Triadic Tales - Recovery - Short Story (Part One)

Triadic Tales - Recovery - Short Story (Part One)
I can see her. I can tell she is confused about me.  Everyone is I guess. I wouldn't care what she was. Religion kicks in and out. A chick is a chick. She's a good one.
I learned two things no one knows but me on the way here. How pissed off I was about my brother. And that martyrdom  is bullshit. If I ever have lots of chicks, it will be right here. It won't happen now. But if I did, it would not be in paradise. Paradise is just a big confusion now. 
I am getting stronger. They don't know how much stronger I am getting. The doctors do not communicate. They poke and dress and say does it hurt. I say nothing. It doesn't hurt as much as thinking about things.
I could end everything right here. I could. They do not know how strong I am. They have no idea how flexible. Shit. Flexible is right. 
I am smarter now than we were. We thought we were smart. Then not so much. It all tumbled to nothing.
But I won my freedom. Now I see things they will never see.
Maybe she'll come back. I have to be careful. I cannot show feeling. Desire. I cannot do anything. Not good.
Lying in the dark yesterday I thought I would die. But it was obvious I wanted to give myself whatever life I could get.
We never named what we did. We did not think about it much. Doing it was the whole thing. 
I knew when I gunned the car what I really believed. I believed I was doing justice. My justice. The justice he deserved. And I knew it would not help me.  But it was worth it.
There she is. I can see without looking. She is coming closer. What's this? She reaches and touches my face. Gentle. Soft. I pretend not to notice. It takes than a second.
This may be the only good thing I will remember.  I will recover. I will never be freer than I was last night.    
I wish I still believed in Paradise.
Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store


Buffer

Triadic Tales - The Hand - Short Story (Part One)

Triadic Tales - The Hand - Short Story (Part One)
The hand we are dealt is the phrase that ran through the mind of Oswald Jagger as he was seeking to recover from a messy divorce and reflecting on his apparent inability to alter a future that seemed doomed to the forces of inexorable gravity. He knew that bread crumbs could be lifted with ease suspended from his finger. But he felt that people like himself would surely fall, in similar circumstances.
He had spent the third night in a row in the reclined front seat of his used Mercedes 240D in front of a truck stop heading West on 1-40. These sleeps were among his few real pleasures. They were deep and without anxiety. He felt that by making himself visible in the most trafficked area of a truck stop, right there by the lighted entrance, he was not likely to be disturbed.  For whatever reason, this had proved accurate.
Over morning coffee, Oswald wrote in his open spiral notebook these words.
"The hand we are dealt is a most destructive concept. I shall die avoiding entrapment by the notion that every scintilla of my existence goes back to some set of cards that determined my fate with exactitude and even vengeful intent the day I was born."
He looked down at the words "vengeful intent" and saw he was allowing himself a measure of anger about the hand whose power he was denying.  So he added:
"Of course, I deny categorically that, even if true, the callous attitude of my parents was more than a minor influence."  
Oswald was suddenly jolted by a poke to his rear shoulder by a man who stood so tall that Oswald had to crane, on turning, merely to see the stubble on this man's jowly chin. 
"What," he said.
"That your Mercedes?" a voice higher than seemed to fit the huge frame of the man demanded.
"Yes," Oswald replied.
The man sat down next to Oswald and turned to him. "How much do those cost?" he asked.
"I buy them second hand . They cost a lot less than a new car. And I can usually get good money when I sell them."
"Figures," the man said. "I'm Bill. I drive trucks."      Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store 


Buffer

Triadic Tales - Pearl - Short Story (Part One)

Triadic Tales - Pearl - Short Story (Part One)
Pearl was born in Tea, South Dakota,  in 1992 and by 1996 had a growing desire to leave. 
Pearl's mother Ann and Father George were recondite Methodists. They followed their Pastor, Solomon Jones. His taste ran in the direction of a namesake in Florida. Suffice to say there was nothing on the Right Wing circuit that did not get "positive treatment". 
Hatred of the President, allegiance to guns, discipline and the Founders, never named, made up the core of the good Reverend's preaching.
Pearl's rejection of  home and state was both definite and unemotional. As an only child a mile from anyone but her parents in the flatness of that land, she kept to herself. 
George was gone a lot repairimg power lines. Ann busied herself with romance novels which she read and then reread in exact order. While reading, she ate pop tarts. By the year 2000, Ann attained a bulk that, TV would come to say, would multiply into losses of many billions in productivity and health costs. 
Pearl did her school work and watched TV. She bided her time. She watched everything about New York. Mad Men  was big.  There was a plethora of sharp women on that show. Pearl practiced their moves. She was a good imitator. The men on the show did not appeal to her, including the head man Don Draper. She found his hair too shiny. She venerated the girl who came from nothing and surmounted various obstacles to get ahead.
Pearl's parents did not burden her with right wing bile.  Nor was she abused. Nor did she run with bad kids. Kids in school seemed just as as spectral to her as George and Ann were.
Perfunctory seemed mutual all around.
 Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store


Buffer

Triadic Tales - Caught - Short Story (Part One)

Triadic Tales - Caught - Short Story (Part One)
Sterling stood upon the edge of the very last flat wall surrounding the top of the Empire State Building, thinking the wind might blow him off before he had a chance to decide whether to jump. It was all a dream. A pertinent dream. Sterling worked in that building in a small ad agency. Lucky to have the job at all. But feeling as caught as if  he had been one of the yo-yos in Mad Men, had there been a Mad Men then.
He turned in the bed and felt Christy there. She was three chapters away from completing her graduate thesis in philosophy. Sterling fancied Christy's education, having himself taken the standard advice to do science and math. He got into the ad agency by sheer luck. A classmate worked there and was sympathetic to Sterling's lack of interest in the professions for which he was qualified. It helped that some of the firm's business came from the precincts of math and science. Sadly, Sterling was no happier with this choice than with most others he had made. Save Christy.
He lay in bed thinking of her. He pictured Christy. slim, willowy, intelligent, in some bucolic college town teaching pragmatism and logic. While he held down a dismal job in the college's development office. The words fucked up rolled across the screen of Sterling's addled mind.
Christy did end up in in a college town,  husband-less. The unfortunate Sterling was simultaneously subsisting in an eighty dollar a week  motel in Boulder City, Nevada, two thousand miles from the best decision he ever walked away from.
Sterling's reaction to his descent was hardly encouraging. He had lately taken walks in the desert and found himself in situations from which extrication was almost impossible. In the desert south of Boulder City, he was almost thrown down a steep v-shaped valley of sand and rock and lost amid the detritus of the 20th century, countless decaying fragments of cars that had ruled the world. Wreckage peered peremptorily from the hard sand all around him. How did it get there? He finally got out. Scared. 
The one bright spot in Sterling's existence was the little computer he bought with income earned from some free-lance science writing. It was an Epson HX 20. The first laptop. The year was 1982. Sterling printed out his literary efforts on cash register paper and viewed his prose in progress on a screen smaller than a playing card. 
Evenings Sterling drove down to the Gold Strike Casino. There were times when the sheer beauty of things around these parts overwhelmed him. He looked out over the lake, tasted the wind and exulted somewhere deep inside. 
Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store



Buffer

Triadic Tales - The Failed Cleric - Short Story (Part One)

EDGES BEYOND Adam met the failed cleric because he got up the nerve to nod. It was not his habit to do so. He lived in the middle of the city next to a narrow park and streets cleared of cars. It afforded him a daily walk. He was not in a social phase. These walks were intensely personal. But when he saw Jim on the park bench, looking like Samuel Beckett, he nodded. 
Jim said hello as if he knew him.
Adam hesitated, then sat down. 
Within ten minutes, he discovered Jim to be a tourist, a resident of Des Moines and the operator of a shelter for battered women on a hill in the middle of that city. What brought Adam up short was Jim's final statement.
"I am," Jim said, "a failed cleric."
"We might be doubles," Adam said. "If there were such a thing. I too am a failed cleric." He laughed softly. Jim was expressionless.
There followed an hour of biographical talk. In both cases,the men had stumbled on the Creed. Jim said: "I could no longer embrace a faith so exclusive with such a record of inflicted harm." 
Adam said: "I am not Ivan, but I am a universalist." 
It was agreed that they would meet again and so it was that Adam found himself on a plane to Iowa the following Sunday morning.   In the center of Des Moines, there is indeed a hill and in the stone building at the top there was then a shelter for battered women.
"How did you get the money to fly out here?" Jim asked. 
"Thievery," Adam said. "Dylan calls it luck. But money from a family is nothing I earned. I know where it came from. My dad was skilled in assisting people with much more money than he had avoid taxes. I believe in taxes. Unless they create harm."
"You have collapsed six conundrums into a few sentences," Jim said. "I had nothing. I still have nothing."
Adam looked at the listless women and thought of a Sargent painting and then about sexual abuse and cringed inwardly, remembering his own brush with same.
"So we are failed clerics. And at least one of us is also a sinner."
"Huh. Huh." Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store



Buffer

Triadic Tales - The Conversation - Short Story (Part One)

THE RULE
Triadic Tales - The Conversation - Short Story (Part One) 
"So how were we talking then?" Adam asked. 
"Before we talked?"
"Right."
"It works like this. Every life is marked by the freedom to discover all that can be discovered. Some exercise it. Others do not. Everything is under everyone's nose."
Adam took these strolls every day. The doctor said it beat an apple. He walked back and forth, avoiding people who passed by at a fast clip. His pace and cadence varied, depending.
"So I had a sense," Adam continued.
"Let me tell you the access code, Adam. It's simple. Ask. Seek. Knock.  Abba. A universal key. Millions use it. Billions sense it. You know well enough who finds it. And why others do not."
Adam allowed five minutes for these and other guidances, alternating with five for the prayer. Six segments in all. He took in what had been said. 
"OK," he answered. "When I looked for you in the eyes of strangers as a kid -- "
"You were on the right track. It took you a long time to see, or rather to act on, how simple it all could be."
"It renders all our language absurd."
"Well, stand back, Adam. You talk. You hear a voice. Who are you talking to?"
"I name you."
"Of course, just as millions of others do. But who is this Abba  you name?"
"The voice of reality beyond me."
"Yes. But what if I said it's your higher self? You are no stranger to that vernacular. What if I said it was you talking to you?"
"You are not my higher self," Adam said.
"No, I am not. But you see beyond me to the edges of how things actually are.  You always did but you lacked the power to go with your sense of things."
"I could talk to you about that," said Adam. "At least how I see it now. And experience it. It's different than talking to you. But not entirely."
"I think we have finished for today, Adam."
"Onward," said Adam.
Panflick went back the prayer. The last four lines. Simple. Profound. Desert Island.
Deliver us from evil, Lord. And guide us safely to your shore. Yours is the power to heal and mend. Yours is the glory evermore. 
He walked slowly to the back entrance of his building. 
Someone was entering. Adam hastened to get in before the heavy metal door shut. The guy saw him. Yelled sorry. Pushed the door back open hard.
Adam was glad his head wasn't taken off. And he knew that if there was providence, it was unfathomable, even with what he experienced.
"Thank you," he said as the man disappeared through an inner door.
Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store



Buffer

Triadic Tales - The Ball - Short Story (Part One)

MAGNIFICATION
 Triadic Tales - The Ball - Short Story (Part One) PART TWO PART THREE
When Alice was three she got her first ball. 
Alice had wanted to reach into Reality and grab one ever since she was aware of their existence past the Veil of Darkness at the end of the yard. 
She was an only child and it was not her fault that her Mother was a Ranger living far from the Metropolis. 
It is virtually impossible to translate distances in a way that readers on Earth will comprehend. The best way to look at it is to consider the termite in relation to an Earth Person and then multiply to the tenth power. 
The notion that earth itself could be a mere ball, floating in the darkness, a ball which Alice might covet, as most other children her age did, is incomprehensible. But I am merely trying to communicate things as they actually are. And if that upsets those who have, in a cavalier manner, posited as a universe a mere pocket of playthings,  just remember how a termite feels when she sees the shadow of someone's boot descending.
I think one way of putting this is to suggest that the seemingly massive force of Sandy and Katrina would be equal to one of  Alice's lesser exhalations when hectoring her Mother regarding this toy of choice.   "When can I reach through the Veil and get a ball of my own?"  
Alice's mother was moved to the Outpost after being impregnated by an Accountant who promised her a future and left her moaning all alone in a maternity ward with the child she now observed through the window of their desolate frontier home. 
Alice's mother was in dire straits. Her lust seemed to her the root of her problem. Nymphomania did not make for success in the Metropolis.  
She had always eaten too much. Out here there was little food. Her pay was meager. 
She considered the black market ball business, but penalties were severe. 
The house was a mess, all two rooms of it.  
She felt a wave of hate pass through her portly frame. How did lesser souls thrive in the Metropolis while active minds like her's were a palpable liability?  Still, she told herself she would yet surpass the the smooth System Climbers who exiled her.  The only plus here was the lack of people. She was not one for putting herself out.
This border was literally the end of Reality.  In her better moments she almost thought of finding a way back to the Metropolis.

Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store

Buffer

Triadic Tales - Fifteen Minutes Before a Roaring Fire - Short Story (Part One)

LOST STARS

Triadic Tales - Fifteen Minutes Before a Roaring Fire - Short Story (Part One) PART TWO
Adam went out to the Vineyard when he needed time to himself. The Broadley family had digs in Menemsha that were for him a sort of second home. 
This visit was for Adam a chance to complete a commission to write a musical narrative for a Bicentennial event. He had completed the lyrics and melodies and shipped them off to someone who could transform his taped effusions into the notation that would enable others to sing what he had written. It remained to get some history done. How did  John Wesley's heart get strangely warmed? How did  "Methodist", the insult, become approbation? 
Adam slept in the front bedroom, not far from the living room and various other rooms adjacent to the large kitchen that was often the scene of informal meals.     On this trip, he woke daily to the sound of argumentation from the master bedroom. The back and forth would make Woody Allen proud. To Adam, the overheard nattering boded the likely dissolution of whatever union there was. 
Adam went way back with the Broadleys and could  remember Morton Broadley's Wife One as if it was yesterday. Wife Two, in the bedroom down the hall, had one of those names you register if you are calling the roll of prominent New England families, with an accent on Newport. Wife Two was now complaining with such energy that Adam could not imagine what sleeping next to her might do, other than cause serious wanderlust. 
It was odd that, when everyone was up, there was no hint of this early morning acrimony. Adam could not figure out what the lack of boudoir inhibition, with him so nearby, signified.  It confused him.
Adam spent the day undisturbed on one of the couches in the sunken living room, determining that Wesley had indeed been moved to universal love at Aldersgate and that Methodists had been tarred with the name Methodist to the point that they took it as a badge of honor. 
Morton came in as the radio played a country song called Too Cold at Home. 
"Good song," Morton said.    It was late afternoon when the intelligence arrived. Wife Two's half-sister was coming to supper with her consort. 
I see no need to go into identities because, at this point, all it would likely create is what Adam's friend Bob out in Vegas said when Adam later mentioned that he had spent fifteen minutes with her. 
"You're lying," he said.
So peremptory and final was Bob's verdict that it convinced Adam that it was dangerous to friendship to appear unbelievable. 
So he kept quiet about his fifteen minutes at Menemsha.
Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store



Buffer

Triadic Tales - It's Lovely Out There - Short Story, Part One

IT"S LOVELY OUT THERE
Ellie finished her story. I had never met a murderer before. The closest I had come was when my ex hooked me up with a  paranoid schizophrenic on a day when he forgot to take his medications. Luckily, I was not the guy he nearly killed after I dropped him off.  Ellie leaned closer across the couch and kissed me. Her casual mention of murder went the way of our outer garments. The only concern I had was whether our exertions would disturb grandmother. Ordinarily, I conduct this sort of thing away from home.
What I did not expect was a phone call. This was in the days before cells. I don’t think a cell phone would have made a difference, but you never know. As it was, I extracted myself gingerly from Ellie’s languid post-coital embrace and walked across the room to the antique table and picked up the receiver.  Persephone, my chocolate lab, padded over and gave me a nuzzle.
It was Terwilliger,  the recently-retired house detective at the Inn. 
“Are you alone?” he asked. 
“Not really.”
“Is my niece there?”  
“Who?”
 Terwilliger said her name: Ellie Todaro. 
“I believe so,”  I said.
“Do you know anything about her?”  
“Yeah.”
Ellie was lying on the couch with her head propped up, looking straight at me. I told Terwilliger I would call him later or the next day.
“OK,” he said. “Don’t try anything heroic.”
Out the window, I saw Ellie’s car, moonlit, standing next to mine. When I looked back, Ellie was pulling on her sweater.
“I’ll just let Persephone out,” I said. 
I opened the door and inhaled the  cool evening air. Something snapped. I walked quickly to my old Mercedes 240-D. But then I realized that my keys were in my pants back on the couch.
“Lose something?” Ellie said, as I returned. 
“Just my pants,” I said. “It’s lovely out there.”
“It was self-defense,” Ellie said.  She held out what appeared to be a folded newspaper clipping. I opened it and  noted the date. October 14, 1988.
INTERN KILLS BOSS CLAIMS SELF DEFENSE
”Who was that?” Ellie said.
I had, in the space of a few seconds, come to my senses. 
“Terwilliger. He says you are his niece.”
“Did he warn you?” 
“I think so, but what’s done is done.”  I handed back the clipping.
“You are a strange one,” she said.  
“It occurred to me his call was a bit unusual,” I said 
PART TWO
Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store 


Buffer

Abba whose home in heaven is

Abba whose home in heaven is

Hallowed and holy is your name

Let your realm come your will be done

Till earth and heaven are the same

This is the first third of the Lord's Prayer. It posits a reality known as heaven. It venerates the reality behind everything. It assumes that there is a real will that is to be implemented by us on earth. Indeed the purpose of life is to make earth and heaven the same.