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P.G Glynn's Books
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Category:
Romance
Publisher: Piper Publishing
Type: Fiction
Pages: 146
Copyright: Jan 1, 2012
ISBN-13: 9780956447012
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
When Joseph meets Jess he's stricken to find she is looking at him with his dead wife's eyes.
This haunting love story across time tells of Joseph Glenny, an artist who long ago lost the love of his life. After mourning her for many years, he is stunned to meet a girl who looks at him with his dead wife’s eyes.
Is Jess who she seems – or can it conceivably be that Lara has found her way back to him? As Joseph tries to make sense of his feelings, Jess fights hers – especially after suddenly coming face-to-face with a portrait that takes her breath away.
Excerpt
I am standing again by my gravestone and know that I am not alone.
I can sense rather than see my companion, just as I sense his identity. Without questioning the circumstances I find myself in I gaze at the stone, trying to read its inscription.
There is a haze over the words, though, and my attention turns from them to the fresh flowers below. The fragrant pink roses are interspersed with lavender – both once such favorites of mine! Am I still alive?
I think I must be, despite evidence to the contrary, since the alternative is beyond belief.
Gazing around me I see a solitary seagull on the Celtic cross atop a tiny, tiered church. We look at each other and it seems to me that I could very easily be up there with him, surveying the scene from his vantage point. By virtue of my will I could be anywhere I want to be. That’s how it is, if we are not encumbered with a body.
Disturbed by this sudden knowledge I look down and am relieved to see my legs and feet. So things are just as they were. It must have been illusory that I could will my spirit elsewhere. In any event I am happy here, knowing that he is near. Soon, soon, he will appear and we’ll be as we have always been.
I can hear the sea calling. It called before and I should not have answered its call but now my feet are eagerly taking me to a gap in the old stone wall. Close to the gap stands the impassive grey saint who protects this place. He towers over me as I feel the first breath of the sea. There are narrow steps to the cove below, but I have no need of these for now I am standing on the pale sand as great waves assault the shore, their widespread white spume in stark contrast to the farther off blue. Both sea and sky are the bluest I can ever remember. Colors, today, are so intensified that I need almost to shield my eyes. And I am one with all that I can see, as well as with all that I cannot see. I am a child of the universe, as integral to it as it is to me.
We – he and I – are children, too, of this environment. The sea runs in our blood and we are never happier than when together, walking the coast paths, surfing, or sailing his lugger. Not that we ever sailed here with the currents on the rampage. Many an unsuspecting vessel has been wrecked off this cove – known by some as Dollar Cove after more than two tonnes of silver dollars were lost from a Spanish galleon of long ago.
How long is it since I last saw him? It seems but moments and then a lifetime. I cannot fathom time, for it lengthens and shortens almost on the strength of my whims. One minute I think I know where I am, and when this is, and the next I appear to know nothing.
I remember seeing him crying. That was my last sighting. It was hard, watching from a distance powerless to comfort him. He was crying because I …
No, not because I had died. I am alive, aren’t I? So he must have had some different reason. There are other, much happier, things that I remember. There can be no forgetting the depth of love in his eyes as he spoke of perfection: the perfection we shared. He said we were privileged to experience this, since few people ever did. He also said that we were two halves of a whole and that for one of us to live without the other would be purgatory.
Now I recalled replying: ‘Without you there could be no life for me … so we’ll never permit a parting, will we?’
With agony in his eyes he responded: ‘No, my beloved … we won’t even let death be an end. There must be no endings for us.’
My memories are saddening me, as is the sea for some reason, so I waft back to the churchyard and now find myself in front of the ancient bell-tower that seems to sprout from the cliff sheltering it. How odd that it was built into the cliff instead of onto the church! Then again, maybe it is not odd. Who decides what constitutes oddness?
Passing between church and tower I rediscover my gravestone, which I now notice is gratifyingly distinctive. Taller than I am, and wide, it dwarfs its neighbors and has pillars at either side whereon sit roses so superbly sculpted as almost to have the breath of life. Likewise the two clasped hands that draw my eyes upwards to the center of the curved bridge linking the pillars. Suggestive of having been fashioned from flesh, not stone, one hand is a man’s, the other a woman’s, and on the third finger of each is a ring with a distinctive phoenix symbol.
Acknowledging the woman’s hand as mine, I smile.
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