A short story published 7/27/23 Culture Cult Press Anthology, The River in Us All.
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A short story published in Issue #12, September 2022, Fleas on the Dog Literary Journal
THE BREAKFAST CLUB GOES TO COLLEGE!
In the fall of 1961, Everett Forester leaves home and travels 1400 miles by train to attend the celebrated School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Through a series of letters to his family, he chronicles his academic progress, touting his accomplishments while minimizing his failures, never once alluding to his complicity in a mail order scam that nearly puts an end to his career at The Mines. It all comes crashing down when Everett boldly spurns the affections of a gay dorm mate, the mastermind of the ill-fated scam, who then betrays Everett to the college’s administration before taking his own life. Suspended for an entire year, Everett returns to his home in California, lands a job, and falls in love with a beautiful, spiritually devout young woman. Unable to tolerate her devotion to an ideology, which to him reads almost like science fiction, he sets out to broaden her mind and open her eyes to different world views. In the course of this edification effort, Everett unwittingly steps out of his own math/science vacuum into a world of cultural erudition, discovering another side of himself and ultimately derailing his pursuit of a technical education for one more humanistic and fulfilling. After nine concentrated years, Everett reaches the pinnacle of his chosen field with a PhD and lands his first teaching position at a college in Iowa. Before leaving California, however, he presents his mother with the ratty old letter he had written on the train back in 1961 after discovering the epochal tear in his pants—the letter that was never mailed. She stuns Everett with a letter bearing a 1928 postmark in which she’d also begged her parents for permission to return home from Sarah Lawrence. Astounded by the similarities of the two letters, Everett is at last able to forgive himself after all the years of regret for being the coward he almost was. ONE NATION UNDER GWAD 11/25/22 Young Eliot Farconi never bothered to tell anyone about the gwaD bite to his forearm. But when he presents one month later with classic symptoms of a deadly virus known as Seibar, it is far too late in the game for the post-exposure immunization. Eliot’s survival becomes contingent upon the success of a highly experimental treatment protocol, one that would place him in a seven-day chemically-induced coma, one that could cause neurological damage or even death. Den Nomlas, Eliot’s uncle and family pariah, who wears dreadlocks and lives in a public storage facility, is sucked unwittingly into a labyrinth of calamities involving the harebrained Farconis and their five ill-fated petrohybrid gwaDs—chichi pets genetically engineered to become the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry. Their vulnerability becomes a liability when Seibar, to which they have no resistance, shatters the economy, plunging the nation into a deep recession. Forced into accountability, the Farconis as well as the extended Nomlas family have no alternative but to reevaluate their priorities as 13-year-old Eliot fights for his life. The first of a duology, ONE NATION UNDER GWAD, pokes fun at America’s fascination with gwaDs and their accouterments from GwaD marriage counselors, ministers, psychics, and travel agents to GwaD resorts, spas, boutiques, bakeries, and funeral homes. At 122,000 words, the story blends quirky characters and strong plots balancing romance, action, and science fiction. |
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