Barbara Brien

“Need a hand?”

I peeked at the figure on the horse’s back through cracks in my fingers. My eyes slowly adjusted to the light emanating from the horse, and the figure came into focus. It was Barack Obama, clad in a white toga.

He pulled me to my feet.

“Thanks,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe the dream I’ve had.”

“Try me.”

“You came to me one night, and said my friend had been hit by a train…and…is that a unicorn? I asked, squinting at the curled horn sprouting up between the horse’s ears.

“I call her Little Beast.”

I ran my fingers through the unicorn’s silken hair, which left rainbow glitter on my hand. The headache that had plagued me off and on all weekend was gone. There was no pain in my knee, or anywhere else in my body. “Is this heaven?”

“No,” Barack said. “It’s Iowa.”

And then suddenly we weren’t in the cemetery anymore. We were on a baseball diamond at the edge of a cornfield.”
― Andrew Shaffer, Hope Never Dies

“The saying "Life is just one damn thing after another," is a gross overstatement. The damn things overlap.”
― The Cincinnati Enquirer

“...it...planted seeds of doubt as to whether we think diabolically enough when we wonder what our government is doing behind our backs.”
― Alexandra Zapruder, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film

“We passed a pickup that was doing fifty-five in a fifty-five. Clearly a sociopath.”
― Andrew Shaffer, Hope Never Dies