And now for something completely different. I often write beginnings of stories, and this is one. I’m toying with the idea of publishing them together in a book called “A Thousand Beginnings” or maybe “Forty-seven beginnings,” depending. If any of you writer-readers feel like writing an ending, or even just the next part of this, please do and, if you would, email me. Also, I’d like to know any response this elicits. Thanks! ~Sara

Covers rustled beside Sandy and she felt herself relax. Tom beside her still felt like a dream come true. They’d been together for a year that bloomed into cosmic unfurlings. The river of her heart grew wide, swollen, and happy. It lapped at its banks in the sun.

At the party last night, an open house for a new realtor, she’d wandered over to a table where Tarot readings were offered alongside crackers with brie and jam, salmon and dill, spring rolls and crisp chardonnay. Sandy’s card had been The Tower, and she’d shuddered.

“I sense many endings this year,” the red-haired young fortune teller said, fixing her hazel eyes on Sandy. The wench! (Sandy’s always thought of women using historic terms: Maiden, wife, crone. Old biddy. It must have been those years spent reading lit and historical fiction (or her vivid imagination)). Old biddies were the well-meaning older women she loved, while this saucy sorceress felt like a power to be reckoned with. Whether for good or ill, Sandy wasn’t sure.

Perhaps she was jealous of the diva’s youth. She’d barely begun to accept the crow’s feet leaning in at her eyes. She both feared and looked forward to her later years.

You must long for something more than you fear it for it to manifest, she’d read. Well then Sandy was going to need one hefty vat full of longing to outweigh her constant worries: Fear she’d never find a companion, fear she’d find another who broke her heart, quickly or slowly, it didn’t matter. That was the thing about not enough love…its truth always comes out in the wash eventually.

Kind of like death. Despite thinking of the tarot reader as a hack and counting her blessings, Sandy thought she could smell a bookend in the night air. Things just come and go, she thought. Everything we love will change…

When she and Tom kissed lately, her own body responded before thought. She’d never trusted anyone this way. She sometimes felt a step behind, as though she were still trying to figure out if she were even in the mood, but her body had rounded second base and was eying third.

They’d begun following the exercises from The Art of Sexual Ecstasy, Margot Annand’s manual for Tantric high sex. For the first time, they were each invited to be that full gaggle of jumbled human. In the past, Sandy often felt herself playing some movie role of a woman aroused, far from the experience. Not anymore. She sighed again. She’d envisioned having this with a partner since her early 20s, but now, halfway through her long life, she smiled and felt her beloved through the thick covers. That day had arrived.

Anxiety resumed fluttering. Whenever bliss neared, or when a whole new level of fully present joy bloomed, Sandy would look over her shoulder wondering if it was safe, or if the dowager aunts of the world would sense abundance and jealously shoot it out of the sky. She had to stop expecting that joy was a harbinger of danger.

Sandy rolled over and nestled into Tom’s shoulder, liking the butter of the sun-warmed bedroom. She would willingly accept all that came to drink in this moment. Her body melted. The contour of their shapes together spoke.

She listened.