Weather: gray and sprinkly.

Reading: About Passion, Stephanie Laurens

Knitting: the green cardigan

This isn't a writing exercise, it's part of a story I wrote a couple of years ago that is coming together for me today. I have pondered on this story for a long time, wondering what to do with it, and now I think I've figured it out, thanks to the things DD#2 (Dear Daughter #2, aka Maggie) has been telling me about her new-found Buddhism. Neat religion, btw, and I am adopting some of the practice in to my own life. I am seeing - everyone who knows Maggie is seeing - solid changes in her. Nam myo-ho ren-ge kyo.

There are ten thousand universes, and in every life there is a critical point at which they converge, if only for a moment. In Carol's life this moment was the one in which she sat in her living room with her gun in her lap, waiting for her husband to get home.

It was a pretty nice gun. Most people think of a handgun when they hear you have a three fifty-seven, but this was a rifle, a carbine, which is a shorter-than-average rifle. Carol was a shorter than average person, so it was just right for her, even though it was officially her husband's gun. Where she was planning on sending him, he wouldn't need a gun.