“…In an attempt to convince the prince to do his duty, he assumes his multi-armed form and he says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’… I suppose we all felt that in a way…” - J. Robert Oppenheimer People always used to ask me,...
“Will you tell us the story again, Dad?” ”Yeah, Dad, tell us about ‘Little Johnny’s Cave!’ PLEASE?” I still remember those days, sitting around a campfire in the backyard and listening to dad tell that story. It was our favorite. “Little Johnny’s Cave.” It was as...
Chapter 1 The Gift On my eighth birthday, in 1968, I got an odd birthday gift. I was certain everything it represented was true, and I was quick to ask it questions as I awaited the triangular answer to appear in its purplish-blue form underneath its black...
Sunday Night Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The world has turned upside down. Glen was right. Fuck! Aliens! About 5:30 p.m., Snaggle wanted to go outside. I followed him out, rifle slung over one shoulder. He sniffed around the fence before he started barking his head off. Then I heard...
Chapter 1 Pat pushed his way through the tall grass of the woodland, navigating the trees and trying to find the source of the sound. Somewhere up ahead, a woman was hurt. He could hear her crying out for help. “Please…I think it’s broken. I can’t move...
Even so close to midnight, the unseasonable heat and humidity clings to the night air with a ferocious grip. Though only one week until Christmas, the temperature feels like mid-September. Regina Parker groans. Enduring one summer per year in Arkansas is enough. The second she...
A tall, well-built man stood in a lavishly decorated Victorian-style living room, staring into a full-length mirror with an ornate golden frame. There was nothing reflected, no image in the glass looking back at him, nothing but the shimmer that the overhead light cast upon...
Wednesday Autumn was Thor's favorite season; the world changed around him in an amazing cornucopia of scents. The color of the leaves meant nothing to him, but the aromas did. Fungi bloomed as quadrillions of spores feasted on decaying matter. So much of the woods around...
It ended in 2047. It was the flu or some evolution of it anyway, and when it took the world, it took it fast. Everyone forgot all about Covid. It was a distant memory, a cold in comparison to the new disease. It was in...
Takoda lifted his gaze from the burning embers of the campfire toward the sky. Tonight, the stars were brilliant in a cloudless sky. Tree limbs, heavy with unfallen leaves, barely moved. This natural stillness, normally produced a calm within him. A calmness his people expected...
Shorty Small, a man neither short nor small, entered the coffee shop, surveyed the patrons and found who he sought. Homer LaCroix sat in a corner table munching on a beignet with a mug of coffee in his right hand. When he approached the table, he...
Prologue Joie slowly opened her eyes, tingles of numbing sensations prickled throughout her body. Not being able to focus on any one thought, she attempted to squint through the foggy blurred vision at what she could make out. The color green was predominant along with hues...
Bert set his drink down on the end table beside his recliner and he stared towards the window. Without looking he lifted the remote and muted the television. He thought he heard movement on the porch. It had happened before and turned out to be...
My early childhood was spent on my father’s farm in the middle of nowhere. Literally, in the middle of nowhere. We had no hospitals or police stations near us; everything we ate, we made from scratch. It was like being Amish or something. The farm was called Beacon...
In the world of international stolen art, an individual known only as Henri, was considered the world’s most successful thief. However, friends, neighbors, and business associates, knew him as Marcel Leblanc, a polite, proper and jovial man in his late forties who owned a seemingly successful...
Ghost from the Past “You know Jake...
Chapter 1 Two Hundred- and Forty-Three-Miles Above Earth Ivan Babichev sat quietly staring through the portal, his blue eyes fixed on the distant planet he called home—Earth. His communication laptop sat blinking on the small desk next to his liquid-lock drinking cup of what I imagined was...
Dusk had only just settled over the vacant crop fields of Goochland County, a vast, rural, farming area just west of Richmond, VA. The sky was bruised in shades of burnt orange near the horizon that bled into deep reds, purples, and blacks as the...
Part 1 A single white rose quietly fell from her slim young fingers. I looked down and saw it had landed on the dark walnut top of the casket. The beautiful wooden box somehow seemed out of place in the cold contoured hole in the soil....
“In the end, people will not be judged by the darkness they lived in, but the light they rejected.” — Anthony Liccione CHAPTER 1 Dartmoor, England. 1989 The small blotches of blood on his hands had already dried by the time Martin realised he had made a grave mistake. It...
