebook, but I'm much happier with this version. I think it displays the scene I imagined better than my previous version.

     As Garrison Keillor requests, "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."


      When the guards saw him looking their direction, they stopped talking. Their footsteps on the cold stone were washed away by the sound of his wife’s name crashing over him, like ocean's waves surrounding his pale, thin body. He could feel her supporting him like he always asked her to when they visited the ocean. From behind him, her arms wrapped under his shoulders and around his chest as he let his legs lift away from the sand. He floated--suspended between ground and sky, connected to the world only by the warm, velvet skin of her arms.


- Michael Kaiser