Excerpt: Ana's November

Ana's November
And so it was that a drawing would change Jared’s life forever. Of course, Jared had no idea at the time, for he was blissfully enjoying peach ice cream and another glass of eggnog, being praised by his art teacher and being excused from math class. All together, one does not think as straight as one might when an individual one respects greatly begins to tell you how much they, in fact, respect you. It is also not conducive to straight thinking to consume more than one glass of thick, creamy eggnog in less than one hour, much less a half of one. Nonetheless, it was not a bad thing that Jared was so utterly intoxicated by life to make one rash little decision. After all, without that moment of rash euphoria, Jared’s life might have been quite a lot different.
Then again, every decision one makes, even the smallest things, like which stall to try first in a public rest room or which variety of truffle to buy your mother on her birthday, can change your life. There’s always the possibility that if you had chosen the stall beside the one you actually did, then you might have found a clue to an unsolved murder, or a portal to another world; there is also the possibility that if you had bought your mother a raspberry cream truffle instead of a mocha dark chocolate one, that the candied berry on top was actually a transmitter which would have connected your mother to a intergalactic communications system. But you didn’t choose that stall, and you didn‘t buy your mother the raspberry cream, and now there’s no way to tell what would have happened if you had.