[Note: This is yet another short story I wrote a few years ago and never got around to editing. Well, ’tis the season to post it. Although I swear my style got better. Really. Eventually I also started editing. Like, really. I swear. *sigh*]

I’ve only just seen this today, but the awesome Tor.Com, one of the biggest short fantasy stories publishers out there, is giving away a free mega-book of the award-winning prose they’ve been posting on their site for five years.

Author’s Note: This is another one of my infamously stuck-in-first-draft stories. One day I’ll actually edit it.

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The first time I saw her – really, really saw her, not just glanced at her as we tried our best to catch the back seats in the small university classrooms – she was at a piano. Maybe I’d never have really been able to notice her had it not been for that one, strange evening when destiny gently pushed me out of my awkward life and into hers.

If only children can be prodigies, then I wasn’t one any longer. I’d lived through my glory years at school, where I’d gone off and won prizes for art and English, maths and physics, running circles around classmates and less talented professors. Eventually, when push came to shove and I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I hid behind some more studying, delaying that dreadful moment when I’d have to prove that not only was I smart, but that I was also able to do something. I chose English and physics as majors, convinced I could do both easily enough. I wasn’t right. I wasn’t very wrong, either. There wasn’t much of a personal life left between the two, but I took my exams with flying colors and dreamed of the day I’d win a Nobel prize. I don’t think it will ever actually happen, but even fools can dream.

Author’s notes: I wrote this a while ago for a friend. It turns out that this blog has any number of spiritual people visiting, so as I was going through stories and trying to pick one to post here, I decided that this one would be perfect for all audiences.

I broke a few polite rules in writing this one. One such unspoken rule is that a character’s name shouldn’t resemble that of the author. Another says that characters aren’t supposed to look like self-inserts unless they are self-inserts. Those things make it so much easier for people to interpret and criticize, but I like having fun and seeing what happens if I do one thing or another.