A collection of my short stories, novellas and verse libre. An Unguiculate Wicket is the first of three books.
Each story below list a link to read either partial chapters or a complete story. Paid subscribers can use the link at the end of this article to read the whole book. [Approximately 270 pages, 82,000 words, 4.5 hours]
A Reflection of Thought, Not Matter
"The sun had no choice but to shine on nothing new, then the universe vanished and the new became what it was always meant to be—eternal."
A portrait artist meets a seven year-old girl who awakens in him a sense of aliveness he had been lacking in his work and life since the death of his wife eight years before. She lost her father when she was five and their attachment over the course of her sittings, twice what he normally allotted for children as young as she, grows into a profound father-daughter relationship.
A Reflection of Thought Not Matter, chapters 1-4
Broken Glass
"In that instant, Mark knew fear was impossible and understood Brock wanted what he wanted: acceptance, appreciation, and most of all, freedom from fear."
Two boys meet in an alley, and when one bullies the other, a miracle occurs—they both share a single identity when they become aware of the other's thoughts. Both instantly realize bullying and being bullied were the same thing, that they were partners in a dance of duality—the miracle was they clearly saw the utter foolishness of it. Years later they meet again, and the miracle occurs again, this time never to leave them even after the death of one.
Bystander
"I am myself, I think, but sometimes I am not, saying and doing things not like me and looking back to see a shadow; a familiar shadow but without context. When I ask myself, 'Who wants to see the shadow for what it is?', I see it's not me who asks the question, but the shadow."
A man is fascinated with a girl from high school he never met, only observed across his table in the cafeteria for six weeks, then she disappears. Those six weeks determined the women he would date, live with, and almost marry over the next two decades until one day, working on a project in France, he meets her again. Determined not to let this opportunity slip away like he did in high school, he discovers while some things change, others do not, and what he thought owned his heart, was a lie.
The Stranger Within
"Not long after his reawakening, Jiddu asked the voice in his head its identity, but it only said, ‘The capacity to explain with a name, a word or description, is impossible, for there is no 'I' with which to refer."
Richard Jiddu Strange died and was reborn the next day. Not the evangelical definition of 'born again' or the Hindu/Buddhist belief of transmigration (samsara), but literally reborn in that his thoughts—his memories—had been joined by another thing, something not human and without a name, where an 'I' or a 'me' does not exists, only 'we' or 'us', and now two thought systems occupy a single body, each believing the other an illusion.
The Stranger Within, (complete)
An Unguiculate Wicket
"For the dying man, his dream of the game was not the one he played when awake, but another one that was familiar as much as it was unfamiliar; a game where he was the batter and bowler, the perfect all-rounder, each player on both teams made from parts of himself, though appearance to size and age dissimilar, the eyes were all the same, some more angry than others and some like his: calm, sure, observant, and keen to win. 'Win what?' he thought."
A dying man's sense of spacetime is shattered, and he appears to live other lives. Most are familiar but each have seemingly dissimilar struggles. In one he is dying, in another he is imprisoned for murder, in another he is a great athlete, and another as an aboriginal holy man from two-thousand years in the past. He is his ancestor in some lifetimes, and he is the progeny of those ancestors in others, but between those lifetimes he plays a game of cricket, discussing with the third, off-the-field umpire, the reasons why his existence is the way it is, and in the process, sees there is only one thing he truly desires—to quit and leave the game forever. But who would he be without the game? Nothing. And so begins his journey to discover who is the 'me' he cannot live without.
An Unguiculate Wicket, chapters 1-4
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