Read Online Magnificent Vibration by Rick Springfield - Free Book Online

time on it for now. Or she senses that my libido has taken a sudden turn to the left.
    She sips her coffee.
    I look around the atmospheric room. There are a few other couples (if I may be so bold as to call us a “couple”) as well as the previously mentioned overcaffeinated students prepping for exams, sucking down Adderall and studying last-minute CliffsNotes on their computers. I focus on a guy in the corner. Big. Slightly menacing. Kind of out of place. He glances up and we catch each other’s eye for a second. He breaks the connection and looks down into his coffee mug as Alice speaks.
    “So, Bobby . . . tell me about your phone call.”

Ronan
    T he massive weight of the great Loch pushes against the peeled and faded blue husk of the old wooden boat. His recent stroke has left Ronan Young with a heavy limp andonly one working arm, making life considerably more challenging. It is with this good arm that he now steers the Bonnie Bradana. They are heading out into deep water, he and his faithful girl, neither of them really sure of the destination nor the exact reason tonight. Something in Ronan has driven him to make this journey, no doubt inadvisable in his current physical condition and at this late hour, but he has lived by his own rules so far and sees no reason to abandon that path at this point in his life. The Loch is calling. He knows that at some point in their lives, every human being dreams of a great and meaningful end when the time comes. But most of us will spend our last hours in small, antiseptic, windowless rooms, hooked up to beeping machines, attended by a scrubbed impersonal staff, when a good death is all that is really and truly desired. The moon crests above the snow-dusted crags that have watched over the great Loch since she first filled and formed. They have borne witness to the creature that found its way into the then salted sea, before the world changed and shifted and closed. Ronan has learned that there are things on this earth and under the sky that we will never fully understand and he realizes that he now, at this late stage in life, accepts the unacceptable, trusts the impossible, and sees logic in the illogical. He has been schooled by the great creature. She who seems to be a spirit of this lake as much as she is real flesh and blood. The lapping of waves against the hull and the sleepy purring of his craft’s small motor are the only sounds Ronan hears as the surrounding mountains reflect their faint echoes back into the darkness. It is chilly out here on the lake but Ronan is at peace. His life has been both arduous and enviable. Small successes have been hard won and he has felt at times as though the weight ofthe great Highlands were strapped across his shoulders. Then again, in the quiet company of his precious Evelyn or travelling the great Loch at the helm of the Bonnie Bradana he has believed he was as blessed as any man on this earth. Now everyone he loved is gone. And he is no longer the man he once was. Life has become painful and exhausting. His mind swims in and around old memories. Meaningful now in their precious distance and the irretrievable moments lost. He thinks of his childhood family. His mother and father who loved and were loved . . . and his brother.
    His elder brother Devin had moved to Glasgow in his early twenties to make his fortune, or so he vowed, and seldom contacted the family nor made his whereabouts known. Devin always loathed this brutal and beautiful land. Was sure he was made for the comforts of the “civilized” world. He had been a brawling, brutal bully of an older brother who seemed to care little for his immediate family and even less for his friends and workmates. His anger would boil over often and cause mayhem for whoever was standing nearby. Ronan frequently took the brunt of Devin’s irrational rage and could never understand where all the fury came from. “I’m just fuckin’ angry is all,” spat out in a hoarse brogue,