jim-ruggeri

Preface 2 of 12 No matter how hard I clung to this forced immaturity, the world was a faster moving, more ravenous beast than I could have possibly imagined. One day in late September of that year, I awoke to a phone call from my professor at UCLA, a Doctor Mark Perry, well respected in his field, and a man with whom I had only had two conversations. The first had been questioning why I had felt the need to park my car so close to his one Tuesday morning, and the second had been a request as to why I hadn’t then moved it when he’d asked me to. The only emotion I’d heard from him was definitive exhaustion and a little anger,

Written as requested for HoleInTheHeart Ten years ago The cold December night sky was a tapestry of blinking white dots, painting pitched, ancient, battles against a backdrop of pure obsidian. It was a night that none should forget, but only a few remembered. At the end of a sleeping suburban street, high up in the attic of his aging wooden house, sat Jake, who was watching the constellations through a borrowed telescope. He was eight years old, a fact he was incredibly proud of, and frequently introduced himself as, and then name, if he remembered to name himself at all. Frost was creeping across the glass, tinting the cracking paint a br