And last but not least... A selection of works from the decade I have been most prolific in - at least in novels. Most of these pieces are from a period of creativity between 2018 and 2019.
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The 2010's and beyond...
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Quite lengthy... sorry (not)
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AFTER THE FALLING
Floridian Peninsula,
Approximately 1,000 A.D…
A drought had pervaded the land that year. The normal storms of summer had been sparse. As the autumn weather began to cool, the Wilaka Chiefdom began sending out parties to the south and southwest to explore and hunt lands normally inaccessible due to standing swamps.
One such party ventured further than any other known in Timucua history. The group of ten dark haired, brown skinned hunter/warriors entered barely known swampland two days walk from their home village. They camped upon a sandy ridge overlooking dry stands of cypress trees.
The men would take turns standing watch over their fire, guarding against prowling yaraha (panthers) and loose embers that might set the dry rushes ablaze. During the final watch, just as the dawn sky was breaking, the final night watchman stood to observe the glorious colors of orange, red and purple highlighting distant clouds. He smiled and gave thanks to the Great Spirit for both the sight and an uneventful night.
A bright glare caught his eye to the left of the rising sun. The man squinted into the building light trying to understand why there would be a second sun in the eastern sky. Just as he turned to shout to his still sleeping companions, a loud, sharp boom shattered the morning calm sending birds scattering into flight with startled cries.
The other nine members of the party sat bolt upright and automatically turned toward the gathering light. The group scrambled naked to their feet and watched as a brilliant glowing ball of fire with a flowing orange-white trail of cloud began descending toward them. The men began to grow fearful, several squatting and covering their heads, all beginning to chant prayers to the Great Spirit.
The second sun roared overhead and quickly disappeared past the innumerous oaks and cypress trees. The men felt an intense heat wash over them and the earth tremble with its passage. Within moments, the ground shook even more violently as the glow of the mysterious object faded out through the trees to the southwest.
Soon, the rumbling faded away though the air was still very warm. The Timucua party stood awestruck, murmuring to one another. After several minutes of increasingly tense discussion, they collectively agreed to seek out the source of the disturbing visitation.
The men dressed into their short, deer hide loin britches and buried their small fire in sand. With their bows in hand, the party began to trek toward the west-southwest into the presently dry swampland. Prevailing winds of the season carried any smoke away in the same direction making tracking difficult.
Even so, after several hours of arduous hiking, dodging poisonous iyola (snakes) and fording many shallow, muddy sloughs infested with great toothed lizards, the group of explorers began to encounter large felled trees all laying in the direction of their trek. After a time, the number of fallen timber increased until they spread out to either side of an enormous trough of barren ground, the air filled with smoke. The momentarily dry area was dotted with broken stumps and shattered logs, some of these still smoldering.
All around them, small isolated fires burned fiercely. These were prevented from spreading by large patches of wet bog and open spring-fed ponds. The air was far warmer than even the time of year would be normally before the noonday sun.
With both expected nervousness and human curiosity, the Timucua party pressed onward into the new, narrow valley carved as straight as a towering pine. It was bordered by a pair of whitish-brown ridges of gouged up soil rising twice the height of the men. Scattered along the top of these embankments were great trees torn from the ground and laying at drunken angles, their wide roots reaching forlornly for the vivid blue sky.
The group took note of the gradually increasing height of the borders as they trudged through the thick muck that was seeping back up through the torn soil. Having no means of distance measurement, the men watched the progress of the sun as the trough seemed to go on and on. The heat persisted, and they all were sweating profusely.
At last, one of the party grunted and pointed toward a darkish lump slowly emerging some distance ahead. The party continued until they were close enough to determine that the hazy, smoking hill spanned the newly carved valley (some 85 yards across) and was colored like dull-silver cuyu (fish) scales. The men drew to a halt and marveled at the strange site before them.
There was the mouth of an enormous cave, well, five caves, each with a near perfectly round entrance. Three were stacked upon one another in a straight line, with the middle cave flanked by a single cave to the left and right. Drifting, acrid smoke partly obscured the entrances.
The Timucua stood and stared at the site and then turned inward to confer with each other. The oldest of the group was naturally the de facto leader of the party. He decided to explore further and ordered six of the men to remain there. Two pairs would each climb opposite sides of the trench and circumnavigate the silvery hill.
The Leader slowly crawled up the very warm earth with his companion below and to one side. Soon, both had vanished over the top leaving the six below to quiver slightly in fear as groaning and creaking sounds issued from the odd cluster of caves. Occasionally, intermittent hissing, like water poured over a fire, could also be heard.
Upon reaching the greatly disturbed earth atop the long embankment, the Leader observed that the closest caves had the appearance of the most massive flared-trunk, hollowed cypress trees he could ever have imagined. They were colored a dull silver, darkened in patches, and lined with strange perfectly rounded branches that converged in places and changed direction from horizontal to vertical. It all was confusing to behold.
The Leader let his gaze move on to discover that the smoothly curving hill rose higher than any of the trees outside of the trench. It also seemed to be strangely long and relatively narrow, quite unlike any natural hill he had ever seen. Cautious of the very soft and shifting dirt, and the heat radiating off the hill’s surface, the brave warrior approached.
The Leader could not hold his hand to the strange rock-hard material for more than a few seconds. Even so, his right palm and fingers felt like they were about to blister. The skin was an angry red.
He turned toward his companion who shrugged his shoulders and pointed with his bow indicating a direction along the hill’s flank. The Leader raised a brow and gave an ironic half-smirk before turning away to carefully make his barefoot way along the upturned soil, trees and roots. The second warrior’s face was grim as he silently followed.
As they slowly clambered along, both men remarked that the odd hill was indented in various locations with straight lines, as if with manmade caves or hollows. None were low enough for them to reach. The hill’s sides were too smooth to climb and remained quite warm.
The pair also noticed that the dull silvery rock seemed scorched in places, long streaks of blackened coloration as if rubbed with pieces of charcoal. Before too long, they had traversed roughly half the distance to the far end of the hill. Without warning, a portion of the silvery rockface they were moving beside withdrew into the hillside with a loud hiss.
The Leader and companion jumped backward and then ran and leapt over a huge log an easy stone’s toss away. From behind cover, they warily observed the new, square cave entrance that appeared at knee height. It was illuminated from within with a bright, steady glow like the sun and not the flickering of firelight.
A loud, unfamiliar sound issued, and the cave seemed to turn inside out as it stretched outward for several yards before angling down and pressing its end into the soft dirt. The two warriors had never seen such a thing before and grew a little frightened. They slowly crawled along behind the fallen tree until they could see roughly into the cave mouth where they observed a dark man-like shape appear from within the bright light.
The creature strode forward and stood at the threshold. The Timucua were squinting into the glare and held their breaths as they watched a tall individual with reddish-orange skin and black hair gaze out over the terrain. It was dressed in strange, black and gray coverings and the pair wondered what kind of animal had provided such skin. Even its feet seemed wrapped in a hard, shaped substance – like fired pottery.
The stranger retrieved an object from a pouch at its waist and held it almost at arm’s length. It swept the arm back and forth before aiming directly at the two warriors’ position behind the huge log. Their deep brown eyes grew large in surprise and they readied their bows, drawing egret feather fletched arrows from soft doe-skin quivers.
The individual suddenly spoke, the voice marking it as male, but neither Timucua could understand the speech. He repeated the same sounds several more times as he placed the object back in the pouch and touched another smaller article at the waist. A glimmer, like sunlight filtering through a waterfall, surrounded the stranger and quickly vanished.
The companion began chattering in their native tongue and the Leader responded in short tones. Both nodded to each other and rose from behind the log, bows drawn and ready. The strange man raised a hand in greeting, but the nervous companion Timucua let loose his arrow.
Both warriors were startled as the missile’s gray chert tip simply bounced off the man with an odd spark of light. The stranger then called out again using the same unknown words. This time, the Leader and his companion chatted to each other before both shot arrows at the reddish-orange man, each deflected from its target by the same spark of light as from a struck flint.
This action caused the oddly garbed man to raise both hands into the air, speaking out in the strange tongue. The Timucua began a lengthy conversation with each other. They witnessed the stranger touch another object at his waist opposite the pouch and aimed fresh arrows at him, rapidly speaking in their dialect toward the individual.
Before the warriors could release their missiles again, the stranger began speaking haltingly in their own language. They were startled but paused to listen. The odd man’s empty hands were once more up in the air.
“Greetings… brave… warriors. I… am… Tyvor. I… come… in… peace…”
– Excerpted from the unpublished short story: Secret of the Iron Castle, inspired from "The Falling" of 1992.
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Composed: May 2018
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Again, with the length. (Insert grin here)
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THE IMPACT
Based upon a true event
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Summer of 1996…
“I think we missed the exit,” the husband informed his spouse while staring out the passenger window.
“Oh,” remarked the surprised wife who was behind the wheel. “Can we take the next one? We really need gas.”
“I think so,” he replied and glanced into the rear seat of the white ’91 Dodge Dynasty. The young girl in the right-side child seat was happily watching the world pass by her window at seventy-miles-per-hour. The even younger little boy was asleep, snugged securely in his infant seat.
The husband turned back around and caught sight of the sign indicating the next exit off of Interstate 75. “It says there’s an Exxon station at the next one. We can stop there.”
The wife simply nodded and paid attention to the relatively thin late-afternoon traffic along the more rural stretch of highway. The offramp appeared and soon the mid-sized sedan rolled to a stop at an intersection with another road. The single advertised gas station was directly across from the stop sign but appeared deserted, the fueling islands even missing their pumps.
“Um, okay,” the husband muttered, both perplexed and uncertain. “What’s the gas gauge say?” He glanced behind them to see if anyone was approaching from the exit. Not a soul was in sight.
“It is close to a sixteenth of a tank,” she replied worriedly. “I don’t know how far it is to another exit.” The wife then looked up and down the road. There was not a single vehicle to be seen in either direction.
“Well, we can’t sit here,” he tried to reply lightly. “I don’t think that station is going to magically open for business. Turn left and we’ll get back on the highway.”
“You think we have enough gas to reach the next exit?” she asked, the concern still in her voice.
“Hmm, if not we’ll find out,” he told her simply. “Though I now wish we had stopped back in Ocala after all.”
The family had been returning from a surgical follow-up appointment at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Their son had been born with a number of genetic issues and disabilities and had undergone his first corrective procedure only a month before. It was a trip of just over two hours one way, mostly via I-75.
Both glanced back and forth to see if the way was clear. The only vehicle in sight was an eighteen wheeler seemingly at some distance to the right but was coming at speed. The husband remained silent as the wife hesitated, assumedly waiting for the soul vehicle to pass.
With a final look to the left, the wife suddenly pulled out, right in the path of the big truck! The husband shouted her name and she gunned the 3.3 liter V-6 engine, the tires squalling on the aged pavement. Both heard the terrifying combined sounds of a double-note airhorn and screech of eighteen tires as the big rig locked up its breaks.
The wife shrieked, hands upon the steering wheel in a death grip while the husband reached out brace himself for the inevitable impact! The couple felt a severe jolt yet, surprisingly, the Dodge didn’t spin out in a cloud of debris but simply came to rest in the abandoned station’s entry drive still facing the same direction they had been turning. The husband reached over and shoved the column gear shift lever into “Park” and turned to check on the children.
The little boy was now wide awake and crying as was his sister. He spun back around and looked out the windshield at the sight of the eighteen wheeler, now fully stopped on the shoulder of the road nearly a hundred feet away just before the Southbound entrance ramp. The driver was jogging toward them.
The husband opened the passenger door and got out, his wife finally managing to let go of the wheel and follow. The driver had reached them and was asking if everyone one was alright. “I could swear that I hit you guys,” he told them in an astonished tone, clearly shaken.
“I think we are okay,” the husband replied in a quivering voice. He looked back at the rear of the car fully expecting the sight of crumpled metal and shattered plastic. His eyes nearly bugged out when he saw no damage whatsoever, not even cracked glass or scraped paint.
The shaking wife had opened the left rear door and was attempting to comfort the crying eighteen-month-old boy. His sister was wailing also. She pulled him from his car seat to hold him as the husband and truck driver examined the rear of the apparently undamaged car.
“I don’t understand it,” the dark haired, middle-aged man was saying to the husband. “When you guys pulled out in front of me I locked up my brakes but was certain I was going to hit you. It’s got to be a miracle.”
“Yes,” the husband murmured, still a little in shock. “I don’t understand it either. We heard your horn and tires and felt an impact.” He had squatted down trying to find any damage to the rear of the Dodge.
The husband looked back up at the truck driver, face filled with awe. “We both felt a heavy jolt. Our car was shoved to the side and skidded into the driveway of this old station.”
“That’s how it happened,” the wife piped up in her reedy voice. “Only God could have done that.”
The husband stood up and made his way to the driver’s door and snatched the keys from the ignition. He proceeded to open the trunk and all three adults leaned over to look inside. The only item of any significance in size or weight was a large collapsible stroller that didn’t even weigh ten pounds, certainly not enough to have accounted for the severe shift the occupants had felt.
The husband glanced first at the truck driver and then at his wife. “It had to be an angle,” he muttered. “It was like a guardian angel swooped down and shoved our car out of the way just in time.”
“It sure seems to be a miracle of God,” the driver agreed. “I’m glad you are all okay. Sorry, but I really have to get going.” The driver shook hands with the husband, nodded to the wife, who was still cradling the boy, and walked back in the direction of his truck.
The husband, still feeling a little in awe, got his daughter out of her seat and hugged her tight. She had stopped crying but clearly was confused about what all had happened. He held her until the big rig had turned onto the entry ramp to the interstate highway and vanished from their sight.
“We need to get going ourselves,” the husband called over to his wife. “We still have to find a station before dark.”
“We should maybe stop for dinner too,” the wife replied. “Since we’re going to be later getting home now.” Both secured the children in their seats and then switched positions before getting back into the car.
From behind the wheel, the husband looked over at his wife and gave a small smile. She returned the expression and they both reached out and held hands, nodding to one another in understanding. They took a moment to pray together, thanking God for the miracle that had not only kept their family safe from harm but even prevented their vehicle from sustaining any damage.
After a few minutes, the very grateful couple started their car, the husband taking extra care before pulling out onto the road and continued their journey toward home.
– This narrative describes a real event that occurred to the author and his family.
Originally composed: September 4, 2018
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BEAST IN THE SKY
A father and his young son walked slowly down a dusty unpaved road. Tall yet thin leafless trees bordered their path, leaning in slightly over the pair. The boy gripped his father’s hand with a slowly increasing fear.
The youngster suddenly halted, tugged his hand free and pointed, crying out, “There’s a great beast of fire flying just ahead of us! It hides behind the trees and stalks us.” He pulled upon his father’s long sleeve in earnest fear. “What shall we do? It may soon leap out and devour us in orange flames!”
With a quiet chuckle, the father replied calmly, “No, my son.” He then smiled in gentle understanding as he explained, “That beast is only the setting sun, and it shall soon pass away into the night.”
As the father retook his son’s hand, he leaned in close and lowered his deep voice to a near whisper. “It is the beast of cold white fire rising behind us that you should fear.”
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Originally composed: March 28, 2019
Slightly modified: November 2023
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THE TRACK
Based on a reoccurring dream from my childhood
I open my eyes, wondering why it is daytime. I had only just gone to sleep, hadn’t I? I look down at my little bare feet to realize I’m standing on warm pavement.
A deep droning sound comes to my ears and I look up in amazement to see an enormous grandstand filled with people. Thousands (maybe millions?) of spectators stare down over me with a buzzing expectation. The quick bursts of flashbulbs wink all across the stands, which seem to stretch on forever.
The endless crowd suddenly roars with applause and I can feel it through the pavement beneath my tiny feet. Wait… I sense the vibration increasing, rising up through my pajama-clad legs. The sensation is swelling faster than the roar from the stands and I feel a sudden sense of fear.
A new sound, deeper than the cheering crowds, begins to fill my ears and I spin around in great terror. Coming right for me is a group of colorful, grand prix style racecars! My tiny ears are filled with the roar of the spectators, the drone of tires on the track, and the shrill whine of numerous high-speed engines!
I want to turn and run for my life but am rooted to the spot. My legs are locked in place, my bare feet seemingly glued to the pavement. I try to scream but nothing issues from my throat.
I don’t know if the crowd is cheering for the racecars or for the fact that they are bearing down on me at a now terrific speed. Can any of the drivers even see me? I can feel the expression of terror twisting my face into a gruesome mask as the first of the cars reaches me!
As I raise my little arms in that instinctive yet always futile attempt to ward off danger, the deafening thunder of the racecars battering my senses… I jolt awake.
Sitting up in bed, I shiver, tears streaming down my face. Skinny arms wrapped around my equally skinny seven-year-old body, I continue to shake with the echoing thunder of the dream.
I am soon comforted by the sound of soft snoring from my older brother sleeping blissfully upon the upper bunk. Our tiny bedroom is dark and quiet and I lay back down and pull up the covers. I tell myself over and over that it was only a dream, only a nightmare, and settle down enough to drift back off to sleep… and the dream begins again.
– Adapted from a five day reoccurring dream
Original dream: mid-summer, 1975
Originally composed: April 12, 2019
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THE DESPAIRING VISITOR
I had journeyed far across the stars,
To visit an old friend of mine upon Mars.
When I arrived what I found instead,
Was that the entire planet was now stone dead.
I floated in orbit crying in despair,
For a world now bereft of life and devoid of air.
Casting about for a source of such a shock,
I noticed the sparkling blue-green third rock.
Could the Martians possibly have escaped to there,
Though I know it's natives often don't like to share?
I cruised on over to quietly investigate,
But all I found was a bunch of rude apes.
No tall, elegant Martians were to be seen,
And of these hairy humans I was not very keen.
So I took flight to the stars once more,
And into deep space toward home I did soar.
Back across the universe so full of sadness,
I returned home to find renewed gladness.
With my offspring hovering around my feet,
I decided to recline in my favorite seat.
Nagged by my regret to let my friend go,
My soul refused and I let my memories flow.
My children all absorbed my tale of friendship,
And they all uttered a gasp of awe with quivering lip.
Originally composed: April 24, 2019
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LEGEND OF THE BLACKHAWK
If spacefarers can believe all the bar side talk,
There’s an old story of a ship called the Blackhawk.
Once a famous defender of the planet Earth,
This vessel and her crew lost the world of their birth.
The Mackmarion conquered mankind’s home,
Leaving humanity in space for years to roam.
As a fleet of survivors escaped the invaders so unkind,
The solitary spaceship Blackhawk was left behind.
Though unable to catch up with the refugee fleet,
Captain Timothy Jackson swore to never concede defeat.
He and his crew began a one ship campaign,
To destroy all of their enemies so profane.
They began as a force of hate and reckoning,
Before one day heeding a desperate beckoning.
They saved a small world with sleight of hand,
And frightened the Mackmarion away from the land.
Beyond the Mackmarion they eventually took the fight,
To battle against any injustice within their sight.
Even outnumbered, Blackhawk kept enemies at bay,
Her captain and crew somehow always winning the day.
Then came the day that many good worlds feared,
These heroes of the downtrodden simply disappeared.
No one truly knows what was the eventual fate,
Of these brave fighters of evil, greed, and hate.
Many tales exist of where these fabled champions went,
Far across the stars seeking evil that’s never truly spent.
In every far-flung spaceport cantina and orbital dock,
Lives on the legend of the spaceship Blackhawk.
– Based on characters and concepts originally created by Charles Johnson.
Composed: May 11, 2019
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