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Fiction
Novels
The Program (2025)
This sci-fi novella takes place shortly after it is proven that our universe exists within a computer program whose Creator has been absent for all of human history.
Spirits (2023)
The other stories listed here are PG-13, but this newsroom mystery/romance set in 1994 has some R-rated scenes, so consider yourself warned.
Voices of the Ruah (2010-2020)
Pre-teen siblings from our era are sent into a future when Earth has lost half of its water, and dolphins have evolved back to land. Now, the "ruah" look like horses with elaborate hollow horns through which they exhale in a musical language that sounds like oboes and bassoons.
The Boardwalk Bomber (1990s)
An ex-cop in the witness protection program is trying to keep a low profile in a sleepy resort town, but a series of explosions in the area prompt him to quietly investigate.
Short stories
These were all written in the 1990s when I lived in Dayton and I was part of a fiction writers group.
While We Waited for Jesus
Although I changed most of the details, this story reflects much of my experience going to a fire & brimstone church growing up.
Time and the Ancient Retailer
At a restaurant, a dapper old man with a pencil mustache sat down at my party's booth and began reminiscing about his long-ago business career. We realized he had dementia and let him talk. I was later reminded of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" because the central character has been cursed to tell and retell his story to strangers passing by.
Trouble at the Hotel Grande
At a Midwestern amusement park, college students working a summer job act out the same scenes of a gangster story in a life-sized dollhouse as park visitors walk by.
Prometheus Downsized
In this modern retelling of "Prometheus Unbound," an employee bound to his desk can only see the world through the window of a high office tower.
Excerpts
The first thing that crossed my mind when the bomb went off -- blasting a hole through the north wall of my bookstore -- was that maybe the federal witness protection program isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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Hearing him speak, I was suddenly aware of how fiendishly on target Angela's frequent mimicry had been. I could have laughed out loud, but my instinct for self-preservation reminded me that any sign of disrespect would result in laser-like glares from father and daughter simultaneously -- and that after such a crossfire, it would probably take dental records to identify my remains.
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Grandma was not fast. She was old and stout and had to push herself off the couch with a grunt. From his vantage point on the dining room floor, Johnny saw her mostly from the knees down -- the frayed hem of her house dress, her swollen ankles, the yardstick nearly touching the floor as she carried it at one side like a gunslinger on TV. He tried to get away from her, but there was nowhere to go. From behind, she slapped the yardstick against his bare legs as he ran.
Afterwards, as he sobbed in a corner begging her forgiveness, Grandma would trudge wearily back into the living room and slump back down onto the couch. "Mercy," she would sigh and light another Chesterfield.
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The garage itself was rented by Mrs. Marlowe to a man who came around on weekends to work on an old sports car. He played baseball games on a transistor radio and occasionally made comments back to the radio, suggesting the next play -- a bunt or stolen base attempt. Johnny liked to pretend it was his father working on the car, and that soon he would take a break and help Johnny learn to hit a ball.
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Although he'd seen the photo of his mother and grandmother many times, Johnny noticed a detail he had not paid much attention to before. The little girl was gripping her mother's dress. Grandma had her purse over one arm, but had both hands free. She could have been holding her daughter's hand, but she was not. In the little girl's eyes, he could somehow see that this was normal. She held onto her mother's skirts because her mother would not hold her hand.
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Jack managed to hide his panic as he took a sip of his iced tea, but the people in his head were fainting and jumping out of windows. "How did you find that stuff?" he asked casually.
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In the days and nights of my 13th summer, I could still accept the notion that God had a mysterious and unfathomable plan -- like a secret wartime document -- which would someday be revealed to us when we all met in Heaven. I imagined Him unrolling it on a table like a big map, with all of us crowding around in our new white robes, trying to get a glimpse of what The Plan had been.
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Mary Beth would have us hold hands as she said grace. I always managed to sit next to her, and I was half-convinced she squeezed my hand with some secret, special feeling. Through false prayer, I watched her as she tilted her head into the sun and spoke to God. The sun burned on my skin, and glared harshly off of my tools as they lay half hidden in the grass, and as I held her hand, I gazed secretly through the fiery gates of my eyelashes up the length of her arm, even to the pure white hollow of her underarm, exposed to me alone.
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Butch had an impressive way of snapping his fingers and pointing in a single quick-draw motion, and when he did so, it was invariably at Duane, who was instantly stricken dumb by his father's accusing finger, and thereby notified of the inescapable doom that awaited him after church.
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Fitz could remember a time when the world wasn't so messed up. Bad things had happened, of course -- the Second American Civil War, the nuclear terrorist attacks in Europe, the collapse of the ocean currents -- but at least back then, people still thought their lives were real.
And then the Program was discovered.
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Eliza was a fairy. That was just how she'd been born. There were other fairies scattered around the kingdom, but no fairy towns or fairy families. Fairy babies weren't born to fairy mothers, but to human mothers, and no one knew why. They just happened.
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It was a city -- a metropolis carved into the steep canyon walls, rising up on both sides of the river, like castle towers taller than skyscrapers. Windows, ornate balconies, and elegant stairways had been chiseled directly into the mountain, rising row upon row as far as Laura could see.
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"Now, back in your land, you probably have your own ways of deciding whether a boy is nice looking, and I'm sure those are good ways. But for us, well, it's the horns -- and the voice, but those go together, of course. Some ruah are okay-looking but rather plain, just the same set of horns everybody else seems to have; a little different from each other, but not in any special way. And then you have the gifted ones who inherit from their daddies the most elaborate pipes and the deepest tones. Thurdom was like that. Stronger than all the other boys. Faster. Louder. Have you seen the duels? No, of course you haven't; you've only just arrived. Well, the boys, mostly when they are young, they pretend to fight each other. No one gets hurt; it's just ceremony. They knock those big horns together, and they blow their deepest notes, and it is something to see."
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"Verdu has an odd number of pipes, which would be notable enough by itself, but he has 15 of them. Most ordinary ruah males have eight or perhaps ten pipes. Twelve is considered quite handsome, and a 13-piper -- like my Thurdom -- is most extraordinary. But 15 is what Cetaceous is said to have had -- and so it is supposed that his heir would as well. Verdu was quite young when his horns started to come in, and right away it was clear he was special because he started with five instead of the usual four. When the five grew into ten and then into 15 while he was still so young, well, people were telling him he was The Caller before he fully understood what that meant."
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Sharon came on stage, though her character wasn't supposed to be in this scene. "I knew you was trouble, Rocky," she said, pointing the big tommy gun at me, and I wondered if she'd remembered to turn it on. The other prop guns shot caps, but the tommy had a battery-powered rat-a-tat sound, and it only worked if the power switch was on. I wasn't sure if I wanted to shoot Sharon or not, but I figured I might have an opportunity if she had to fumble with the switch. She pulled the trigger, and it was turned on all right. The sound of machine gun fire rang through the house, and I had no choice but to fall backwards and wiggle around on the floor like Sonny Corleone while she drilled me with about a hundred rounds.
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Jesus was even more explicit in his condemnation of the rich, saying "I tell you it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25). Do you also contact people who are wealthy to tell them you are worried about their eternal souls?
You don't? Well, that is rather concerning because it strongly suggests you are a hypocrite, and Jesus speaks at some length about what He thinks about hypocrites (Mathew 23). So please accept my sincere expression of concern about your salvation. You really should be more careful about how you quote your Lord Jesus because ... I hear he has quite a temper.
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"I would decide in the morning that I was NOT going to go to the store and buy liquor that day, but my disease always talked me into it. I started imagining it as my identical twin, except he was a quadriplegic. He had no power of his own except his voice, and he would sit there in his wheelchair and tell me to go to the liquor store for him. And I would. And then he would tell me to make him a drink. And I would. And he would tell me to hold the glass to his lips -- because he did not have the power to do that himself -- and I would."
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"North America was so lush and verdant, so even though there were occasional droughts and floods, for the most part, people felt that Nature would continue to provide for them. But Judeo-Christian theology emerged in a much drier region of the world where it was probably a lot tougher to survive. So when they wrote their origin story, they had to explain why life is hard. So, we were kicked out of our Garden, but the Native Americans got to stay in theirs."
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"And here we are, these little hominids, and we are amazed by the fact that we have consciousness, but we're not sure how that happened. We just woke up with it one day. And our consciousness is so compelling to us that we can't quite believe it's just a function of our physical brains. The Ancient Greeks got a good look at brains because they hacked at each other with swords. But when they saw blobby gray brains inside each other's skulls, it didn't occur to them that THAT was where thinking and loving took place. They thought it was in their hearts because they felt emotions in their chests."
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"And you think the Earth is sentient."
"I don't know if it is or not. I'm saying if we're going to have religion at all, if we're going to decide to worship anything at all, it should start with the Earth. And if people are capable of believing in the God of the Bible, then it is no great leap to imagine instead that the Earth has gradually become conscious and self-aware. And this can be rationalized at least as well as the God of the Bible. Maybe it has to do with all of the fields and forces associated with being a celestial body, or maybe -- I think probably -- the Earth's consciousness would have emerged because of all the life energy that now covers its surface."
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"Once in a while, news would break right on deadline, and they'd hold the presses to cover the story. I remember one time it was a plane crash, and we ended up working until about three. By then, the bars were closed, so Millie invited us to her house and we sat on her porch the rest of the night drinking beer and talking quietly so as not to disturb her neighbors. And then it was starting to get light, and we saw the paper boy coming down the block on his bike, tossing a paper on every sidewalk. When he got to her house, Millie stood up and started applauding and cheering him, and the rest of us joined her, giving him a standing ovation. That poor kid probably thought we were making fun of him, but we were totally sincere."
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The other women on the softball team included Bea and Dee, a forty-something, leather-wearing dyke couple. They had genteel-sounding Southern accents, but cussed like sailors and seemed able to answer any question with a quaint idiom into which they had inserted swear words. For example, if a movie or meal turned out less impressive than expected, one of them would say, "Well, that didn't blow my fuckin' dress up." I giggled the first time I heard that one because I was pretty sure neither of them had worn a dress since sixth grade. Bea read my mind and added, "That being a fuckin' metaphor."
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From my office window on the 19th floor, I can look out at the world. Well, a little part of it anyway. My view never changes. The airport is on the right, so I can watch the planes circling like birds of prey waiting for their turn to land. On the left, it is mostly trees, but among them I can see a dilapidated yellow house, and I imagine myself sitting on the porch or maybe working in the garden.
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"Mind you, we never tried to sell people what they couldn't afford. We knew our customers like family. 'Mrs. Gibson, nice to see you. How are the twins? Hello children! Time for new shoes for the school year, hey? Now, Mrs. Gibson, we have a wonderful sale going on in boys' shoes -- just the thing . . ."
And he goes on like that for a bizarrely long time, acting out this long-ago transaction. He's so caught up in it, I realize I could probably slip right past him and make my getaway, but it's so weird I'm rooted to the floor until he finally finds some shoes for the twins that poor old Mrs. Gibson can afford.
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