30.03.2020
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Chapter One
"Annie is my 2 o'clock here yet?" Dr Janet Waters released the button on the intercom.
"Not yet. Shall I send him in when he gets here?" Annie replied.
"Yes please." Janet Waters released the intercom button and took a glance out the window. Fall colors were beginning to emerge on the hillsides surrounding Salt Lake City. Moving her eyes to the traffic four floors below her office window, Janet thought that perhaps the heavier than usual traffic on the streets below were causing her next patient to run a little behind schedule.
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29.03.2020
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Introduction
Sandie had just turned eighteen a month ago but she was so tiny – barely 5' 1" – and with such a pixy face, that she could have passed for 12 or thirteen. Adding to the image of youth was her long sleek black hair, which hung straight to her waist. Whenever I saw her lounging by their pool in her one-piece bathing suit over our neighbouring fence, I swore she had no breasts to speak of.
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28.03.2020
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Memory triggers.
They come rushing at you when you least suspect them.
You can walk into a house and take in the heady aroma of a cake being baked and you'll be transported back to your grandmother's kitchen. You can smell an empty beer bottle and suddenly there you are playing hide and seek behind a pile of your uncle's empties. Smell is our most powerful sense and we all have a repertoire of aromatic triggers nicely tucked away in that gluggy grey mass we call a brain.
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27.03.2020
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"What are you staring at?" said Julie as she came up silent on slippered feet beside her friend Elaine, who was gazing out of the picture window.
Elaine turned with a smile. "Nothing much. My future, I suppose."
"Future, huh? And what do you see?"
"Loneliness."
"Why? You're still young."
"Forty next birthday, divorced for the second time, and haven't been laid in almost three years."
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26.03.2020
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I've never been a big fan of horror movies. It's not that I scare easily, but they just don't do much for me. I will say, though, that the scariest movie I ever saw when I was a kid, was a film called "Poltergeist." It came out when I was about thirteen or fourteen, and it frightened the shit out of me when I first saw it. It's about a bunch of people living in a housing estate that's been built on an old cemetery, and in the big finale, there is this huge storm, and coffins start popping up out of the ground, and the lids flying open, with skeletons in ragged, rotting clothes start falling out, and it's a shocker!
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25.03.2020
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Grandpa thought he was in heaven! The 55 and older community was actually about 65 and older, and most of them were women, so when I visited him, he'd light up and was proud to show me off.
He was still a spry 82, went out for a few beers every afternoon at the local bar, which was really a package store with a bar in the back room, complete with old time bar maids, songs from the Forties, and a million old war stories.
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24.03.2020
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He was the perfect gentleman. I'd been working at Junior's, an old fashioned ice cream parlor in the tourist trap part of town known as The Riverside for a couple of months. He came in at least once a week, had a single scoop of chocolate ice cream and always he made me laugh.
His name was Craig. I'd guess his age at about 50. He looked his age, but in all the right ways. He had thick hair, black at one time but now going white.
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24.02.2020
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The mountain road was badly rutted, the snow in thick banks at the side. Jack peered through the screen, barely kept clear of snow by the windscreen wipers, blessing the fact that he was driving a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The Jeep wasn't new, but it was in good condition and well maintained. Maybe coming up to the cabin for the holiday wasn't such a good idea after all. He told himself not to worry.
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23.02.2020
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It was a Saturday, and I had the house to myself. As my girls went through their teen years, the house was always full of their friends. We had an open door policy and their friends, girls and guys alike, would frequently walk in unannounced. We pretty much got used to it, and now that my last one was gone to college it seemed like the house was always quiet. To make things worse, my wife was out of town shopping for the day with a friend, leaving me to my own devices.
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22.02.2020
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"Hey Mom, why don't you get Brian to drop you by Aunt Mary's? He'll be driving right by." I hit the leg on her chair as I tried and missed in my attempt to put a knot on my usually sweet and wonderful wife's leg.
I had just been discussing my hunting trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota with my brother-in-law, Mark, when my wife blurted out the unexpected invitation. What is she thinking? I asked myself. "Note to self never mention trips in front of the wife again!" I quietly reminded myself.
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