The next day at work Michael cornered Daniel in the lab. "Come to dinner with me tonight..." Daniel stared at him. "No" "Come on its Friday and you don't work tomorrow. Seriously I won't take no for an answer." Michael said. "Well, guess what, I just said 'No' so you're gonna have to." He retorted. Michael stared back, waiting. "Look, I'm sure you didn...
Practice should have been over an hour ago. Kenneth shifted his weight from one foot to the other to garnish what little relief he could for his feet. He, along with three dozen other choir members, had been standing more than four hours singing and swaying to the same three songs over and over again. And Kenneth was nearing his limit. The inner child in hi...
Chapter Seven: Tokenham Collegiate church In the early years of the twenty-first century, while Luke and his sister Cathy were still at school, on one summer holiday visiting Jon's developing woodlands, they found near the forest in Shropshire that Jon and Arthur Rockwell and Robin Banks had planted fifteen or so years before, the small hamlet of Tokeham. N...
I grew up in a small town. Everyone I knew was involved in the church. I was eighteen and had just graduated high school. There was a conference taking place in another town. My parents decided that I should go. This was a sign that I would begin to become an adult in church affairs. I would be travelling with Elder Stevens. His first name was Jeff. On the...
Disclaimer: This story is fictional. The characters are entirely fictitious and are not based on anyone who has or is still living. Any resemblances to any person or persons who are alive or dead are completely coincidental. All characters depicted in this story are above 18 years of age. The following contains some explicit scenes of male/male sex and a...
I live in a community where too many guys spend their Sunday mornings attending Sunday School and their summer evenings at Vacation Bible School instead of going hiking, going water-skiiing, smoking pot by a pool, or grabbing a beer together after work. I tried to mind my own business but when people like me wouldn't come to them, they would instead come to...
I stood there next to the baggage carousel, waiting for Lincoln Douglas's flight from New York. I was nervous and wondering why I'd said I would meet him and put him up for three nights. He was some high muckety-muck preacher with a big church in Harlem, who was down here in the research triangle of North Carolina to watch his grandson play in the Duke-Georg...
Waiting It wasn't the only pub in the area, but it was the only one he remembered. Not that he had been old enough to drink then, of course. But he found it unsatisfactory, filled with grumbling old men in flat caps playing dominoes. The music was muted as if to apologise for its existence — and maybe it should, he thought, when he realised that it was some...
I was seated at the high table, but just barely. Newly minted Bishop McLeod—Andy to me in moments of privacy—was four seats to my right, at the center of the table. I couldn't have achieved eye contact with him, if I'd wanted to. I wondered if Crandel, seated to the bishop's right, the dean of the college, had arranged that seating that on purpose. Crandel w...
I tried to make sense out of the last several days as the plane began its descent across the eastern Atlantic into the peninsular city of Dakar, capital of Senegal. From there it would be several hours of a dusty ride northeast to the village of Sagata, in Louga Province. I tried hard not to think of this as a banishment, and why it might have been banishmen...