Date: 2013-03-20 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Paranormal; Romance; Fantasy
Description: Love does not live in the rational world, and is not constrained by the laws of logic.You cannot stand apart from it and analyse it from a safe distance so that you do not get hurt by its sharp edges. Love lives in the heart, and in the senses, and it is impossible to completely experience it without closing your eyes and stepping inside it and letting it close above your head like an ocean. What does it feel like when you are surrounded by the senses that you have freed? How would love taste? How would it feel to the touch? What are the sounds that it whispers into your ear? Step inside these

A Sense of Love

Alma Alexander

© Alma Alexander 2013

Published by Kos Books

Kos Books

A & D Deckert

343 Sudden Valley Drive

Bellingham WA 98229

Cover art by Sarah-Jane Lehoux

email: angharakirhama@gmail.com

website: AlmaAlexander.org

Table of Contents

A Sense of Love

Foreword

I Can Hear You Breathing

The Painting

Bitter

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Other books by Alma Alexander

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About the Author

Foreword

One of the early, easy pieces of advice meted out to beginner writers is inevitably, “Use all your senses.” And sometimes that’s easy enough to both achieve, and, alas, to misinterpret.

Sometimes a sensual experience forces itself onto five and often all six of the human senses – intuition and instinct and a psychic/psychological awareness not being easily dismissed here – become sharpened, and pure, and it all comes at you with all the guns blazing, phasers set on kill, and leave you barely able to breathe in its wake.

But that doesn’t mean that you can, or even should, act as the sort of conduit for this overwhelming flood of sensory input for your reader. Sometimes you, as the writer, have to cull and to hone, to find out precisely which senses belong in which story to make it a heightened experience and not one that will be a complete overload and therefore blank out everything that you are trying to convey and to achieve.

In the three stories that form part of this particular collection, senses play a major part. The stories are all, at least on the surface of it all, about love – what love is, what it means, what it isn’t, what it can’t ever be, what someone might want it to be – but it’s love as experienced through the physical and psychological senses of a human being – it’s my interpretation of how love is passed and parsed through those filters, and somehow both the feeling of love and every one of the senses used to experience it come out of an experience like this sharpened and if not more comprehensible (who can lay claim to understanding what love truly means to every single human individual) then certainly, and hopefully, a little more enlightening.

That’s what using your senses is all about, after all.

Welcome to the Alexander Triads, Book 7: A Sense of Love.

Alma Alexander

2013

I Can Hear You Breathing

I originally wrote this story in a somewhat different form, with a different POV. But then, as these things happen, something caught my eye – an online short story competition which wanted stories which had a protagonist who was blind. I had a blind character in this story, so I took another look at it to see if I could recast it from that character’s POV – and it just… worked. It all came together beautifully.

The story took second place in the competition, but that is not what I most remember and treasure about it. That distinction belongs to an email I received not long after the winning stories were posted, and a girl wrote to me,”My friend and I would like you to settle an on-going argument between the two of us – are you, or have you ever been, really blind yourself?”

The fact that somebody could ASK this question told me that there were things in this story which I – who have never been blind – got right. I got it right. I reached for what it meant to live in a world of darkness, and I succeeded in both teaching myself a little bit of that truth and in conveying it to others in such a way that they felt it necessary to ask if I actually viscerally and personally knew what that felt like. I have seldom been prouder of an achievement than I’ve been of this.

---

She thought she was invisible, but I could hear her breathing, very close to me, every time I stopped playing and rested my calloused fingers on Belinda’s curves. Smiling over the quiescent shape of my guitar, I told her so, and she fled.

The first time she returned, it was just as the sun came out after a day of rain; the air smelled washed, faintly scented, as though somewhere there was a cherry tree in bloom. I could hear her standing there, breathing softly; I said hello, and heard her gasp, and then the receding sound of high heels clicking quickly away on the paved path.

The second time, I could sense her waiting for me as I approached my bench.

“What brings you here so early?” I asked.

“What?” she said.

“You’re the deer at the edge of the wood, vanishing when seen,” I said. “You’ve walked here before. But the sun is too high and too warm; it isn’t your usual time of day. May I?”

She shifted to give me room beside her on the bench.

“Did you come to see me?” I asked.

“I came to hear you play.”

I arched my eyebrow. “So,” I said. “This.” I coaxed a long, trembling minor chord from the guitar. “What would you like to hear?”

“Anything,” she said. And a world of loneliness was in her voice. I had a tune for that. I always did.

There was a moment of silence when I was done, her rapt, me waiting. Then she sighed.

“That was beautiful.”

“That was yours.”

“What?”

“The song I was playing. That was for you.”

“You mean you just made it up as you went along?”

“It’s the only way I play,” I said. “My name is Bobby.”

“Vivian.”

“Well, Vivian, can I tempt you with a cup of coffee? The guy with the coffee stall is a friend of mine.”

She hesitated, but only briefly. “Sure.”

It seemed natural to link arms as we got up from the bench. I asked Murphy over at the coffee stall if he wouldn’t mind taking care of Belinda for me, and he obligingly stashed the guitar behind his counter before passing over two coffees and a stale doughnut for the omnipresent ducks. We made our way over to the lake edge, at first in silence, and then she suddenly could not stand it anymore.

“How do you do it?” she blurted. “You can’t see, and yet you OWN this park….”

“I know every bench and tree in here,” I said gently, “but outside this park I am blind again. Only here and in my own bedroom can I ‘see’.”

I took a sip of my coffee – strong and black and bitter.

“Belinda,” she said suddenly, with a smile in her voice. She had heard me name the guitar to Murphy.

“She felt like a Belinda when I christened her.”

“What does a Belinda feel like?”

“Round and rich and generous,” I said. “You do not feel like a Vivian. You smell of brown things – earth, and chocolate. You’re a Mary, or an Anne.”

“Boring,” she interpreted. I could hear the hurt in her voice.

“Not at all,” I said, and left it at that.

She stepped away to feed the demanding ducks around our feet, leaving me holding both polystyrene coffee cups. When she was done, I held out her coffee to her; I could hear a small sharp intake of breath. My instincts spooked her.

I let my fingers rest on her shoulder, tangling in her hair. “Brown,” I said. “Deliciously brown.”

“How do you know what brown is?” she asked tactlessly, and then caught herself, started fumbling. “I mean, how long have you… why…”

I laughed. “If my sight were miraculously restored I would not recognize ‘brown’ ,” I said. “I don’t remember color, although I wasn’t born blind. But I understand the concept of it, and to me color means... impressions. If I put my hand in cool water I ‘sense’ blue. ‘Red’ is the heat that comes off embers.” I lifted a strand of her hair. “This is brown. Blondes smell of vanilla. You don’t.”

“I smell of chocolate?” she said, echoing my earlier words.

“You smell of earth. You would TASTE like chocolate,” I said softly, and kissed her, tasting her. My fingers traced the contours of her face, sliding over her closed eyes, her cheeks, the line of her jaw, down her neck, onto the ridge of her collarbone, my thumb coming to rest on the pulse that beat in the hollow of her throat. “Why did you come here today, my Mary Anne?”

The kiss had acted as the usual truth serum. “To find you,” she blurted.

The lonely ones always found me.

“Come see where Belinda lives,” I said.

“Yes,” she said softly.

We retrieved the guitar and my white cane, and walked arm in arm out of the park. My flat was a semi-basement room, nine shallow steps down from a quiet side street. I fished my key out of my pocket, let her unlock the door.

I leaned Belinda into her accustomed corner, and waited – without expectations, without pressure, in silence, filling the room with the patience and serenity that the lonely ones came to me to find. She crossed the space between us, reaching out to touch me the way I had touched her – running her fingers across my face, through my hair, lacing her hands together at the nape of my neck.

She shed her clothes; I would never see her body, but already I knew more about it – and her – than any other lover ever would. My fingertips found all her small imperfections – the moles clustering along her spine, the left breast that was marginally fuller than the right, the sharp bones of her pelvis – and I made them irrelevant.

“Do I still taste of chocolate?” she asked.

“No,” I said, my lips close to her skin, the words formed against her cheek, “of salt.”

She had controlled her breathing, but I knew when the tears had started.

When she started collecting her scattered clothes, she did not speak; that trembling silence is something else they all share. I heard the door close behind her, very gently, as she slipped out.

I had known she would leave me – they always did.

The Painting

This is a story I deeply, deeply love. Back in 2000, BBC’s Radio 4 announced a short story competition which would run like this: you were supposed to send in the first paragraph of a story, and if they liked it they would ask for the rest. Winner would be read on air on BBC Radio 4.

There would be a small monetary prize, but this, THIS was the real prize –hey, you don’t get a door opening into the hallowed halls of the BBC that often. So, then – this story – it was PERFECT for this competition. The only problem was that it wasn’t just a preliminary paragraph. It was whole and complete and itself already, and if they meant “send us a beginning and if we like it we will ask you to WRITE the rest” then it was cheating – but I sent in what they asked for, and when the letter came telling me that I had won I almost cried.

The story WAS read on BBC radio, by a trained actress with a beautiful voice who did it proud. And I still love it deeply. The sense connection here? There’s a deeper one than just the physical five. This is a story of a visceral regret, so palpable, so deep that it made… a painting come to life.

---

It always gave Molly a shock to realize how little the museum changed from year to year. Returning here was beginning to feel like going back in time, simply arriving at the worn front step again and again at the same instant in her life.

This year something was different, though. Through a glass partition she could see into the curator’s office as she walked in, and she glanced in as she always did - in the last few years the ancient guardian of this tiny museum had started to recognize her, and had even raised a gnarled hand in greeting. Today the office was tenanted by a much younger man. He looked up with a friendly but blank smile as she walked past. Molly avoided his eyes, shuffled past with her hands in her pockets. She felt irrationally upset. How could they change things? This was supposed to be immutable, unchanging, the anchor point in a constantly shifting universe. She wondered briefly and morbidly if the bushy-browed old curator was dead.

Her feet took her unbidden to the same painting she always came to see. Molly could almost see the floor worn into a subtle groove along this path, she had walked it so many times before. She kept her eyes down until the last minute, as always, relishing the shock of lifting them to the painting - it was a sort of delicious pain, something that tore into her and released a bittersweet sort of rush, a longing for something never had and a sense of loss of something long had and cherished all rolled into one. But this time she wasn’t alone here, as usual. Her eyes, still downcast, met a pair of paint-splattered sneakers, and then travelled upwards along a none-too-clean orange overall to meet the quizzical glance of a young man leaning against the wall.

They stood looking at one another for a moment or two.

“What are you doing?” Molly blurted at last, when the silence stretched into being acutely uncomfortable.

He shrugged, apparently not finding the question in the least bit disconcerting.

“It’s going into storage,” he said easily, tossing his head in the direction of Molly’s painting.

“Storage?” she echoed. The word was meaningless. This painting had to hang here, right here, or else the world would fly apart and Molly Cameron would no longer know who she was or what ideals she lived her life by.

“Yeah,” said the young workman lightly. “Into the back room.”

“Why?” Molly said, and to her chagrin felt tears gather in her eyes. She slid her gaze from the young man’s face and on to the painting, but discovered that it was blurred and indistinct through the tears. She had been coming here since she was very young, to worship at this shrine; she knew every delicate detail of the painting, and yet now she could not quite see it clearly, and could not remember it.

“Search me,” the young man said after a beat of silence.

He was distantly friendly, willing to wait until she had had her gawk to get on with the job. But get on with it he would, and Molly found herself hating him for it.

“Don’t you have anything else to do?” Molly asked, nastily for her, knuckling her eyes. A few moments ago he was nothing to her, something she barely registered, did not even know was there. Now, all of a sudden, she found niggling small things about him to pin a sense of dislike on. The single earring which had flashed from beneath the lanky dirty–blond hair hanging around his face, the shifty cast to his features that transformed the easy half–smile he wore into almost a smirk…

“Eh?” this unexpected enemy said, sounding genuinely surprised. Then he seemed to take in her damp eyes, the clenched hands, the glance at the painting. “You like this one, don’t you? Don’t be upset - they kinda change them round every so often, I’m sure it’ll be right out again before you know it.”

“But not there,” Molly whispered. “It’s been hanging there, just so, for years. For years! Even if they put it back, it’ll be somewhere else...It’ll be different. It means...”

“What?” he said. He was intrigued; this reaction to what seemed to be a relatively minor incident was wildly too strong.

Molly must have been radiating her distress, because in the next pause, while she fought to gain control of her breath, they were joined by the new curator, who approached wanting to know if there was a problem.

“You can’t take it away,” Molly said, clutching at his sleeve, at his authority.

He freed his arm with some distaste. “Madam,” he said, with a commendable effort at not allowing that distaste to creep into his voice, “we do need to rotate our stock occasionally, it gives the place a facelift - we can’t just stay static forever...”

“But it’s a museum. Museums preserve...”

“We thought we would use this gallery for an Impressionistic exhibition. We do have in our possession a genuine Manet...”

“But this is genuine. It’s the only real thing you have...”

The curator stared at the offending painting with a jaundiced eye. “That?” he said. “That, Madam, is a certified fake.”

The breath went out of Molly in a long sigh. “Fake?”

“It was originally supposed to be a genuine Luckenberg, but we’ve had it valued for insurance, and it’s undoubtedly a fake.”

“Who’s Luckenberg?”

The curator stared at her loftily. “Lord Henry Luckenberg? He painted the landscape around here a lot, and an occasional portrait. That’s why this painting was thought to be so rare. It’s not his usual subject matter. But the lady was thought to have been Matilda, his bride - she drowned after they’d been married for less than a fortnight, in Reedmere. But it’s not Luckenberg at all.”

“Does that matter?”

“What?”

Molly and the curator stared at each other in blank incomprehension of each other’s worlds. It was left to the young workman to bridge the silence. The painting had been just a painting to him, a load - something to be removed from this wall, taken into the storage area, and dumped there. Now he was looking at it and seeing it properly for the first time: a young woman veiled in white, with her eyes glowing blue and joyous behind the gauze, extending a fragile, pale hand towards that person whom she loved with all her being and who waited just outside the frame ready to receive her.

“That’s not fake,” the young man said abruptly.

Both Molly and the curator turned towards him, but he seemed to be oblivious of them. He stretched out a hand so that his fingers almost touched those of the young bride, and for a moment it seemed that her eyes were focused on him alone. “God,” he said, “to have someone look at you like that. To know that it’s possible. That’s not fake. That’s the realest thing in the world.”

Even as Molly watched, he began taking on the stretched, tense look she knew so well after watching it on her own face every morning for years when she looked into the mirror in the morning. He had gone from an unknown stranger to being the face of an unexpected enemy; now he was metamorphosing again, into a fellow sacrifice on an all–too–familiar altar.

“It’s a painting,” snapped the curator.

“It’s a vow,” said Molly. The young man turned to her, his own eyes too bright, nodding.

“You,” said the curator suddenly, pointing at Molly. “I’ve seen you here before, haven’t I?”

“I come every year,” Molly said.

“Every year?”

Molly did not want to explain. This was hers, hers, and nobody else in the world had the right to know it. Not even the man with the power to take it from her, the petty autocrat glowering at her with his foot beating an impatient tattoo on the polished wooden floor. Especially not him. But then she glanced at the young workman, and something in the eyes of the youth she had come close to hating a moment ago gave her strength. Perhaps he was already lost. But maybe it was not yet too late…

“Today would have been my wedding anniversary,” Molly said, very softly, so that both men instinctively bent forward to hear. “My... forty-eighth anniversary, as it happens. I come here every year on what would have been my wedding day... to find out why I couldn’t marry Willie.”

The curator was bristling again but the young workman was nodding as understanding dawned.

“You see,” she said, “I could not do that.” Her hand lifted briefly, helplessly, towards the painting and then dropped back to her side. “I could not look at him like that. I could not feel that. And if I could not do it on my wedding day... then I could never....” She wiped at her eyes again. “Today would have been my wedding anniversary,” she said again, the words dying into a whisper, settling on the painting like a fine dust

She looked up at the painting again, as though hypnotised by it. The loving eyes on the canvas were both a blessing on what she had sacrificed - renouncing what might have been less than perfect and holding out for that slice of heaven which the painting-bride promised could exist - and a never-ending reproach which stretched through her lonely years, for letting go of something which might have given her an arguably imperfect, possibly flawed, but human happiness. The painting had been a riddle, and Molly was yet to discover whether she had got it right. And now it was going to be taken, even that - years ago she had lost Willie at the command of the loving, lethal lady in white; now she was going to lose the lady herself. There had been no answers - and now, very soon, there would be no question.

"Please…" she whispered, her hand fluttering towards the painting in a futile gesture of entreaty.

The curator frowned. "I'm afraid the decision is already been…"

Without waiting for him to finish, helpless, defeated, the old woman dropped her gaze and walked unsteadily out of the room. The curator stared after her, his hands limp at his sides, his mouth open. Then he tore his eyes away and looked at the painting again - the hot blue eyes behind the veil, the reaching hand... He suddenly shivered. There was a wedding band on his own left hand, and he found himself staring at it, remembering his own wedding day, trying to remember how his bride had looked at him as they had stood before the altar. Somehow, and the very fact that this could happen almost terrified him, the memory of the event he had thought he would never forget had been swept from his mind. All he could think of was that it had not been, could not have been, the look on the face of the portrait bride.

“Take it,” he said hoarsely. “Take it away and bury it somewhere, deep. Let nobody ever find it again.”

“It isn’t a fake,” murmured the young man again, his own expression distant and distracted.

The curator turned away, hunched into himself. “That,” he said, softly and distinctly, “is why it must go.”

The eyes of the two men met briefly, uncomfortably, in a moment of shared understanding – of each other and, perhaps too late, of the old woman whose life the portrait had ruled. Then the young man bit his lip, turned, lifted the painting down, and laid it gently face down against the wall, blinding the blue eyes behind the veil.

. There was a faint shape on the wall, a trace of where the painting had hung untouched for years; the wall looked curiously bare without it, almost indecent.

And the room was suddenly full of shadows, and then it was full of light

Bitter

This one is a marriage of two senses, really. Part of it is the fact that it was inspired by a song which triggered something inside my brain and this story came alive for me in an unprecedented way; part of it, of course, is obvious – the sense of taste, of that bitterness which is reflected even in the title itself.

Yes, it’s a love story. It’s not a HAPPY love story. It would seem that of all the writerly gifts that I have received, that of believing in a Happily Ever After ending was not one of them. I’ve always preferred the fairy tales of Andersen over those of the Grimm brothers – because of Andersen’s sense of tragedy and drama. It is something I apparently share in abundance.

Anyway – you’ve been warned, by me, by the title itself. It’s a love story. But it doesn’t end well…

---

You look up from the milky whirlpool in a coffee cup, raise your eyes to the slight squeak that heralds the opening of the café door, meet another pair of eyes, full of secrets, which once you knew in innocence. All at once you are back in a time when your briefcase was a school satchel and your wheels a humble bicycle. And then, because the years all come crowding back in a fragment of a second, you look away again, feeling the weight of those eyes, recognising the secrets aren't yours, knowing it is much too late - too late for everything.

Tanya. How well I remembered her, and how little she resembled herself now, alone in a red plush booth, hunting in a chic black handbag for a cigarette. Once she had been a fragile-looking redhead, her clear blue eyes as limpid as Mediterranean skies. She wore her hair in two long plaits then. That's how I first chose to claim her attention, not knowing any better - I yanked at the pigtail as hard as I could, and actually brought tears to her eyes. She had simply ducked her head and run away. That was not what I had wished to accomplish, but I was a boy, and I knew no better. And I laughed out loud after her. How was she to know I was kicking myself inside, banging my head against an imaginary brick wall and screaming silently, "Fool! Fool! Fool!"

She avoided me for a whole year after that. I tried to ignore her - and an outside observer might have thought I'd succeeded rather well. She was never one of those girls who grew up precocious, and was possibly the last in our class to acquire a boyfriend, one of the many guys totally wrong for her with whom she took up. I had my strings of girls, too. But always I kept an eye on Tanya, and, perhaps arrogantly, thought that she often cast languid glances my way when the current unsuitable boyfriend wasn't looking.

There was a wild almond tree growing along the far wall of the schoolyard, spreading fragile purple blooms along the old bricks and bringing forth a crop of small nuts every year. There was a sort of bower beneath it, formed by the interlacing branches, which did obvious duty as trysting place in the flowering season when amorous boys were fond of using the wash of blooms to romance whichever girl they were after at the time - I don't think any girl went so far as to lose her virginity entirely under the wild almond, but the shy blossoms saw many a white breast surrender to a victorious brown adolescent hand, and certainly quite a few generations learned to kiss underneath the friendly, concealing boughs. But for me the wild almond had quite a different gift.

I was not fond of bringing girls here, although I had heard plenty about my friends' exploits. I found the flowers faintly disturbing, I couldn't really say why, but I felt as though they were sentient, watching my hands move and my lips speak lies. But I would often come and sit here when nobody else came, out of season, as it were - when the small wild almonds had ripened and hung sturdy and tough on the branches which, bereft of concealing flowers, suddenly looked gnarled and old. Perhaps, yet again, I found a strange symbolism growing on that tree, and sometimes it almost spoke to me, only just failing to convey a truth I knew I must learn before I was fit to leave the schoolroom and face the world. I was frustrated, young, thoroughly adolescent, blood afire with schemes and dreams which would probably never come true. That was the hour in which Tanya came to me, and to the almond tree.

"Oh," she said, coming around the blind side unexpectedly, alone, on a blustery school recess when everyone else seemed to have found other things to do. The wind had whipped a strand or two out of the tidy school plait, and flicked the hair this way and that across her face. She raised a hand to trap the wayward lock, her lips parted.

I said nothing, just looking at her. She shut her mouth, looked down, scuffed the bare earth with her shoe. "Sorry," she said, turning to go. I lifted a hand; she saw, looked up, then down, then blushed into a shade that clashed woefully with the auburn hair which had darkened to rosewood with the years.

"Have you ever tasted wild almond?" I asked her.

"No," she said, coming closer, her hand brushing my own. My fingers closed over hers. "Have you?"

"Never," I said. "Do you want to?"

"All right."

I tugged off a couple of the nuts that hung around us and inexpertly cracked them to get at the kernels within. There was not much left by the time I finished. I gave her one shattered almond, and she took it with a hand that was hot and smooth; we lifted the offerings up to our lips simultaneously, our eyes holding, as though in some pagan sacrifice. I know I felt as though I was kissing her on that soft mouth as I watched her lips touch the pulverised almond kernel at the same time mine touched the remnants of my own. And then she closed her eyes and turned away, pulling a face.

"It's bitter," she said, her voice a breath.

The taste was burning its way down my own tongue and throat. I knew that I had just been given another piece of the wild almond's message, but still I could not put it into thought or word.

"Wait," I said, reaching clumsily for her arm. But she turned, keeping her eyes veiled behind long pale lashes, and stepped away, into sight of the school yard, distancing herself from me.

"It's bitter," she said, whispered, and walked away, shoulders hunched against the wind.

I stayed where I was. The bell went for the end of break, and still I stayed there, staring into the clouds that flew across the sky, and wondering where they were going. I wasn't exactly cutting class so much as forgetting that there was a school building behind me. I was looking down a narrow tunnel into the days of my life still to come - and yes, it was bitter, like the wild almond tasted with a girl who had always been special to me, as if in communion. But that was the last time I ever really stood that close to Tanya.

We graduated high school, and scattered. I saw her occasionally, in the streets, still with all the wrong men; her pale, fragile prettiness changing subtly into something transparent and clinging, searching for a harbour she could not seem to find. Our eyes met every now and again across a crowded street, or sometimes in a store; we'd nod at each other, and turn away. It was as though there was an unspoken pact between us - after that "It's bitter", which said it all, nothing remained to be discussed.

I left her behind, eventually, searching for my own dreams, finding them through a camera lens in the wilds of the world. Perhaps once or twice I spared a thought as to whether, back home, she was married, or whether she came across some magazine or other with my photographs in it and remembered me. I had seemed to bring her nothing pleasant in the brief encounters of our younger days, much as I had burned to do otherwise. There never was anything between us - and yet there had been everything.

And today, here in the cafe, back in this town for the first time in nearly thirty years - why did the nameless wind that blows us all along our roads choose to blow her into this particular cafe, right here, right now? I watched her come in, saw the gleam of the gold bands that imprisoned her ring finger, saw perhaps the only thing I had returned to this town hoping not to see - and, aware of my eyes in a way a wary wild creature might be, she looked up and met my gaze squarely.

Her mouth was parted a little, just like in a schoolyard long ago, but she was no longer the girl who came to me then. Her hair was bobbed, a nondescript strawberry blonde, and I could see evidence of concealment beneath her eyes where dark circles had been artfully smudged into oblivion. There was a question in the look she gave me, and I answered it as best I could without benefit of the spoken word. I looked away, down into my cup, where the milky whirlpool still turned in its inimitable mindless way. I raised the cup to my lips and sipped, and the taste made my head spin with the sudden comprehension of the prophecy the tree in the schoolyard had been offering me so many years ago and which I had been far too young to understand at the time.

The coffee was bitter, bitter as aloes; I knew that taste, for my soul had never forgotten it. The coffee tasted of wild almonds.

What Reviewers Say

Midnight at Spanish Gardens: "Alexander's language is lovely and poetic...the imagery is beautiful, the setting is compelling...But it's the characters that drive this story, in all of their imperfection, in all of their passion or disconnection or feeling of failure." - Alana Abbott, Flames Rising

The Secrets of Jin-shei: ”Combine ‘The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood’ with ‘The Joy Luck Club,’ add elements of ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon,’ and you have this astonishing novel.” — China Books

Embers of Heaven: “Beautifully written, with rich characterisation and captivating originality, it quickly draws you in and is a real page-turner.” — Glasgow Evening Times

Worldweavers YA Series: “…combines elements of magic, culture, and spirituality with a firm grounding in the real world of Thea as she struggles to find her identity in her family and in the world of magic….” —Teri S. Lesesne, VOYA (starred review)

Changer of Days: "Powerful characters and a powerful setting help to deliver what I am thrilled to say is a great bloody book." – Altair

Letters from the Fire: “The book operates on many levels: as one of a new breed of ‘Internet novels’; as an exposition of the ‘other’ point of view; as a story of intense suffering; as a love story... — Sydney Morning Herald

Once Upon a Fairy Tale: Alexander Triads 1: “One of the things we lose when we grow up is the thrill of reading a new fairy tale because people just don’t write fairy tales for adults. Alma Alexander has. And they’re good. –Stephen J. Walter

Other books by Alma Alexander

Dolphin's Daughter and Other Stories, Macmillan, UK, 1995

Houses in Africa , David Ling, New Zealand, 1995

Letters from the Fire, Harper Collins New Zealand, 1999

Secrets of Jin Shei, HarperCollins, USA, 2004/2005

The Hidden Queen, Eos, USA, 2005

Changer of Days, Eos, USA, 2005

Embers of Heaven, HarperCollins, UK, 2006; Sky Warrior Books 2012

Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax, Kos Books 2010

Midnight at Spanish Gardens, Sky Warrior Books 2011

WORLDWEAVERS

1) Gift of the Unmage (HarperCollins, USA, 2007)

2) Spellspam (HarperCollins, USA, 2008)

3) Cybermage (Harpercollins, USA, 2009)

Alexander Triads

Once Upon a Fairytale, Kos Books 2011

Cat Tales, Kos Books, 2011

Haunted, Kos Books 2011

Weight of Worlds, Kos Books 2012

Plaisir d'amour, Kos Books 2012

Out of This World, Kos Books 2013

Contact Alma Alexander

Website: http://www.AlmaAlexander.org/

Blog: http://anghara.livejournal.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlmaAlexander

Email: angharakirhama@gmail.com

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/amaaalexander/

About the Author

Alma Alexander was born on the banks of an ancient river in a country which no longer exists.

She began telling stories as a child and never stopped. To date, Alma has written close to three million words in more than a dozen published books.

Her novel, The Secrets of Jin-shei, has been published in 14 languages in more than a score of countries. Her popular Young Adult Worldweavers series features New World magic and a heroine who is as American as Harry Potter is British.

The woman underneath the author likes books, embroidery, music ranging from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to Dvorak's New World Symphony, animals, coffee, chocolate, snow, velvet -- and, in people, kindness, intelligence and an off-the-wall sense of humor.

She is a punaholic, a chronic worrier, sentimental and passionate. She is married to a man who wooed her over the Internet and lured her to America, where she is currently owned by a cat.