I first met Miki O’Malley in a creative writing course my junior year of college. She was everything I wasn’t. I was a quiet average looking female student who was not involved in any activities other than getting a degree. Miki was strikingly beautiful. She told me her name meant flower stalk in Japanese. Miki’s father was Irish and her mother Japanese. The...
Nobody likes being frog-marched in public under the best of circumstances, especially a famous screen actress. "Who are you?" demanded Monika, "Why have I been placed under arrest?" "Stop struggling, you little bitch," von Schitt warned her, "and things will go a lot easier for you. It is futile to resist." "Oh, I forgot, this is Nazi Germany where no on...
Until I met Susie I didn't have much of an idea what innuendo meant. For all I knew, it could've been an Italian brand of suppository. I still remember that evening quite clearly. There were about a dozen of us at an informal dinner party hosted by Alan Johnston and Clare Jenkins, celebrating their engagement. We were all in our final year at Edinburgh Univ...
Tom is a character that began as a stand alone story and as it proceeded I wanted to bring it into the SF Bay Area environs and characters from the later chapters of "The Epiphanous Spouses". This is not a story of great wrongs and retribution. There is no bitch burning and from my perspective there is no judgement of right or wrong. These are people who mig...
Chapter One of Six Location: New York City, United States - November 3, 1938. The European Continent had plunged into another war. Just days after British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, came home in triumph from Germany with a signed treaty and spoke his famous "I believe it is peace for our time." It was a worthless promise from Adolf Hitler. It w...
The atrium was beautiful, it was true, but she couldn't appreciate it. The tingles of uncertainty that began in her stomach on the bus ride down from the hills had spread into a full-body tension. A momentary feeling of faintness wafted up to her head and she realized she hadn't been breathing; a place to sit down for a moment would be a wise choice. The res...
Gisela was shaking, but even as I considered offering her some comfort, I found my own body numb, and unwilling to move. Think, I told myself. We have Casey. The otherworlder. Gisela, and some of the Kobalt. It's fine, right? I mean, that still gave access to tons of information. As I pulled myself to my feet, Cameron came over to me. "What happene...
Author's note: This is part of a long story. No part of it is intended to stand alone. I suggest starting with Part 1 In revising the whole story, I've corrected errors, but also filled in a lot. This has inevitably made it all even longer. My apologies to anyone who read it in the original form and now finds it changed for the worse. If you're looking m...
It had been a hell of trip sailing from Larochelle to Casablanca to the island of Tenerife in about week of shifting November winds. When endured ten days of storm the captain threw his hands in the air and said "we're dead" and headed below deck and only peeked out the hatch a few times per day to check on me and the large ships that floated about the rugge...
Chapter 29 Picking up where I left off... I enrolled at the University of Cincinnati, and walked on to the football team, made it, and became the fourth string quarterback. I was second string before graduating, but nothing ever came of what might have been a noteworthy career. I left baseball behind for good. While not a really well-known school, the U...