Audrey

“Oh my. Molly put her hand to her no-doubt agape mouth. Oh my, oh my, oh my. After her divorce, she hadn’t thought this day would ever come again, but here it was, a second proposal. Life is funny, she thought, and she felt herself step back from the reality of her situation for a moment, lest its emotions overwhelm her and make her swoon like a damsel in those Middle English chivalric romances she taught in 10th-grade English. Yes, life was indeed funny. It had no syllabus, which was why Molly, always a diligent student, felt so unprepared for it. Life played tricks on you too, surprised you, with the biggest surprise that life, even at the nearly half-century mark, could still hold surprises. Like so: There is a man in my kitchen, a man I’m in love with, and he wants to spend the rest of his life with me. How strange and how very unconventional by its conventional, everyday setting.”
― Ray Smith, The Magnolia That Bloomed Unseen

“This has been her life for the past fifty years, this striving to help save the world a little bit, to push it just a bit farther into the right. This action was the only thing that sustained her during the hard times [when] only her purposeful life propped her up from total collapse, and she thought how strange that she had taught the morality play Everyman all those years but didn’t fully understand its central lesson or how true it was: We are our good deeds, and they alone will come with us into the afterlife.”
― Ray Smith, The Magnolia That Bloomed Unseen

“She looked at his face, his lined, well-lived face. You were right. This perfect moment, in her once-desolate bedroom, was John’s belief at its apotheosis. She realized she wouldn’t have believed it before—that, in the most hopelessly constricted of places, you could find the fulfillment to all your dreams of adventure and romance. No, she wouldn’t have believed it. Not twenty years ago, not ten years ago, not a year ago. She had to reach forty-eight years of age to realize the truth and to internalize it. Forty-eight long years of groping in the dark. How silly she felt now and how blessed.”
― Ray Smith, The Magnolia That Bloomed Unseen

“I was broken. I didn't need to break anyone else with me.”
― Tijan, Fallen Crest High