jwritesbooks7

Yep, just when you thought you'd seen it all, I come along to screw up your serene little life some more. Some of my stuff, believe it or don't, just doesn't get sent out to publishers. Why? Why don't I publish or attempt to publish everything I write? I really can't say. It happens late at night and by morning the memory of what I did has faded. I'm sorta like a duck, ya know. Every morning, when I awaken, the whole world is new and I have to learn to walk all over again. I just write it and stack it and there it stays until it comes time to clean up my mess, which is not often, and I find it and say, "Jeez, where the hell did this come from?" Most of the time they wend their way into the trash (unless they attract my attention for some reason. Who knows what that might be?) If my interest bone is snagged I'll read a couple of paragraphs and, if they still have my attention, I'll rewrite them, or at least go through and edit whatever I find out of place.

So, I gathered up a few of those reborn tidbits, plus a couple that are reprints from times past and tossed'em together into this collection of fifteen (15) nifty shorts. A stew, slow-cooked to perfection. Well, at least it isn't burnt. A couple of them are really short, like flash fiction pieces (I do a lot of those to keep my writing disciplined and sharp as a straight razor dripping some kind of icky goo from a horror story.). Some are ordinary shorts (Not that the stories are ordinary. Oh no, that can't happen here at the Jacobs' QWERTY -- no, sir -- nothing ordinary here -- certainly not the author.) and a couple are on the, like, longish side, but not too long, ya know. Just right, really.

I'm gonna give you a few excerpts below the story list to help you make up your mind about following up with a purchase. You were planning on buying something, right? The story list includes the genre in which each story fits best. Well, more or less, anyway...

Here are some excerpts...just for fun.

From A RIP IN THE SKY

     Abe Peterson, a kindly gentlemen in his early nineties—still bright of eye and keen of mind—has a hobby. That it pays a little doesn’t take it out of the casual pastime category. He follows the air shows around the country and volunteers his services as a greeter, explainer, and storyteller. He is uniquely qualified for this little task. See, Abe joined what was known as the Army Air Corps back in 1937. He changed uniforms to USAF blue when the new organization was established and stayed with it until they were forced to retire him, much against Abe’s will, in 1982. Since then, he’s been a permanent fixture at the shows. Just now he’s working the show in Wichitaw, Kansas. Come on, let’s join the crowd and see what’s going on.

     “Hi there, folks,” he says. “Welcome to the air show. Hope you have a really good time out here today. My name’s Abe Peterson and this beautiful red bird I’m standing next to is a P51-D.” He pats the fuselage lovingly. “Well, let’s say it’s a very modified and special P51-D. It’s powered by a Packard built Rolls-Royce Merlin, sixty degree, V-twelve engine. The same engine that powered it during the Second World War, except it’s got a heck of a lot more horsepower today than it did back then.”

     He walks with an uncertain, bowlegged gate out to the wingtip and lays a brown spotted hand on it. “The wings on this baby have been clipped so’s the wingspan’s about the same as its length. They shorten the wings to speed up the roll rate—so’s it can duck around the pylons in a flash, like this, you see.” He holds out his palm, snaps it from the horizontal to the vertical and makes a quick left turn with his hand to demonstrate the idea.

     A young boy, powdered in freckles by the millions, his tousled red hair dancing in the hot wind, steps out of the crowd and approaches Abe. “Hey, mister, did you ever fly a plane like this one?” the lad says, his blue eyes flashing reflections of the azure sky above.

     “I...huh? What’s that, son?”

     “Did you ever fly a plane like this?”

     “Did I ever fly a plane like this? You bet I did, but that was a long time ago. Now all they let me do is—”

     “Did you wanna fly when you were a kid?”

     “What? Did I want to fly when I was a kid? Nope, I can’t say that I ever wanted to fly when I was your age. It’s not because I didn’t want to, but rather because I didn’t know that I could not want to.”

From REMEMBERING SEAN O'BRIEN

     “Chief, do you have a few minutes to spare?” Detective Lawrence said through the open door.

     “Sure, Lawrence, come on in and close the door.”

     Detective Lawrence entered Chief Stafford’s office and sat down. Lawrence looked like he was uncomfortable, maybe confused would be a better description. Stafford knew by that look that what Lawrence had on his mind was important to him. He worked with Lawrence since they were both beat cops and knew the man as well as anyone could.

     Lawrence was sent out to the McClure house to investigate her death two days ago and, since then, he had been wandering around with a perplexed look clinging tightly to his face, as if something about the old woman’s death was eating at him. Today his expression was somehow...different.

     “You know, Chief, when I went into that McClure place the other day,” Lawrence began, “I felt like there was, um, something weird about it. Just a feeling I had, you know? Nothing bad, or anything like that, just...from the gut strange. So, this morning I read the Coroner’s report again and called the M.E. He said he couldn’t find any specific cause of death, nothing he could pin down...not even old age. There was no sign of death trauma, either. In his view, she was a perfectly healthy person and it was as if she were sitting there one minute and the next minute whatever it is that animates people, call it soul if you want, got up and walked away—just left its old husk sitting there, you know?

     “Anyway, after reading the Coroner’s report a couple more times to make sure I had it right, I went back out there to see if there was anything we missed. You know how it is with cases like this...you make some quick assumptions and maybe not look as close as you should? Well, I took a better look today and I found this note under one of those wrought iron spiral ladders. You know, the kind with potted plants and stuff on it. It was over in a corner of the dining room. I guess the paper must have blown off the table when I opened the windows to air the place out and I didn’t notice it. It’s the old lady’s writing. I had that checked. I’ve read the note a few times and, frankly, I’m at a loss, Chief. I’d like you to take a look at it to see what you make of it.”

     Lawrence pulled a folded piece of paper out of his coat pocket and handed it to Stafford. The first thing Stafford noticed about it was that the note started out with tight, small, stingy script that progressively opened out into a smooth and elegant hand, the opposite of what he would have expected from a person in their final moments. Stafford began reading.

From THE RIDER

     The staccato crackle of upturned pipes, sounding slightly out of time, thumped out its unique song to me as we flew along the highway east out of Oregon. We had stopped briefly the day before at an old farm, my childhood home, nestled up in the hills leading to the Cascade’s western side. There I paid a visit to the Gunny’s grave. I placed a pebble on the headstone, something I’ve done but twice—a smooth, rounded stone selected with care from the creek of liquid ice that tumbled and churned down from a high mountain source—just to let him know I’d stopped by. A disgruntled beaver, annoyed by my presence, slapped at the water a couple of times, then sank out of sight.

     The Gunny carved that stone on his own—not a bad job, either—and created his own epitaph. It said, simply:

From THE REALITY OF DREAMS

     The lights in MegaTech's School of Psychophysics flickered, died, then stuttered back to life at the instant Dr. Trevor Platt, Dean of Psychophysics, closed the switch and the first stage of the Dream Dimensional Sequencer whirred into life. Frank Teasdale, a student who was about to lose his football scholarship to low grades, lay strapped to a stainless steel table in the center of what little floor space remained in the tiny laboratory. A halo was fixed to his head from which a jumble of wires cascaded to the floor and snaked their way across the nondescript beige tiles to various black boxes scattered around the perimeter of the room. He rolled his eyes in a vain attempt to watch the good doctor as he moved from one panel to another, making the final adjustments that would supposedly send him on a trip into the unknown.

     “There, that should do it...I think, Platt said.   “Are you ready for your trip, Mr. Teasdale?”

     “I guess so...yeah,” Teasdale said. “Hey, Doc Platt, are you sure this thing works? I mean, it ain't gonna hurt me or nothin', right?”

     “No, Mr. Teasdale, of course not. Mm-m-m, that is, not to my knowledge, anyway. You just concentrate on the one point nine you received on the final for this class and how your cooperation in this experiment is going to ensure you an undeserved four point oh. You do want to remain a member of the team, don't you?”

     Sure he did. The only reason he was in school in the first place was to get his foot in the door of the pros. Education was an unfortunate and not too desirable side effect of the whole process.

     “You bet I do, Doc Platt.”

     “Good. Now, Mr. Teasdale, begin counting backward from ten to one. Please, do it slowly.”

     “Okay. Ten...nine...eight...se-even...si-i-ix...fi...fo-o-o-...”

     Platt smiled down at the young hulk on the table and Teasdale could still see him, but it was like looking up from the bottom of a well. Platt was saying something that he had to strain to hear but couldn’t quite understand. Platt’s voice sounded so terribly far away.

     “Ah, Mr. Teasdale, that’s much better. You know, you are so big, so strong—so incredibly stupid. You are the perfect subject for this experiment,” Platt said quietly, as if talking to himself. “All right, Mr. Teasdale,” Platt continued, raising the volume of his voice but maintaining a soothing tone. “You are sleeping now. You are comfortable in the dark and you are experiencing pleasant feelings. Are you able to hear me well, Mr. Teasdale?”

From IN HIS BONES

     Cross-legged, an ancient shaman sat precisely in the center of the western edge of a rectangle of tightly woven reeds, reeds found only at the juncture of the two holy rivers where the coppice stands, chanted the ritual tune handed down to him through the ages and tossed the bones for the third—the final time—as called for in the rite of prognostication.

     He stared with ancient eyes still clear and bright, using only the dancing firelight fingers ricocheting feebly from the cave's walls to read the intricate pattern of small, chalk-white skeletal remains scattered over the ceremonial mat in front of him. What he saw made his frail body tremble more than his advanced years and the cool, damp air demanded, but he knew it was not a time to distort truth—not as he had twisted it a thousand times for the sake of keeping the peace in years past. The clan's survival was at stake.