FIRED ON MY DAY OFF AND ON MY BIRTHDAY

FREE KINDLE FOR PC

FREE KINDLE FOR PC
So you can read my books

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

THE UNWISE DON'T THINK IT TWICE_Chapter Five_The Girl With Silver Eyes

 

"Strange how paranoia can link with reality every now and then." 

- Lucas

Moira, now that she was sure Lucas wasn't going to kill her, grew bold.

Lucas smiled bitterly. How undisturbed were the thoughts of the foolish. 

He wondered how it felt to sleepwalk through life, to look and not see.

Moira sneered, "Afraid of those spook eyes, are you? Me, I like to live dangerously."

'You and Kierkegaard. And you know what happened to him?"

She paled. "What?"

"He died."

She snorted a laugh. "We all die, mister."

"But not all of us live. Take you. I doubt your hungers allow you to live one moment ... in peace."

"You're nuts."

Lucas shrugged, "What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding? What if laughter were really tears?"

"Like I said: you're nuts."

Lucas smiled wearily. 

"Insanity runs in my family. In fact, it practically gallops. Besides, I am not afraid of that dryad. It's her book that unsettles me."


It's just a book, for Heaven's sake. It can't hurt you."

Lucas fought a shiver. "Heaven has nothing to do with that book. It can do more than hurt you. It can damn you."

"How? If you don't read it, you're safe, ain't you?

"No. It is sentient."

"What?"

"Living, self-aware, bored ... and hungry."

"You're shitting me."

Lucas somberly shook his head.

"Long before hieroglyphics, Sumerian, or Akkadian symbols were carved upon temple walls to be swallowed by the sands of time, this book existed to damn all who opened it, touching them mind to mind."

"Quit calling it THE book! What's its damned name?"

"The wise do not even think the title."

"And the unwise?"

"They do not think it twice."


Friday, July 26, 2024

A Pointed Gun Is Not A Question Mark_Chapter Four of THE GIRL WITH SILVER EYES

 


"He who measures a person's worth grasps only illusion." 
- Ancient Basque proverb

Lucas wore the veneer of civilization easily as he did all of his disguises.

Inwardly, he was as wild and fierce as his mother ever was ... if not more so. Perhaps it was a remnant of his unknown father.


He cared even less about his father than he did about the gun held steadily at his heart, the least vulnerable part of his body.

His utter disregard of her gun obviously bothered Moira.

"I could kill you right now and get away with it, you know,"

His eyes became hard, and his voice irritable. 

"People kill one another for so many inane, shallow, pointless reasons. And ultimately, they destroy themselves doing so."

His words became little more than a whisper. 

"A pointed gun is not a question mark, Moira. It is an exclamation point."

His right hand became a blur ... and suddenly, her gun was in his hand.

"This is a prop gun. The safety is on. You've been shouting -- Please kill me!"

He flipped open the cylinder, showing her what he had already seen: there were no bullets in the gun.

"Pl-Please don't kill me."

"Why would I? I don't want your life. I just want to know where I can find the girl with silver eyes."

Her pale face puckered as her thumb jerked up over her shoulder to the mock-up movie poster on the wall behind her.

"You mean Deirdre Manes?"

As Lucas took in the poster for the movie still in production, an image of himself with long donkey ears flashed before his eyes.

A Bible verse came to mind: Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

He sighed. It was a great life if you didn't mind making a fool of yourself every so often ... like now.

He cursed himself in Basque: artaburu : corn head, idiot.

A girl with eerie silver eyes looked down on him from the poster, clutching the most cursed book in all of existence.

Donovan didn't want that girl at all. He wanted to damn his soul for her book.

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

THE WIND HAS ITS OWN FREEDOM_Chapter Three_ The Girl With Silver Eyes

 

"When Ortzi put madness in the wind and loosed the bridle on the lightning, He called it Woman." 

- Ancient Basque proverb


For a woman holding a gun on a man, the blonde didn't seem to recognize Lucas. But then, she had only seen him the one time.

But Lucas recognized her. Moira wore sexuality like some women wore expensive perfume.

The barrel of the gun was rock-steady, and to unbalance her, Lucas said,

"Is this the Bureau of Indian Affairs?"

"Huh? Funny man, aren't you? Though you do look Indian."

"Half-Basque actually."

Lucas made a show of looking at his wristwatch. 

"As in half-Basque Two. Speaking of which, isn't this after hours even for a workhorse like DeMille?"

Recognition widened her azure eyes, 

"Hey, I know you! You're the numb-nuts who thought giving DeMille that tiny working model of a guillotine would make up for not being in the prop makers union."

Lucas shrugged. "It was worth a shot."

"You disappeared on us. What happened?"

"I got drafted."

"There's a lot of that going around ... dying, too."

Moira pulled back the hammer. "What brings you back at this hour?"

Lucas didn't have to ask her that question: her left fist was filled with the petty cash from the open safe behind her.

"This was the last place a fellow draftee, Lt. Eileen  Henderson, was seen alive."

"Aw. don't tell me: you were in love with the broad."

"I am incapable of love."

"You and every other man I've ever met. At least you're honest about it."

"My memory's too bad to lie."

Her gun steadied on his chest, "You ever not a smartass?"

"Sometimes I sleep."

Her eyes narrowed. She leaned towards Lucas with a curious malice that carried with it an undercurrent of sexual heat.

Lucas reminded himself that an affair that starts with a woman pointing a gun at you always ended badly.

"You know what's going to happen to you?," sneered Moira.  "You'll grow old and run out of yourself. That will be justice."

"No, I'll die first, and that will be mercy."

Saturday, July 20, 2024

Run OF DeMILLE_Chapter Two of The Girl With Silver Eyes




"When you try to tell DeMille something, he doesn't hear you. He hears your motive for saying it or what he believes your motive is for saying it.

He hears some of the implications. But he doesn't hear the obvious meaning. It is the occupational hazard of being a movie director."

 - Lucas to Major General William Donovan


Turning the corner

That's what Lucas called it when a child. If he desperately wanted to go some place he had already been, 

he would reach inside himself, picture the place, and shift his thoughts ... and he would be there. 

It was not easy by any means, more like forcing a reluctant antique car into third gear.

A damned nuisance is what his Basque mother called it.

And it scared her to death.

The villagers in Wyoming called her Sorginak ... and witch is the closest thing in English for that term ...

but it was close only as the moon is close to the earth.

She had been a fierce, wild woman and to see her frightened had shaken the little boy.

Lucas still felt her fingers as they had dug into his shoulders as she shook him.

"Never! 

Never do this again. I am allowed to live for I am useful. This thing you can do comes from your father, and they will kill the both of us if they find out you can do it."

And he never had ... as long as she lived. 

His only regret was that Sheriff Danvers' death agonies had ended so quickly.

A woman's voice snapped behind him. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Lucas grimaced.

That was the drawback about "turning the corner." You couldn't peek around it before you did.


Tuesday, July 16, 2024

The Girl with Silver Eyes




"He knew his measure and the full measure of the person he longed to be."

 - Major General William "Wild Bill" Donovan of his enigmatic O.S.S. operative who went by only one name, "Lucas."


Donovan appraised the prisoner with cold eyes and gestured for the M.P.'s to leave his office.

As soon as the door closed, the man casually tossed the handcuffs on Donovan's desk.

"They chaffed my wrists."

Donovan remembered one of Lucas' legends, 

(an alias lived long enough that a cursory examination would be fooled)

was that of a stage magician.

"You're AWOL, out of uniform, and your hair is not regulation." 

"Your sin is greater. You killed Henderson."

"I gave her a graduation assignment that is all. She died attempting it. The O.S.S. is not for girl scouts."

"And I attended her funeral. Sadly, it was held in Wyoming ... a state where I am still wanted for the murder of Sheriff Danvers. So I had to go incognito."

Donovan tapped a manila folder. 

"It says here you were cleared ... that Danvers hanged himself after writing a confession for your mother's murder."

Lucas shrugged. "The governor was friends with the sheriff and knew Danvers would gleefully get into everything ... except a coffin."

Lucas flashed a papercut smile. 

"So there is an unofficial 'Shoot On Sight' order on me. I prefer not to be unofficially dead hence my showing up as Eric Strauss, famed magician."

"Are you saying the sheriff was assisted in his hanging?"

"Of course."

Donovan stiffened, and Lucas continued. "Gravity."

Donovan sensed a calm, pent-up violence in the man ... much like the eye of a hurricane which heralded terrible destruction to come. 

Donovan had seen Lucas, upon entering, coolly assess the entire office and all it contained ... even himself.

It unsettled him, and it goaded him to uncharacteristically ask a needless question.

"What do you think of my office, Captain Lucas?"

Lucas' eyes flicked over the walls lined with yellowed photos of dead comrades, old mentors, and faded medals awarded for forgotten deeds of valor. 

The walls, dense with the past, formed a sad kind of insulation against the present world and all its dangers.

He kept all that to himself and instead said, "The past fills this room like a tide of whispers."

Donovan growled, more mad at himself than at the captain, "Rather melodramatic."

"I do not apologize for the way I think, sir."

"The shrinks say you are sociopathic."

Lucas shrugged. "Psychiatry is in its infancy. But I do admit my moral compass usually points to self-interest."

"Then, why attend Henderson's funeral? The coffin was empty."

"But it represented my only friend." 

Lucas ironed his face with a palm. 

"Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind. You do what you feel is right, or you're a weather vane."

"The doctors say you don't feel."

"Don't trust doctors who go by the book, Major-General. One day, you may end up dead due to a misprint."

Donovan looked off into the distance, seeing things Lucas was just as happy not knowing, then gruffed, "You want revenge for her murder?"

"No. It won't bring her back."

"Too bad. Your graduation assignment is to finish hers. Find the girl with silver eyes."

"Where do I start?"

"Where else? Hollywood, the land of false fronts, empty dreams, and emptier souls."

"Now, who's being melodramatic? And could you be a bit more specific? Where in Hollywood?"

"Her last communication was that she was going to burgle the office of director, Cecil B. DeMille ... then nothing."

"Speaking of nothing ...."

Donovan blinked twice. Lucas had simply vanished.

 No smoke of flash powder. No glare of mirror. He had simply disappeared.

A coldness took him bone-deep. The perfect cover for a true magician would be to pose as a fake one.

What had he just unleashed upon Hollywood?





Monday, July 15, 2024

THERE ARE MOMENTS THAT TRANSCEND POLITICS

 


I am ancient enough to remember when John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed.

Sadly, I believe Mr. Gingrich is mistaken.


The hate, the prejudice, the corruption is too strong.

WASHINGTON POST:

"Trump leaves rally after loud noises erupt."

CNN:

"Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally."

FORBES:

"Will surviving gunfire (not being shot, mind you) be Donald Trump's next appeal to black voters?"


Perhaps they can't help themselves ... literally. Their paychecks depend on writing and saying things like this.

The Secret Service is now blaming the local police.

Oh, really? Where were the drones? 

The Secret Service snipers had the gunman in their sights for 2o seconds before firing ... after he had already fired.

As Hamlet once said:

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."




Thursday, July 4, 2024

I WAS ASKED TO WRITE A FRIEND'S OBITUARY

 

It was quite the challenge since I knew he would be reading it before going into major surgery.

I may let you visitors read it if I can get his permission ... he survived with flying colors ... black and blue.

I write of this since when I tried to comment on C. Lee McKenzie's substack page today, I had to go through a dizzying gauntlet of questions ...

I was asked to give a short bio of myself ... 250 words or less ...

My first was rejected ... too long, so rather than let it go to waste, here it is ...


One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.”

- Albert Einstein

Most writers are curious by nature. We look at the world around us and wonder at it.

Who are these people? What are we all doing here? Where are we heading? Why do we do the things we do? How will we achieve our goals? 

Who am I? I am what I do.  I write of hearts in conflict with themselves in a world we little understand.

Who am I? I am a seeker.

WHAT WOULD YOU WRITE AS A SHORT BIO?



Tuesday, July 2, 2024

REASONS TO BLOG ... even if no one is reading _ IWSG Post

 


It is July ... right before the 4th.

Many are too busy with the fiery celebrations and the summer heat to visit your blogs.

Me? I am imprisoned in my apartment by a Shelter In Place from a leak in a local Bio-Lab. 

I didn't even know we had one. So if you don't hear from me. Ah, it was bad.

Your number of visitors may tumble.  Don't worry.  

It's all good.

Sounds illogical doesn't it?

What possible reasons could there be for blogging if no one is reading?


1.) SEARCH ENGINE BENEFITS
 

This may be the most obvious benefit of blogging. 

Search engines give preference to websites that have fresh, relevant content.

 Hubspot research shows that updated blogs get 55% more traffic than blogs with old posts  —

 even if there are no readers!


2.) INFINITE SEARCH ENGINE

 Your content keeps working for you month after month!  

I research my most often visited posts.  Many of them are years old.  Some are from last week when I was sure no one was visiting.

People Google all manner of subjects.  

Who knows when someone will be looking up something you wrote a post on?


We work hard to gain followers.  Me, I am on my 16th year.  My followers are my friends.

To lose one would hurt.

It is often harder for people to remember to visit if you change addresses ...

Sometimes that one extra step to visit costs you a frequent visitor.  

Why take that chance? 

A thought:

Several of my friends have switched from blogger to Wordpress, thinking their old posts would always be there on Blogger.

Not so.

Now, their addresses have been given to food and fashion blogs.  Two of them in languages I cannot read.

I work hard on each of my posts.  

They are my cyber-diary entries.  

To think all that effort and creativity would evaporate into nothingness feathers the insides of my chest with icy wings.

Just something to keep in mind.




3.) A VERY COST EFFECTIVE AD!


If you write interesting posts, readers will glance at your sidebar 

and perhaps decide to take a chance on one of your books ... 

even if you never mention them in the post.

 
4.) YOUR CONTENT ENGINE
 
Your investment in a consistent stream of quality content 

can be leveraged in many ways to support a content marketing strategy. 

I use links from blog posts in some of my comments on other blogs with posts that relate to them. 

They may garner visits.  They may not.  

But links provide the possibility of more visitors, right?


5.) PR


A constant stream of new posts will encourage old readers to drop in after a time to see what new things you are talking about.

Should an old or a new visitor speak of your post on their blog or web site, 

you have an opportunity to garner a new audience for your work.


6.) NOT EVERYONE Does Social Media

You provide new content for those lonely Non-Social Media souls looking for something new to read.  

Your blog may be stumbled upon by someone who hears of you from a link or from an email.


7.) YOU MAINTAIN THE HABIT and KEEP THE DREAM ALIVE.

Get out of the habit of steadily writing new posts, 

and Life will find a way to fill in that vacuum of time.  

You may find yourself without new content for weeks after July -- 

especially with December Madness looming over the horizon.

 WHAT KEEPS YOU WRITING YOUR BLOG?

Monday, July 1, 2024

LAST BREATH

 

“Your life, like snow, while ongoing masks your passage, when finished, marks your path.”
– Darael



Labored breathing.  I’d heard the term often but only now realized the reason for it.  Every breath hurt as if I were giving painful, hard-won birth to it.



The dead are never far from us. 

They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final grasp for air



From just outside my hospital room door, I heard the nurse snap, “Mr. Evans, I can only tell you that your tenant is in guarded condition.”



“I just want to know how soon I’ll be able to rent out his apartment.”


“Mr. Evans, he may well recover.



“Ha. If that’s him breathing, he ain’t got long for this world.”



“Then, you have your answer, don’t you?  Please leave.”



There was a long silence followed by heavy steps heading away from my door.



A face of flint stuck in from a crack in the door.  “Did he bother you?”



I shook my head and wheezed, “He only bothers himself, nurse.”



Her face softened.  “How can you be so forgiving?”



I managed a weak smile.  “He has to live with himself 24 hours a day.  How can I not feel sorry for him?”



She sighed, shook her head bemused, and quietly shut the door.


By the dim mirror light, I tried to make out the plaque on the opposite wall.  It was an ornate rendering of Margaret Fishback Powers’ poem, Footprints.  

 I snatched back the snort before it cut me in two.



Others had lived worse lives I knew, but when the blows came for me, I never felt carried.  Never.   

My footprints had always been solitary, lonely ones.  Women went for the Bad Boy never the ugly, poor Nice Guy.



I could have become mean, bitter, but what kind of company would I have been for myself then?   

Better by far to give encouragement and a smile to those who entered then left my world.


I spasmed a series of wet coughs that cut me in half, bending me in a fetal position.  The world blurred, became black.  I blinked my eyes to clear them. 

It truly wasn’t worth the effort. I saw shadows moving in the corners of my room.  Though I should have been alone, I wasn’t.  


Words, feeling like mine but were not, slithered into my mind: ‘You will die alone, unloved, unmourned.  Yours was a worthless life.’ 

Maybe the words weren't mine, but were they speaking the truth? Were they?


“Enough!” softly rumbled a Voice above me from the back of my bed.  “Did you not hear the nurse?  He is in guarded condition.”


Wails of pain and outrage pierced through my mind.  Then, the Voice of distant thunders spoke but one word.


“Go!”


The inside of my mind suddenly was all mine once more.





I turned to see who had spoken.  Fingers of soft steel took my shoulder and stopped me.



“No.  Not just yet.”



“Who are you?  What were those voices?”



“The unlearned call them demons.”



“Ah, I’m not important enough for demons to fool with.”


There was a hint of laughter underneath the rumbling words.  “Then, perhaps they were bored.”


The laughter disappeared.  “If you are in the light, darkness will always try to extinguish you.”



The Voice sighed, 

“You, born of Eve, look back on your lives and those of others and only see a meandering trail that wanders into the light and into the darkness to things you only imagine are there.”



There was a strange blur in front of me, and I hushed in a painful breath.  The plaque was gone from the wall.   

Somehow, I knew that the mysterious speaker was holding it in his hands.



“Her heart was in the right place but her perception off-course … like all those whose blood is that of Eve’s.”


“Who are you?” I wheezed.



“Those with cloudy perceptions call me Archangel.”


“And are wrong?”



“And right.  Life for you of tainted blood can be confusing.”



“An Archangel?  I’m just small potatoes.  I’m not worthy of someone like you.”



The undercurrent of laughter was back.  “Really?  Remember what I said of flawed perceptions?”


A flurry of mists billowed in front of me and out of it floated a slowly spinning globe of the earth.  A breath smelling of cedar and honey blew over my shoulder.  The masking clouds wisped away.



Tiny spots of golden light dotted every continent, appeared in isolated places on the seas.



“What are those?” I asked.



“Footprints.  Your footprints.”



“No.  I never left this city, much less this country.”



“Oh, but you have.”



 “How?”




“There are Nexus Points in every soul’s life where a shared laugh, a compassionate word, a needed affirmation of another’s worth, or desperately needed money left anonymously in a mailbox can start a ripple of random acts of kindness whose wake goes on and on.”



Steel fingers softly squeezed my shoulder.  “Those acts became a way of life for you.   

So much so that they became a part of you … and a part of all those you touched and a part of all those they in turn touched.”



My breath just wouldn’t come anymore as the Voice whispered in my ear. 



“Just now, the nurse you think of as Nurse Ratchet, because of your forgiveness, is withholding a bitter retort to a small child whose heart would have been shattered by those harsh words.”



An elephant seemed to be sitting on my chest and an ice-pick stabbing deep into my heart.  It hurt so badly I couldn’t speak.  I choked.  I heard a wet rattling gurgle in my throat.



The Voice murmured, “One last soul touched by you.”



Steel fingers settled on my chest.  The pain disappeared.  All became honey-light.


The ghost of laughter was back.  “Boot Camp is over, good and faithful servant.  Now, the adventure begins.”




One life well lived is long enough.


Goodbye, June