WIP Wednesday 10/11/2023

October 11, 2023

Please Note: All submissions are posted ‘As received’ with no edits except possible formatting required by Word Press constraints.

Welcome to WIP Wednesday. Please remember, sharing your fledgling work is a leap of faith. Unlike Show Case, a work in progress is typically rough and unpolished. The feedback and critique are intended to help the writer see other avenues or gain insight as to direction of their prose or poetry.

Beginning with this edition of WIP, we have changed the submission guidelines based on feedback from the September 13th WIP Wednesday. The original word count limit of 500 words provides a great introduction to a writer’s work, yet within this group we are already familiar with the writers. In a sense, introductions are unnecessary. We know we want to read your work. Therefore, writers have submitted one full chapter of work with a maximum of 5000 words.

As we learn and grow, we’ll keep this forum as open and flexible as possible.

Now, enjoy the reads! Ask questions. Provide insight. There is much here to discuss!

The next WIP Wednesday is November 15th. The submission deadline is November 10th. Please send submissions to:

themotleypresswc@gmail.com

---

Code Blue and Little Deaths

By GD Deckard

USAF Hospital Clark Airbase, Philippines – image by GD Deckard (1967)

Young men and women of the medical corps in wartime cope with death by seeking life. They watch horror without blinking and look for humanity. If their behavior is outrageous, it is because profound sadness is best balanced by outrageous hope.

one. ICU

Edgar Smith watched the man who had been shot through the brain. The man was standing in the hall of the Intensive Care Unit drinking from the water fountain. He streamed the water with one hand and with the other he steadied himself by gripping his IV stand. Urine swished back and forth in the catheter tubing below his hospital gown. Bandaging had replaced his hair with a turban. The naturally thin man looked frail. But he seemed on his way to full recovery.

The shooter had been an American soldier cleaning his .45 auto in a tent at the Tân Sơn Nhất Airport. This man had been shot on arrival, while getting off the plane, and would now go home.

“At least,” Ed joked, “You weren’t in ‘Nam long.”

The Mid-western face broke into a big grin. “About forty-five minutes.”

Ed felt the man’s relief. Miracles were accidents.

two. USAF HOSPITAL CLARK

The cafeteria’s atmosphere, like every room in the hospital, was created by its function and the people in it. The large open area of tables and chairs scattered across green and white tile flooring was brought to life by the stainless-steel serving line along the back wall that catered around the clock to staff, patients, and visitors. Ed took a seat and smelled breakfast bacon mingling with the hamburgers for lunch. He listened to the dishes clanking and the people talking and was cleaning his glasses when Captain Kelly looked up from her coffee.

“I was taking a guy to x-ray in a wheelchair,” he told her casually. “Shot up, just off medivac. He was in pain, but upbeat. We go by the gift shop, and he says, ‘Stop! See that nurse? I want to eyeball-fuck her.’” He shrugged. “I stopped.”

“Who was she?” Captain Kelly asked with bright humor in her green eyes.

“Jenkins, from O.B.”

“Oh. That didn’t take him long then.” She turned serious. “You see death, you want life.” She pushed her chair from the table and looked down at the floor and sucked in a breath. Then she stood. “Back to it.”

Ed took in the blonde walking away. Kelly was on the dialysis team and regularly watched young men die because their kidneys had been left on the battlefield. When she was on call at night, Captain Kelly was notified by waking the doctor on call that night. He shook his head. Would he ever meet another woman he could tell this story? She would have to be the woman that Captain Kelly was.

The hospital sat in the tropics on Luzon Island in the Philippines in the South China Sea. Ed waited at the entrance to catch a bus to the front gate, his slim build unwound on the bench in a decidedly unmilitary posture, his hands behind his head. The hot sun precipitated lead into his bones. Above him rose large aluminum letters announcing, “USAF HOSPITAL CLARK,” and five rows of windows shaded by honeycombed panels. Dark clouds shooting bolts of black lightening billowed from the windows on the top floor. That was 5-South, the Intensive Care Unit where he worked. Ed knew the clouds and the black lightning were only in his mind. A thousand wounded men came through the 200-bed hospital every month in 1966; in 1967, that number doubled. Most survived. None were ever the same.

---

Elevator Charm

by John Correll

Here’s the first chapter of a witch’s romance, a romcrone, perhaps? It is about 2,700 words. The title isn’t set, but I’m toying with ‘Elevator Charm’. Some bits may be familiar, but I’m curious if this piece strikes your interest? Would you read on? Which scenes work for you, and which don’t? Are any bits confusing? Do any scenes stand out in drawing you in? That’s sort of what I’d like to know. Then, do you have a really nice agent I can pass this on to? Many thanks in advance for all your help. Cheers, John.

Real witches don’t cure headaches with crystals or read fortunes with tarot cards.

Honest witchcraft requires lymph nodes. Special ones. And a witch begets a girl witch. But a witch’s son, well that’s another story. Sometimes they become warlocks, sometimes, something else, and a few end up as common accountants. It takes a special witch to love her commoner son.

Commoners, or non-witches, go about their lives without a clue, (unless their mother happens to be a witch.) Witches run their corporations, buy their coffee, or occasionally turn them into toads, but commoners don’t notice. Witches make certain they remain — oblivious. Witch transformations and other spells end up dismissed as a trick of light, deja-vu, memory lapses, a new phase in life, or maybe, just another forgotten battle with reality.

But Max didn’t forget. He didn’t doubt. Reality knocked on his head like an ache in need of a triple-X sized crystal. His uncle, Professor Wolfgang Hardt, a warlock and specialist in medical witchology, pronounced genes to be Max’s trouble.

After Max’s birth, Wolfgang told his mother, “Louisa, he’s missing a couple of signature genes, but not the X chromosome triggers, that’s to be expected considering his heritage.”

Louisa held her infant son tight. “He’s so beautiful. But he’s not a commoner?”

Wolfgang shook his head. “No. Not common. And not a warlock. Witches will hate him and commoners won’t understand.”

“Then he’s special?” she said.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Max grew up between worlds, his mother’s spell casting side who couldn’t control him, and his commoner father’s, who thought him odd. He belonged nowhere, until he met Elizabeth.

~~~

Elizbeth believed Max didn’t belong in the same elevator as her. And, in her more than witchly opinion, Max was something else —  a philandering jerk. He could do his flirting somewhere else, preferably in Siberia.

In the darkest corner of her mind, a door opened. A path to the forest of faded dreams. She kicked her temper in, slammed the door shut, locked it, and broke the key. She didn’t need interference.

If Max had been a normal person, or a witch, a regular warlock, Elizabeth would have turned him into a cockroach. Wham — a massive bug because Einstein held a grudge against magic. Basically, witches couldn’t ignore the laws of physics. A witch’s quantum transforms followed the conservation of matter and energy. More simply, an object’s weight stayed the same no matter how she changed it. But witchcraft wasn’t magic either.

Elizabeth considered herself an applied scientist of quantum string manipulation. A specialized science she was born into. Years of motherly guidance and practice helped. But years of practice achieved nothing against a stinking-rotten-worthless half-breed like Max. What did he call it? Quantum echoes. Spells bounced off him like a mirror. The first time she tried zapping him into a monkey, she craved bananas for a week, and he didn’t even bother to say ‘oof’ or scratch his armpit.

She pushed down his collar. He jolted back. But she persisted, revealing a nasty mouth-sized bruise. A drunk vampire’s hundred failed attempts at drawing blood sort-of bite. The bite wasn’t the problem — the fact she didn’t make it was. Without magic, extreme physical violence remained her only option.

You might be surprised at the force an untempered, one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound witch can muster in a heated argument. Approximately nine hundred pounds-per-square-inch, if you want to know — almost the same as a heavyweight boxer’s knockout punch.

Elizabeth cracked her open palm into Max’s jaw, slamming him against the back of the elevator. He slumped, shook his head, but remained standing. Jenny, who stood at his side, grabbed his arm to keep him from collapsing. Elizabeth suspected Jenny had played a key role in creating Max’s inept vampire marks.

“Wha waa dat fo?” he said, holding his chin.

“Who did that?” Elizabeth pointed at his neck. He raised a finger at Jenny.

But Jenny shook her head. “I did not.”

Max closed his eyes, letting his head sway as if asking, ‘Can I go to sleep now?’ Jenny tapped his cheek. “Who did do that, Max?”

He kept his eyes closed and took a deep breath. “You did. At the party on Saturday — you threw temperance under a bulldozer or something. And Meghan asked me to help get you home. We drove you, then you puked on the sidewalk and passed out. I carried you to your bed, but on the way, you latched onto my neck. It still hurts, you know.”

Jenny let his arm go and crossed her arms. “And you put on my nightie and placed Mr. Wiggles, my stuffed unicorn, on my pillow?”

Max shook his head and grimaced. “No. I left. Meghan must have done that.”

“Oh. Really?” Jenny asked. The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and a crowd stared, waiting to enter.

“Yeah, right,” Elizabeth answered. She spun around and raced through the parting masses.

Okay, okay. At this point, you might think Elizabeth and Max were finished, but they go on to live reasonably happy lives — together. No kidding.

Of course, you’d have to define happiness as spending thirty years raising three headstrong witches and three suicidal warlocks. This includes sleepless nights changing an endless supply of diapers. Elizabeth refused this part since she birthed the sweet things. Max’s favorite happiness involved wrestling the pet dogs when they became king cobras, tigers, and confused tyrannosaurus-rexes. The pretense of ‘homework’ provided the cute little witches usual excuse. Finally, the happy couple rejoiced at the daily sibling rivalry ritual. This usually involved finding one or more mysteriously vanished brothers. “Alexa, I want to know, this instant, what you did with little Peter. And what is this new coffee table doing in the living room? Is it laughing at me?”

But this is more towards the end of the story. You’ll need to journey back four years to find the real start of this affair:

~~~

It’s a well-known fact that a witch in search of romance spells trouble. This simple truth hit Elizabeth at the age of eighteen when her aunt defined the nature of her courtship.

“Gino will be perfect. Your mother and I are in agreement. And he fits so well — I mean — handsomely in tights,” her aunt Ester explained. Unfortunately, her aunt’s definition meant more trouble for the witch than the warlock of Elizabeth’s supposed affection.

After the ballet, Elizabeth stood with her aunt and uncle at the reception for the company’s final performance. A buzz of wealthy admirers and the cast surrounded her. Across the hall, Gino chatted with a middle-aged woman wearing a mink shawl. The woman wore a diamond necklace. The type of diamonds which likely went into a well-guarded vault when not in use. Next to her, a young man, perhaps a couple of years older than Elizabeth, guarded her side. He sported a tailored suit and a black eye patch. Like a pirate. He frowned at Elizabeth with one eye. She took out her phone and checked her reflection. Why didn’t she wear makeup or contacts like Ester said? Why doesn’t he look somewhere else?

Ester droned on, “Commoners might be reasonable practice in high school, dear, but you can’t have children with peasants.”

Elizabeth had had a couple of commoner boyfriends. But when she told them about being a witch, they laughed, “So what, Elizabeth. There’s nothing wrong with herbs, crystals, and broomsticks.” Then she transformed their ties into snakes, and they ran. The snakes were only animated silk, but the boys didn’t return. She considered using love spells, but her Oma Tilda nixed that. “Spells f—k up romance, child.”

Ester pointed at the one-eyed man. “You don’t want a halfbreed bastard like Baroness Hart’s son, either.” The man noticed Ester pointing and faced Gino. “You can never have peace with one of those brutes. They can’t transform anything or even read minds. Worthless. And her stupid child almost killed himself. What was it, Eli?”

Elizabeth’s uncle Eli coughed. “A grenade, supposedly. But sweetie, it is so kind of you to let Max join the firm; I’m certain, with training, he’ll be…”

“Charity case. I don’t see why you bother, Eli.” Ester linked her arm around Eli’s. “Elizabeth, stick with warlocks; they’re the best. They understand that being zapped into a toad is part of a loving courtship.”

“And learning who’s boss,” Eli mumbled.

Ester elbowed his ribs and smiled. “And you don’t need to worry about powerless children either. Isn’t that so?” Eli nodded and examined the floor’s tile pattern.

Female witches dominated their male counterparts. They mastered witchcraft by transforming larger objects like horses, cars, and people with ease. Their poor men-folk barely managed to turn rabbits into skunks. A warlock thought hard before contradicting the superior sex. The notion of becoming a huge amphibian ensured reflection. Usually, one transformation secured a lifetime of harmony.

Across the hall, a woman using a crutch hobbled up to Gino and kissed his cheek. She must be the dance partner who broke her ankle. Gino placed an overly affectionate hand on her hip and introduced her to the Baroness and her son. The one-eyed son noticed Gino’s hand, then he returned his focus to Elizabeth. She focused back. She imagined him asking, “Do you want to marry this guy?” But she didn’t have an answer.

Elizabeth’s and Gino’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were pure witches. And purity matched ability. Supposedly her great-great-great-grandmother, Charlotte, molded an elephant into a dragon. That’s a lot of molding. Witchcraft meant the ability to transform and move matter with your mind.

At ten years of age, Elizabeth transformed her pony into a fantastic flaming dragon. But only for a short hour. It burned the barn, frightened the dogs, torched the Rolls, destroyed the garden, and her mother promptly changed the beast back. The poor pony became unrideable, and Elizabeth spent three days in the tower mulling.

Ester waved for Gino. He excused himself from his party and approached with the aplomb of a seasoned dancer. As the lead dancer, he had years of practice and could turn a raccoon into a cat. A proper party trick. Ester grabbed Gino’s shoulder. “Gino, let me introduce my niece, Elizabeth.” The one-eyed man’s frown changed.

~~~

On the second day in San Francisco, Elizabeth planned to visit the art museum before her lunch with Gino. She fled from her aunt and uncle on the tenth floor of their new acquisition. An insurance company with tons of money. Boring.

The witch matriarchy pulled humanity’s strings from the start. Witches delegated — not leading or standing in the public eye. Direct leadership invited unhealthy attention and assassination. Witches fostered power and profit backstage. They increased their affluence without annoying questions or public accountability. Indeed, no witch had ever been burned or tried in a common court. Their ability to nudge the thoughts of ordinary men prevented such silliness.

Avoiding the trials of business, Elizabeth ran for the elevator, where a man followed her with one eye. The Baroness’s son. What was his name? Something common — David? John?

The elevator doors sulked, and she tried to read his mind. She was good at it. But he got in the way. His hands, chest, face, and one eye — wow. She imagined sightseeing hands caressing her thighs. Would it be rude to ask what happened to his eye?

Something wasn’t right. Regular men’s emotions beamed like lighthouses on a clear night. Even other witches and warlocks couldn’t hide from her. She might not know their thoughts, but she’d sense their attraction or displeasure. Did he like her? He stood like an impenetrable fortress.

The elevator bell burst their three-eyed struggle. The doors slid open. They entered and reached for the first-floor button together. Their hands collided, and his fingers pressed against hers. Tenderly. Then he hit her. Not physically. Not violently. Forcefully. All his emotions flooded in — bursting. Foreign feelings warmed her core, spreading to her toes. Amazement, embarrassment, desire, passion, and attraction drowned her. His contagious lust knocked.

“Uh?” She snatched his tie and held his hand. She needed to steady herself. She needed to pull him closer.

“You okay?” He held her arm as the elevator door closed and proceeded downwards.

She pulled herself up. Face to face. What spell was this? Was her sister playing tricks? Her nose touched his chin. He grabbed both her arms and stopped her from kissing.

“Sorry, I’m Max from IT. You were at the ballet yesterday with Dr. Mann and her husband.” His head tilted, ever so, as if she needed to straighten him out. Closer? Or did he expect her to identify herself?

“You — what are you?” She looked down at his tie and imagined a snake. No — not here.

“Statistical analysis. Just started last week.” The elevator stopped on the third floor, and a handful of people made them scoot to the back. He didn’t let her go.

Then, she canceled her lunch plans.

~~~

On the third day they sat on her hotel bed. She made an excuse about forgetting her jacket and led him in. He slipped off her glasses. “You have the most beautiful eyes,” he said. She snapped her eyes shut, and he kissed her eyelids, nose, and mouth. He kissed her chin, neck, and shoulder. “You’re the most beautiful witch in the universe,” he added, tickling her and forcing her eyes open.

“Shut up and give my glasses back.” She placed them on the nightstand. Then she unbuttoned his shirt and made love to him for the first time.

At three in the afternoon, her aunt texted, “Come to the tenth-floor staff room, now.”

He joined her, and they chatted on the sofa as she waited. They had time because Ester never waited for anyone.

Max reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a card, but a cute woman in a suit stopped him — a commoner. Her attraction for Max sparked like a faulty arc welder. Overly emotional commoners were easy. With a quick adjustment, Elizabeth made her forget his name.

The woman stuttered, “Uh? I’m sorry, what’s your — I need a word with you — I think.”

“Jenny, this is Elizabeth. We’re waiting for Dr. Mann. Can I come to your office in about ten?”

“No. We need — what was it — to talk. It’s important. Uh, Max. Right?” She dragged him to the opposite end of the room and whispered to him. Then, they both looked at her.

Elizabeth smiled and waved, and Max waved back with his frown. Quick adjustments never lasted long enough. Jenny shook his arm and spoke in his ear. But he shook his head and started to return to the sofa.

He got halfway when Ester shouted from the door. Elizabeth didn’t respond. She scribbled her number on a scrap of paper and slipped it on her seat. Ester followed her niece’s glances and detoured for Max. “Please, don’t turn him into a dodo,” Elizabeth muttered as she stood.

“Having a good start, Mr. Renovier?” Ester extended a hand and grasped him firmly.

Max glanced at Elizabeth. “Very much, Mam.” Ester followed his gaze and raised her eyebrows — one of those I’m thinking of frogs moments.

“Mam? We’re not in the Army anymore, my boy.” Her aunt smiled, and nothing happened.

“Yes, mmm — Dr. Mann.” Jenny held Max’s arm with her mouth ajar.

“Say hello to Carl and your mother,” Ester added, not in a we’re-old-friends way, but in an ‘I know your parents, and if you cross the line with my niece, you’ll hear it from both ends.’

Ester turned. “Come Elizabeth, we have a flight to catch.”

As they flew to LA, her aunt warned, “Don’t ever see that man again. Otherwise, I’ll let your mother know, and she’ll turn him into a statue that you won’t be able to change back.”

Her aunt’s threat didn’t matter because Max didn’t call. Jenny and her aunt turned him away.

Weeks passed into months, and she couldn’t forget him. And two years later, she pulled out her postcard. In their one encounter, she snapped a pose of him after a shower — her memento. Then, she discovered he had called, despite her aunt’s spells.

---

A Fine Kettle of Fish

by Mimi Speike

The Booted Cat reimagined head-to-toe.
Chapter one of The Rogue Decamp

The steep drop of circular steps would have been a challenge for anyone, let alone an old wreck with bad knees. A wooden hand-hold was long fallen away; only the iron supports remained. The thick stone wall was pierced by staggered slits which failed to illuminate the space to any useful degree. Sly had begged to precede, to coach the descent–broken step here, sir–but the fugitive had ignored him.

They’d spent the best part of the afternoon with a panel of officials, until the recipient of irritating exhortations culminating in a disturbing proposal had leapt up, exclaiming “Umeak! Isilik oiloak pixa egin arte!” (Children! Be quiet until the chickens pee!)¹ He’d bolted without a hint of intention to his startled associate, who’d trailed him down a series of corridors to a little-used exit.

At the foot of the stair, a door opened onto serene formal gardens which were normally a source of delight for both of them, but they were too agitated to enjoy the setting. Sly knew what was in store for him. Lately, any unpleasantness kicked up the same long-litigated dispute. Batten the hatches, boy, he told himself. You’re in for a real blow this time.

He unleashed a volley of quips assessing the intellects of those they’d been sparring with. Instead of the chuckles his wit usually earned him, he got annoyed shrugs. In his best nothing-fazes-me voice he exclaimed, “Sir! This is a bad business. We must ponder a response, but I’m not up to it just now. We’ll go at it tomorrow. What do you say?”

Bent low, hand cupping a knee to steady himself, thin lips set in a deep frown, the old man spat, “You would abandon me to those fat-heads? I refuse to believe it!”

The hunched form tottered, but his aide did not back off. Small of stature, nowhere near the other’s heft, and far from possessing a youthful agility himself, he disdained to act on a very reasonable fear of personal injury. He was focused on making a point. “Not one,” he hissed, “not a one of those fools saw fit to condemn an insanity. Why would they? They were delighted to watch Monsieur d’Ollot make an ass of himself.”

The greybeard lurched to a stone bench, collapsed onto it, and buried his face in his hands. “Holy Mother,” he moaned, “steel my spine, as you did for my sire of Carcassonne.”²

Jakome, that’s the greybeard’s name, is a gentle soul. He hasn’t a ruthless bone in his body. And, poor guy, he’s easily rattled. He’s a sad-sack, but no ordinary sad-sack. He’s a sad-sack king. The meeting he’d just fled was a session of his Cabinet of Ministers.

Always timid, he’s become downright withdrawn. He does not give his opinion on any matter until his cat hops onto his lap, whereupon the two seem to confer. His adherents claim he takes comfort in the presence of a beloved pet and plays at confiding in it. Others insist it’s a way to humiliate favor-seekers and annoy adversaries. Many use the term dotty, in private.

Is the conduct a strategy? It cannot realistically be branded judicious temporizing, nor cunning dissimulation, nor, as much as one might wish to believe it, an unremarkable royal fatuity. His friends know he’s unfit to rule; they defend him nonetheless. Crown Prince Bittor will be far harder to manage.

Sly, who’s Sly? Sly is a cat. That speaks. And reads. He even writes. Here’s how he explains himself to John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s Royal Astrologer in book four of this series:

“By the way,” says Dee, “do I continue to call you O-ek?”

“Call me Sly,” says Sly.

“Sly. Fine. Sly it is.” Dee hikes an eyebrow. “So, are you?”

The cat grins. “I was born a poor, puny thing on the Scot border. I couldn’t keep up with my siblings. Bullies dubbed me Slaw, Scots, you see, for slow. A friend of mine, a sweetheart named Arabella, called me Slee, clever. When I hit London, I made it Sly.” He winks. “Yes, Doctor. Yes, I am.”

“You recited just now, Sly. Awkwardly, but you did indeed read. I know that work, every line of it. I ought to, I wrote it. A cat can be trained to fiddle, I suppose. How is it that you read? No, let’s start with a more fundamental issue. How do you speak? If you speak. If I’m not gone mad.”

“I had weak ankles,” says the cat. “No zipping around the farmyard for me. I’d post myself in a busy location and listen to the sounds made by ones who, I slowly got it into my brain, referred to themselves as man, men, woman, women, small but crucial distinctions. The concept of speech was as grand a game to me as, I imagine, ciphers are to you. I had to discover the secret. We know, do we not, that a child’s vocal apparatus is at its most flexible, most able to produce a range of sounds. Thus it is that a tyke learns to speak a foreign language flawlessly, a feat that in a few years is nigh impossible.” 

“A nice argument,” countered Dee, “but for this: the young of every species have an equal opportunity to master the trick. I have never known a dog, man’s intimate companion, to match your astonishing accomplishment.”

“Essential,” lectures the animal, “is a willingness to persist at a difficult task. I reckon it must be an obsession, for so it was with me. And there must be something extraordinary here.” He taps himself on the noggin. “One cannot be easily discouraged, for discouraging work it is. You know something of that. You drove yourself. You broke new ground. I have long admired you from afar. Here am I, face to face with the great John Dee. I can hardly believe it!”

“That makes two of us,” mutters Dee.

Sly sighed. “A fine kettle of fish,” he muttered. “The spark,” he growled, “emboldened by some exchange with your silly son, imagines he has an ally there.”

“Impossible! Bittor despises him!”

“Be that as it may, that stunt was a declaration of newfound sway. Now, part of me says he was trying to get your goat, and he knows damn well how to do it. Laugh it off. Look the other way.”

“Part of you says! What does the rest of you say?”

“Frankly, it’s a damn ingenious idea. I don’t put it past him. I put nothing past him. We know he’s prone to these eruptions but, if he’s serious, you’d think he would have managed to refrain from advertising his indecent intention.”

“I must speak to Bittor.”

“No! It was a jest, that’s your stance. Play dumb. Give the idiot his free rein. Leave containment to me. I have my own nasty ways, and you know it.”

“Do I not!” moaned Jakome.

“I can’t predict the exact nature of my involvement but, whatever I do, no blame will be laid at your door. I’ll see to that.”

“No blame? What do I say to Saint Peter, standing sentry on the door to Joy Eternal, when the inevitable hour overtakes me?”

“Please! Let’s not dig into that bucket of worms. I’ve had my fill of nonsense for one day.”

“Your fill of nonsense! You, with your ideas! That I always listen to respectfully, do you dare to deny it?”

Sly did dare to deny it, to deny it vehemently, but the geezer in a doozy of a tizzy, this was not the time to point out the fallacy of that statement.

“Belief,” the man screamed, “belief shared by millions, nonsense? Simon Peter, nonsense? Play dumb, while d’Ollot is plotting a crime beyond contemplation? I’ll tell you what the Cephas will say. Peter will condemn me on the spot–You saw to your own interests? You looked the other way while faith was mocked? Worse, you failed to hinder the corruption of the innocents? Begone, scoundrel! The pearly gate will be slammed in my face. No! I will not tolerate the deviltry. Never!”

Sly crept into a swath of greenery as, arms shot skyward, his mentor pledged frenzied allegiance to the expanse of blue slowly dulling to grey, the perhaps observant, possibly responsive region rumored to be the safe harbor after the storm-tossed sea of life, referred to by multitudes as ‘the heavens’.

Jakome’s tiny kingdom occupied a strategic position in a contentious Europe. Buffeted by hulking neighbors, Spain to the south, France to the north, it was peopled by a tribe that claimed to be in a pristine pre-Visigoth state. The people of the lowlands were mongrels. The Navarrese maintained that they conserved the undiluted blood, according to legend, of the offspring of Tubal, son of Japeth, Noah’s grandson.

This was the mountainous territory to which the first settlers had been driven by waves of newcomers. Although both remote and inaccessible, it had intermittently been subdued by foreign forces, but the people had never reconciled themselves to outside governance. Belligerence was their birthright, but active resistance did not suit them; their revolt consisted of pugnacious inertia. In the end, it was not worth the effort necessary to bludgeon them into true submission.

The annexation of Haute-Navarre³ by Castile (not Spain; a whole-peninsula patria was not yet a reality, though it was on the monarch’s wish list) would have added little to Phillip’s wealth, and he had his hands full courting more desirable hold-outs. France was divided into more than twenty provinces and sovereign territories. French unification was proceeding steadily, but the Gallic way was to expand through dynastic alliance. That possibility seemed comfortingly unlikely. In no way could Prince Bittor be considered a ‘catch’ for the mighty Valois. Haute-Navarre was let be as a haven to which traitors might withdraw while they negotiated a pardon for their crime, and as a neutral site in which a risky proposal might be advanced quietly, and as quietly withdrawn.

The economy was built on sheep: wool, sheared and spun, and on the item for which the region was best known, ewe’s-milk cheese. The only city, a settlement of five thousand situated on the side of a steep hill, was a warren of narrow, gable-roofed houses situated on narrow streets. A prosperous upper town and a squalid lower town were separated by a system of walls. The Haves, wary of the Have-nots, locked the midtown gates every night at eight and punished strays severely.

A crafty populace greeted you and cheated you with the same show of hearty welcome. They communicated with a great deal of gesticulation, seeming to convey what they would not suffer to be plainly spoken, affording them the opportunity to un-say what had never been clearly articulated. The local language challenged the best linguists. Those who gained a grasp of basics were stymied by the wholesale dropping of syllables and a lightning-quick delivery.

There were better places to be than in the wind-walloped hills of Haute-Navarre. For the natives, it was their sacred bit of God’s green earth, cherished with the ferocity that continues to roil the region today.

That a dirt-poor realm was lusted after by adjoining giants was a notion universally held. Foreigners were suspected spies. Every innkeeper tried to sell information to perplexed patrons, simultaneously badgering them for loose-lipped admissions. The nobility did the same, only demanding a vastly higher price. The king did not play the game but, due to his odd behavior, was reckoned (by neophyte diplomats, not by old hands) a master at it. His interactions were erratic, composed one minute, unhinged the next. Pushed to take a position, he frequently exploded. One ambassador wrote home, “When I see him enraged against any person whatsoever, I wish myself in Calcutta.”⁴ All this, of course, is no more than an amusing footnote to the more dangerous antics of the day.

France and Spain were both enemies of England, but at this time Spain posed the graver threat. The crown of Castile housed nearly eighty percent of the inhabitants of the peninsula and, fueled by treasure from New Spain, had become a powerhouse the likes of which the world had never seen. Sly was glad to claim kinship with Castile⁵ when it suited him. Spain had produced innumerable important written works. The cat counted himself among the letrados, the lettered elite, and corresponded with several of them under the name Sylvester Boots. Sadly, he did not live to see the publication of the greatest of Spanish novels–I’ve seen it called the greatest of all novels–Don Quixote, in 1605.

Two Catholic arch-rivals concurred on this much: The English, carriers of a deviant plague, did the devil’s work in actively spreading the contagion, to the detriment of stable relations with their European cousins. Diplomats gossiped freely about an overdue comeuppance. That Spain was preparing to invade the British Isles was well known. Sly, subjected to diatribes against his homeland,⁶ was forbidden by the king to respond to them. When he could take no more knocks, he would grumble, “I have a tongue in my head I guess, and I guess I know how to use it.”

The king would admonish him, “You have a brain in your head also, and a good one. It cannot but instruct your tongue to keep still.” And the cat, although spitting mad, would swallow his pride and make nice with men he detested.

________Chapter Notes_________

1. A Basque proverb, meaning shut up, and stay shut up. (Birds do not pee and poop separately. They plop, as we can readily see on our windshields.)
2. Bernard Délicieux, aka the Friar of Carcassonne, battled the corruption of the twelfth century church in a region not far from my Haute-Navarre.
3. Haute-Navarre is fictitious, although the kingdom of Navarre did exist in this period.
4. This comment was made about Elizabeth I by ‘a French ambassador’, according to several sources.
5. Historically correct or not, from here I refer to the conglomerate peninsula as Spain.
6. He’d been born and raised in Cumbria, in far-northern England. After years abroad, a good chunk of that time in the service of a foreign government, he remained ferociously loyal to the Virgin Queen.

---

THE APP

by S.T. Ranscht

Image credit: S.T. Ranscht

Chapter 1, The Inheritance

“The first time I met my Great-Aunt Majel, I threw up all over her antique Persian rug.” Natalie grimaced and shook her head, quite independently of the elderly elevator’s shake as it strained upward to the attorney’s office. “I think I was six. The next time, a couple years later, I broke some ancient Mayan fertility goddess figurine. That time, she took a Polaroid of me and the clay crumbles, probably so she’d remember who did it and wouldn’t invite us back. I never saw her again. Why would she leave me anything?”

Natalie’s boot heel bounced like a frantic metronome against the narrow cage’s grimy linoleum tile. She fiddled with the strap of her tawny messenger bag, and her mane of brandy hair jittered against her shoulders.

She guessed there must have been a time these musty, vacant halls and offices thrummed with life. And this elevator was a marvel of modern design, she thought, like, a hundred years ago. Now, still boasting it could carry a maximum load of 500 pounds, it screeched to the fifth floor and clunked to a stop. Its closed door stood resolute. The smeary handprints on its brass surface testified to either its obstinate nature or the scenes of carnal exuberance it had contained.

“What the hell.” She reached toward its surface.

Erick lowered her arm and leaned across her to press the Open Door button. He laughed, his hazel eyes crinkling at the corners. “Maybe she left you the rug and the rubble goddess. Or maybe she saw your future and realized she had no choice but to leave everything to you.”

“What?” Natalie scoffed, “Like destiny?”

As the door crawled open, Erick offered his hand.

She looked from his hand to his face. He’s trying, she told herself. Give him a break. Out loud, she said, “All I remember about her is that her place was crammed with art and stuff that was as weird as she was.” When she took his hand, he lightly ran his thumb over her inner wrist. She didn’t respond.

Still, he smiled that off-duty FBI smile with those bedroom eyes that had won her heart the first time. Not this time, she vowed, no matter how great the sex is.

“Oh, and the old-people smell.” She cringed. “If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t mind inheriting her apartment.” She checked the letter in her other hand. “507. This is it.”

With skill belonging to a long dead artisan, Bradford J. Morton, Esq. was painted in gold on the door’s clouded, pebbly glass pane. A slash the width of a key tip through Mr. Morton’s honorific, as well as other scars in the door’s dark wood, suggested his practice had survived more than a few dissatisfied clients over the decades.

Sharing a glance with Erick, Natalie pressed her lips together and turned the knob. The door swung out with a whimpered squeal and snapped closed behind them with a loose glass rattle. Its exhale fluttered papers on a desk at one side of the room. On a table across the room from the desk, coffee steam wafted from a silver service next to a doilied plate of bite-sized cookies. The inner office door in a side wall at the back of the reception area remained closed.

Erick helped himself to a cookie. His eyebrows drew together mid-chew, and he expelled the soggy mass into a paper napkin as the far door opened. Wadding up the napkin, he stuffed it into his jacket pocket.

A trim, early-middle-aged man emerged, tugging at his vest. Straightening the knot in his tie, he looked up.

“Oh,” he started, looking from Natalie to Erick and back. His British accent gave the sound a far more oval shape than most American mouths would have. “I apologize. I didn’t hear you come in.” He held out his hand. “Ms. Oliver?”

She extended hers. Smelling vaguely of vanilla and violets, he held only her fingers and bent over them to place the breath of a kiss on one knuckle.

Natalie’s lips parted and her pupils dilated as he straightened up. He was taller — and more attractive — than she’d first realized. “It… It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Morton. Uh…this is Erick… my boyfriend.”

“The pleasure is mine,” the man said, “but — I’m sorry for the confusion — Mr. Morton will be ready to see you shortly. I’m his assistant, Michael. May I offer you some coffee? A cookie, perhaps? Cardamom-laced snickerdoodles, gluten-free. I picked them up at the Farmer’s Market this morning.”

“Just coffee, thanks,” Erick said, sidling up against Natalie to nestle her shoulder against his chest. His stony tone drew Natalie’s stealth reprimand. Defiant, he pulled the balled-up napkin out of his pocket, and glaring at the assistant, dropped it into the wastebasket beside the desk. Going back to the coffee, Erick poured two cups, added cream to one, and returned to hand the other to Natalie.

The door Michael had closed behind him opened again. Mr. Morton’s torso and head, with its glinting waves of white hair, leaned through the opening. His spotty, skeletal hands gripped the door knob and jamb with strength belying his age.

“Is she here?” His voice was dusty with case law and precedents decades older than he was. “Ah,” he breathed, his sparkling eyes peering at Natalie through wire-rimmed glasses. Temples that curved in half circles behind his ears held them close to his face. “Yes, she is,” he answered himself. “Do come in, Miss Oliver.” He nodded at Erick. “Yes, yes, and your young gentleman friend, too, if you like.”

He stiffened his arms, pushing back from the doorway, paused to center his wispy body over his feet, and creaked back to his desk. His walk betrayed joints that refused to forgive him for not retiring twenty-five years ago.

“Michael!” he called as they settled in, “Bring me one of those cookies, would you?”

The assistant entered and placed a napkin and cookie on the desk. “Will there be anything else?” Michael asked.

“Yes. Please reschedule the masseuse for tomorrow afternoon. I think the acupuncturist will be more than enough for today.”

“Of course, Bradford.” Michael said, closing the door.

“I swear,” the attorney mumbled, picking up the cookie, “the kneading hurts worse than the needles.” Reaching for the only folder on his desk, he bit the cookie in half. “Mmmm. Savory. Reminds me of Mumbai.” His words faded as he gazed absently into an unseen distance.

As the silence stretched, Natalie and Erick exchanged looks of growing uncertainty.

“Mr. Morton?” Natalie’s volume was slightly louder than conversational. “How long did you know my great-aunt?”

“Hm?” He tuned his focus to Natalie’s face. “How long have I known Majel? A very long time. Most of my life. We met on a dig in Jericho, back in ’43.” His arid lungs released a desert breath. “Those were heady times. Majel had a way of finding things no one could explain.” He sighed again, but said nothing more.

Shifting in his seat, Erick cleared his throat. “Mr, Morton. Sir. Do you think we could get on with the reading? Please.”

Natalie nudged his ankle with her foot. “Relax,” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

Mr. Morton rallied without acknowledging Erick was even in the room. “Miss Oliver, I hope you will forgive an old man’s reminiscence. I really was very fond of your aunt. But,” his voice turned crisp, “let’s get down to business.” He pulled a one-page document with an attached photograph from the folder. Lifting the photo, he reviewed the paper.

Natalie tried, but couldn’t make out what was in the picture.

“This is your copy.” Mr. Morton was saying. “As you will see, your great-aunt, Majel Genevieve Oliver, being of sound mind and body, et cetera, et cetera, left everything to the Smithsonian except for the one object she bequeathed to you.”

His thumb and forefinger worked their way into his vest’s watch pocket, dug around the watch, and retrieved a small brass key. Holding it up in victory, he turned his attention to one of the desk drawers and fumbled the key into its lock.

The drawer opened with grinding reluctance. The attorney’s knotty fingers dipped in to extract a cardboard gift box stained with age and slightly bigger than a Rubik’s cube. He set it on the desk and leaned forward to scooch it toward Natalie.

Waiting what she hoped was a respectful five seconds, Natalie reached across the desk to claim the box. It was weightier than she expected. She removed the lid, pulled out a brittle crumple of waxy brown paper, and dumped a reddish-gold disk about the size of a hockey puck into her hand. She let the box drop to the desk.

Spiraling stars engraved on the edge and both sides of the disk scattered reflected light, twinkling into her eyes. She pressed her fingers into the three round depressions equally spaced around the center on one side. On the other, she found three unevenly spaced parallel grooves across the center.

Natalie raised her eyes to Mr. Morton’s wizened visage. “What is it?”

His head wobbled as he shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t believe Majel knew, either, but she insisted it was special. She wouldn’t even tell me where she found it — I think she had an idea she might return to wherever it was and try to find another one.” He unclipped the photo and held it out to her. “You can see it here in Majel’s sitting room.”

It was the Polaroid of eight-year-old Natalie in her great-aunt Majel’s trinket-congested living room. Lining the two visible walls, floor-to-ceiling shelves held myriad bizarre objects. Fossils and figurines covered every little end table and tea tray. Natalie remembered the cheek-burning embarrassment that had made her wish the floor would open and swallow her. Her olfactory nerves recreated a phantom old-people smell.

Expelling a brief huff through her nose, she took a closer look at the photo. Shards of the shattered fertility goddess lay scattered around the little girl’s feet, but the girl’s attention was directed toward the table she had accidentally knocked the figurine from. She was reaching toward the base of a crystal vase containing a single rose. And there it was, the disk she now held, playing the part of a coaster beneath the vase.

“Oh, yes,” Natalie said, making no attempt to disguise her sarcasm, “that’s very special indeed.” She passed the photo to Erick, who laughed out loud when he finally sorted out the visual clutter.

“Don’t underestimate Majel’s instincts,” Mr. Morton cautioned. “Her international reputation for identifying valuable artifacts is unmatched among her colleagues and serious collectors. In fact,” he continued, “the reason the Smithsonian is to receive everything else is that they spent the last three decades of her life appraising and cataloging her finds and negotiating for sole possession upon her death.”

“So why did she leave this thing to Natalie?” Erick asked.

Mr. Morton looked at Erick as though the young man had just materialized out of thin air. His halting answer gave the impression he wasn’t certain there really was anyone there to speak to. “She—” He turned back to Natalie. “She never shared her reason with me.” Then firmly, “She said you would know why.”

Natalie looked again at her younger self reaching to touch the disk, and remembered something so improbable, it must have been a figment of her imagination. “I… I thought I heard it humming.” She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Kids, right?”

Erick leaned forward, studying her face. “But what if you did?”

“Why?” she asked. “Are you taking notes for the Bureau?”

Leaning his head to one side, the attorney shrugged again. “All I can tell you is that Majel was adamant. The Smithsonian offered to name an entire wing after her if they could have that piece, too. Without it, all they promised was a plaque.” His shoulders shook as he chuckled. “She told them she didn’t need an entire wing any more than she needed a damned plaque, and they could sell everything she gave them if they wanted to. They never mentioned it again, but I had Michael retrieve it before I notified them of her death.”

What do they think it is? Natalie wondered. Replacing the disk in its box with more care than she’d used to remove it, she reinserted the packing paper and closed the lid.

“Maybe you should buy a vahse,” Erick joked.

A chuckle died in Natalie’s throat.

“Oh. One more thing, Miss Oliver.” The attorney shuffled through the folder’s remaining papers and extracted a sealed envelope. Stroking the writing on the front, he said, “Majel instructed me to give you this with the bequest.”

Natalie held out her hand. He continued to draw his fingers across the elegant script as if he were trying to absorb it. The overhead light glinted off a wetness in his eyes. She placed her hand on his. “Mr. Morton, I am sorry for your loss. Majel was fortunate you were her friend.”

He mumbled, “Thank you,” and turned away to dab at his eyes with the cookie napkin.

Natalie had never seen her great-aunt’s handwriting before, but the strength and flourish of the flowing cursive embodied everything she had come to believe about Majel Genevieve Oliver. The writing commanded, “Natalie — open in private.” Without sharing that message with Erick, she tucked the envelope and then the box into her bag.

After signing Mr. Morton’s Receipt of Bequest form, Natalie rose to shake his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Morton. I’m glad we met. I wish I’d known Majel better.”

As they entered the outer office, Erick helped himself to another cup of coffee. Natalie glanced at him over her shoulder before extending her hand to Michael, who took it in both of his.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” she said.

Michael’s lashes shadowed his ocean blue eyes as he bowed his head. “My pleasure,” he smiled.

“Could you please direct me to the restroom?”

“Of course.” Freeing one of his hands to gesture, he said, “Left down the hallway, third door on the right,” then bent once again over her hand to brush it with his lips.

“Let’s go,” Erick said. Taking her elbow, he steered her toward the door, which she opened. She preceded him down the hall, the echoes of her bootsteps crossing like ricocheting ripples.

With its original fixtures, the restroom was a simple toilet-sink-and-mirror affair, but someone had added a Louis XV armchair upholstered in lavender damask. The towels were cloth. A modest arrangement of tiny pink, lavender, and turquoise blossoms lent color to the marble counter and gave off a soft powdery scent. She locked the door and took Great-Aunt Majel’s note out of her bag. After considering the door’s thinness, she turned on the water before ripping the envelope open.

The same confident penmanship poured across a single sheet of parchment.

            My dear Natalie,

My parents travelled the world seeking out the unique and impossible-to-find. I was fortunate to be their student and companion.

When I was a young teen, decades before the ancient stone bridge near Blue Nile Falls was broken, we followed whispered rumors of a singular curiosity up the Nile to the rugged terrain surrounding the Falls. Of course I made my way to places no person was ever expected to go. But that was where I made what I believe is my most important find, the Star Disk.

The first time I heard it hum was in 1947. The second was when you were here. I haven’t heard it since.

I have never been able to trace the disk’s source or discern its purpose. My hope is that, with today’s technology, you will.

My deepest regret throughout my lifetime of artifact hunting is the truth that one can trust very few people with one’s secrets. I urge you to hold the Star Disk close and reveal it to no one unless you absolutely must.

                                                Wishing you good fortune and trusted friends,

                                                                        Majel

Natalie turned off the water and dropped onto the lavender damask to re-examine the disk. So she really had heard it hum. What was this thing? Where did it come from? Who made it? What was it supposed to do?

What was she supposed to do?

Returning the letter and the disk to her bag, she jumped when Erick knocked on the door.

“Hey, Nat,” he called, “are you all right in there?”

“I’m fine,” she called back, flushing the toilet. “I’ll be right out.” She turned on the water to wash her hands and stared at her reflection in the gilt-framed mirror. Thanks, Great-Aunt Majel. Now what?

Rejoining Erick, Natalie said, “Let’s take the stairs.” When he reached for her hand, she pretended not to notice, opened the stairwell door, and clattered down the steps in front of him.

~~~

“Hold up, Nat,” Erick called as she pushed through the street door. A chilly late morning gust tinted with a wood fire’s smokey tang swirled a few November-crunchy leaves and bits of litter around their feet.

Natalie hesitated and brushed back the hair that had blown across her cheek before she turned to face him.

Taking both her hands, he studied her eyes. “You read that note, didn’t you?” he asked. “And it upset you.”

He always knew. It wouldn’t do any good to deny it. She nodded, but avoided his gaze when she admitted, “It made me a little paranoid.”

“About me?” he probed.

She gave her head a little shake. “No. No, of course not,” she lied. “I just need to sort through it.”

“Can I help? You know I’m here if you want to talk about it.”

“I know.” She leaned against his chest so his arms could pull her closer, but he lifted her chin so her lips could accept his lingering kiss.

When he released her, his eyes gleamed, and she couldn’t deny her spreading warmth.

“We either go get something to eat,” he whispered into her ear, “or we go home right now.”

She smothered a moan. “Can we do both?” Mentally, she kicked herself. Why am I so weak with him?

“We can.” He smiled that smile and took her hand to run from this run-down brick desert to lose themselves in the surging New York crowd they could see only a few blocks away.

Next

---

Chapter 1: God and Human Suffering

by Barb Woolard

NOTES:

This is the first chapter of a book for which the title is still a WIP but which will contain the words “thoughts and prayers” in some way.

Chapter 2: Who or What Is God?

Chapter titles 3-10: The God of Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, and Chistian Nationalism; The Gods of Popular Culture; Does God Answer Prayer?; Parting the Sea; Prayers of the Oppressed; Prayers that Make a Difference; What about Atheists?; An Allegory and a Prayer

I have omitted much of the source information to prevent interruption of the reading; but it is safely recorded and would, of course, be included in the event of publication.

God and Human Suffering

“Let’s all send our thoughts and prayers for the victims of this tragedy.”

“Thoughts and prayers” has become a cultural cliché and the panacea for social ills during a time when tragedies, many of them preventable, occur with frightening regularity. The problem is thoughts and prayers are not saving any lives; what we need now is action, and I am going to argue that prayer and action are not incompatible, that in fact prayer cannot be divorced from action. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his sermon “On the Misuse of Prayer,” said, “Prayer must never be a substitute for work and intelligence.” Simply put, talk is cheap; prayer requires action.

John Mellencamp, in “The Eyes of Portland,” sings:

“In this land of plenty where nothing gets done
To help those who are empty and unable to run
Your tears and prayers won’t help the homeless.”

No, tears and prayers won’t build houses. They also won’t feed the hungry; comfort or compensate grieving families whose loved ones have been senselessly shot to death; cure the addicted; save the targets of racial, ethnic, and religious hatred from violations of their rights; or protect the LGBTQ+ community whose gender identity or sexual orientation makes them victims of biased laws, religious scorn, and hate crimes. What tears and prayer can do is lead human beings to act as “instruments of [God’s] peace,” in the words of Saint Francis. The hard fact is that God—if such a supernatural being exists—can work only through humans who choose to become instruments of love and peace.

I offer these statistics to demonstrate the enormity of the social ills for which our actions, on both government and personal levels, have been insufficient or misguided. 

The United States is currently the only country in the world with more civilian-held guns than people: 120.5 firearms per 100 people. By my math, that’s 399,939,500 guns, compared to 331,900,000 people. Ali Mokdad, professor of global health and epidemiology at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), told NPR that the United States stands out among “other well-off countries” for its level of gun violence. Countries which do have higher rates than the U.S. are those with a “large presence of gangs and drug trafficking” or where there is political unrest and economic crisis.

According to the IHME,  “When we look exclusively at high-income countries and territories with populations of 10 million or more, the US ranks first.” 

And guns are not the only problem. The National Alliance to End Homelessness reports 582,462 people experiencing homelessness in this country, or about 18 out of every 10,000, and families with children account for 28 percent.

USDA statistics show “10.2 percent of U.S. households were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 3.8 percent (5.1 million households) that had very low food security,” as of October 18, 2022.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) included this chart in their NIDA IC Fact Sheet 2022 on another public health crisis:

UCLA School of Law Williams Institute reports on hate crimes against LGBTQ+ citizens: “About one out of 10 violent victimizations against LGBT people are hate crimes, according to a new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. LGBT people are nine times more likely than non-LGBT people to be victims of violent hate crimes. In addition, LGBT violent hate crime victims are more likely to be younger, have a relationship with their assailant, and have an assailant who is white.”

Many times during the 2020 COVID crisis, people on social media said they didn’t trust the CDC or Dr. Fauci or the manufacturers of life-saving vaccines; so they were just going to trust God to take care of them and pray for protection. I have no way of knowing how well that strategy worked out for those individuals, but the number of COVID deaths in this country stands at 1,134,710 as of July 8, 2023 (CDC). I have to believe many of those deaths could have been prevented.

Our country is in distress, and yet we continue to offer the impotent solution of “thoughts and prayers.” Something has to change; in fact, a lot has to change. Thoughts and prayers have their place but only if they result in action which acknowledges human responsibility for solving human problems. My mother taught me, “God helps those who help themselves.”

Senate Chaplain Barry Black, in his prayer for the March 28, 2023 Senate session, prayed for senators to “reject the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous” and asked God to “use them to battle the demonic forces that seek to engulf us.” Amen, Reverend. This book is filled with examples of everyday people who saw a need and, by prayer coupled with hard work, have accomplished miraculous things.

I believe prayers, if they are to be effective, must consist of three elements: talking, listening, and acting. If I were to make a pie chart to illustrate what prayer truly is, it would look like this:

The yellow area represents talking, which I believe should not take long. It should consist of expressing one’s desire to see a situation changed and making a sincere appeal to be guided toward some positive personal action. The blue area represents listening: sitting still, meditating, waiting for a response to that appeal for guidance. You won’t hear an audible voice, or at least I never have; but you will feel your inner eyes opening to embrace inspiration, motivation, and insight into what you can personally do to see your desire fulfilled. The green area, the largest of all, is action. To stop after talking or after talking and listening is not prayer; prayer must result in action if it is to make any difference at all.

In Chapter 3, I talk about two sets of personal friends who founded nonprofit organizations to help feed and house some very deserving people. Not everyone can do that; but everyone can make a phone call, send a text message, write a note or an email, or take a pie to a struggling or grieving friend—or stranger. Everyone can also write their members of Congress to urge them to do their jobs. Some can volunteer, as I did, at a local soup kitchen or food bank; and some can join marches, as I have, to demonstrate to the world that they want change. A text or a pie won’t solve a problem or heal a broken heart, but it will let the recipient know he or she is not alone or forgotten during a difficult time. Prayer is about community, connection; it means no one should ever feel abandoned in suffering. Prayer cannot be used as an abdication of human responsibility.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said this about prayer:

“There can be no gainsaying of the fact that prayer is as natural to the human organism as the rising of the sun is to the cosmic order. Prayer is indigenous to the human spirit. It represents a throbbing desire of the human heart. As [Thomas] Carlyle stated in a letter to a friend: ‘Prayer is and remains the native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.’ We often try to call prayer ‘absurd and presumptuous.’ But a yearning so age-old and deep-rooted cannot be slain by a couple of objectives [sic]. Men have often tried to dismiss it by affirming that pressing the rigidity of natural law makes it impossible. But such a declaration is unconvincing; for there is something deep down within us that makes us know that God works in a paradox of unpredictable newness and trustworthy faithfulness.”

I am not as eloquent as Dr. King, but I also believe prayer is a natural instinct, motivated by the human craving to understand the world around us, to make sense of things we can’t comprehend or explain but which often cause the deepest pain. The question “Why?” is among a child’s first utterances, and we spend the rest of our lives, from childhood on, looking for answers. When we fail to find those answers in the natural realm, we look instinctively to the supernatural. Concepts of God vary according to culture, religious beliefs, and personal upbringing; but a large percentage of the world’s population has the sense of something or someone who exists outside the realm of our senses and who, though unseen, affects the things which are seen and experienced.

No one has definitively answered the question of who that supernatural being is,  because that concept defies human understanding. Bishop John Shelby Spong says, “There is a difference between my experience of God and who God is.” The God images we have created, as I will discuss further in Chapter 2, are of necessity anthropomorphic, because the only way we are capable of explaining the unknown is by relating it to what is known. One of the obstacles to prayer for modern humans is that those anthropomorphic images of God are often primitive, illogical, and nonsensical, based on ancient models incompatible with modern understanding of the world.

Spong also adds, “We live in a religiously pluralistic world, but there is only one God. This God is not a Christian, nor is this God an adherent of any religious system. All religious systems are human creations by which people in different times and different places seek to journey into that which is ultimately holy and wholly other.” Many religions claim to be heaven’s gate keepers, but in truth, God is the Spirit of Love who gives equal status to every human—religious or not—and  hears every prayer with equal compassion.

Henry Gee, in his book A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, says human beings are the only species on the planet who are aware of themselves, of their existence in the world, and of their impact on the earth. If that is true, it also seems fair to say that humans are alone in their awareness of and desire to connect with the supernatural. Cats, dogs, chimpanzees, and elephants can live their entire lives and die without ever giving a thought to whether there is a god, how they should relate to that god, whether that god causes the maladies that send them to the vet, and whether if they were to ask that god very nicely to take away the malady and make them well again, the god would grant their wish. Yet humans have wrestled for centuries with all of those questions and more.

In their attempts to find answers to the plethora of questions, people of various cultures and time periods have recorded their personal experiences and their own understanding of the supernatural in the form of stories. The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Sutras, and others are collections of those stories, which serve as a kind of history of the human struggle to connect with the supernatural. I do not believe any of those writings can claim inerrancy or divine authorship, but their value as a written record of human beings’ efforts to connect with and know the supernatural is inestimable. Literalists who argue for verbal inspiration by God only serve to detract from the message which, when we simply let the stories speak for themselves, can be a powerful source of wisdom and truth. It is to those sources we often turn when seeking answers to life’s trials and mysteries, and it is misunderstanding of those sources which has led to our often damaging concepts of who God is, how we should relate to God, and what we can expect from God.

Ancient cultures were polytheistic: the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse, the Celts, to name only a few. Polytheists had whole pantheons of gods to whom they could attribute earthly phenomena. In those pre-scientific cultures, the weather, the sea, love and beauty, fertility, war, the sun, music, the hunt, and dozens more earthly domains all had their own appointed gods and goddesses; the whole range of both grand and petty human emotions was also ascribed to various gods. Those gods frequently intervened in human affairs, some gods being loving and benevolent while others were jealous and vindictive, inflicting their personal wrath on hapless humans.

I believe the God of the Hebrew Old Testament is a carryover from polytheism, reflecting now-revisited concepts of God as an unseen power who regularly intervenes in human affairs and who is the primary cause of everything that happens both to the world at large and to individual people. The angry God who must constantly be appeased by unquestioned obedience and sacrifice, who in Genesis rains down fire from heaven to destroy cities which have displeased him (that God was always male), who also in Genesis sends flood waters to obliterate all life on Earth save a handful of humans and animals because humans had sinned too much, and who in Exodus drowns an entire army in the Red Sea to save his “chosen” people from the Egyptian soldiers’ wrath is not the God Jesus personified in the New Testament. Did God change? I don’t think so. I think the stories changed because of greater human understanding brought about through Jesus’ life and teachings, lessons from other great teachers, and advances in human research and knowledge.

The angry Old Testament God was Zeus on steroids, sending thunder bolts, making deals with Satan, raining fire, and destroying whole populations, but then dropping manna from heaven to feed God’s “chosen” as they wandered in the wilderness. Who was this God? Who does that stuff? In the New Testament, Jesus showed up as the human face of God: a tangible, relatable, just-like-us-only-different person who came to say, “Look at me if you want to know who God is.” “I and my father are one.” The differences between the God reflected in Jesus and the God who made a bet with Satan in the Book of Job or burned Sodom and Gomorrah to the ground and turned Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt in Genesis are too obvious to mention.

One problem for modern humans is that, even though our knowledge has expanded exponentially, we’re still following pagan reasoning when we try to explain natural and supernatural occurrences; even people who claim no religious belief are influenced by images and ideas from the Christian Bible. Although we have science, philosophy, and psychology to explain how natural phenomena occur, what is real and true, and why people behave as they do, when it comes to God and prayer, we tend to revert to primitive thinking. In Irvine Welsh’s short story “The Granton Star Cause,” discussed further in Chapter 6, God is an angry white man who tells the person next to him in the bar, “I’m getting a little bit fed up with all this self-justification. It’s not for you c—s to criticize me. I gave you the place. I made you c—s in my own image. You lot get on with it. You f—ing well sort it out.”

I especially like Welsh’s use of “self-justification”: People blame God to shift culpability from themselves, granting themselves absolution from responsibility. If we are to believe in God as the Spirit of Love, it’s high time we let go of God as the inflictor of pain and suffering. It’s time we let go of pagan thinking and acknowledge that God is not the cause of everything that happens, that things happen for two reasons: because we live in a world filled with hazards to  which no one is immune and because humans are born with freedom of choice, which we do not always exercise responsibly. It’s time we stop asking God to cure our social ills, such as gun violence, and admit we caused the problems and it’s our job to fix them. We can ask God for strength and wisdom, to help us help ourselves; but we can’t ask God to clean up our messes and make our country safer. That’s up to us.

We ask God “Why?” when the answer is right before us and has nothing to do with God. No amount of prayer will yield an explanation for why an officer sworn to uphold the law would murder a person who was no threat to the officer’s safety, why innocent children are shot to death in a place of learning which should be a safe haven, why a gay man was beaten to death on his 29th birthday after being randomly chosen by a stranger who just needed to kill a gay person, why a couple would give birth to nine children and lose all of them to the state because of neglect caused by addiction, why lawmakers are obsessed with seeing who can pass the most restrictive laws to save unborn babies while doing little or nothing to protect the lives of breathing children.

God did not cause any of those things to happen. They were caused by human irresponsibility and will have to be cured by human responsibility, and both are choices. Each person in the world can choose to act responsibly or to act irresponsibly, and religious indoctrination does not guarantee more of the former. The determination to act with love toward one’s neighbor (every other person on the planet) must come from within, where I believe God places the sparks of love, kindness, and compassion but cannot force anyone to act on those instincts. 

A person I’ve never met posted this on social media in a description of their time spent living in the Middle East: “One of my favorite things is when you are in a local place on a Friday morning and the call to prayer comes on, and the whole neighborhood just enters the energy of respect. And the neighborhood lets go of chaos and receives calm. Lets go of movement and receives stillness” (Alex McRobs, quoted with permission).

What our country needs is not necessarily more people who call themselves Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or atheists, but more people who understand being quiet; who know what it means to enter the energy of respect which the universe gives all who are receptive; who can open themselves to releasing their personal, social, and societal chaos and allowing calmness to fill and guide them; who are capable of stopping and being still. It’s during those times of quiet and stillness that we can hear what Shakespeare calls “the music of the spheres.”

Words and names lose their meanings. What matters is knowing that we are all connected and that peace on Earth will never be bestowed from above; it can be created only by humans who recognize the spark of divinity in every other human, regardless of race, gender identity, sexual identity, or religious/a-religious belief. Peace will come when more people stop talking and start listening. I call that prayer; you may call it what you wish. Our children’s lives and future wellbeing will be saved not by our words but by our actions—actions which place the common good above self-interest, religious differences, and “rights.” Our children’s right to live and feel safe supersedes all else. There’s our common ground.

As the world’s population approaches 8 billion souls, we are surrounded by suffering, and we crave explanations and solutions for what seems cruel and unfair. We grapple with how or whether we should pray because many of our learned concepts of God are erroneous, thus our expectations are unrealistic. God is blamed for human atrocities and then implored to right human wrongs. Praying for God to “bless” people in whose suffering we are complicit is an act of deepest hypocrisy, not of faith. Thoughts and prayers must result in action if our country is to live up to its own hype; God can’t bring peace without us.

---

Cosmic Chalk

by Sandra Randall

This story came from a contest I entered in May of 2022. It was intended to be a flash fiction short story. Stories don’t always work like that for me. To me, stories are but moments in the timeline of a larger story. This piece encouraged me to write a second chapter. The second chapter is the only chapter of this work that was not a contest piece. And if you’re curious, I was disqualified for submitting 1300 words … just a tad over 1.000! They were kind and still sent me feedback. I knew I was over, but I was also down to the wire with the submission. I think (but don’t clearly remember) I had 48hrs to write this.

Here are the contest details and parameters:

YeahWrite Superchallenge #24

This round you’ll be writing a story in 1,000 words or fewer with two prompts.

Prompts:

Your object prompt is: a broken piece of chalk

The “chalk” may be chalk like for a blackboard or sidewalk, or a more formal artist’s chalk like a chalk pastel. It may not be an artist’s charcoal, or a pigment stick held together with wax or oil (notice how that’s someone else’s prompt already). At least one piece should appear in your story, but the original unit that the chalk was acquired in must have been broken or smashed at some point before your story starts. 

Your motivation prompt is: A character who wants to find a key they lost at least six months ago.

The key is NOT: a piano key, a musical key, a “church key” bottle opener. It is a KEY, an object that opens a lock or starts a piece of equipment. It can be the sort of electronic key that you just have to push a button on or swipe past the lock. It may also be the kind of key that winds a clock or gears.

The key doesn’t need to belong to this character, but they have to have had it in their possession long enough to lose it. The thing the key opens need not belong to the character. Opening/starting/unlocking/winding the thing need not be the plot of the story, although it can be.

Chapter 1: Broken

The book thumped to the floor. Vor opened her eyes, surprised she had fallen asleep. Rain beat the bay windows of her mother’s cozy front room. Childhood memories crowded around her as she retrieved the book from the floor. Since Daddy died six years ago, her visits home had dwindled.

The wind howled under the eves of the old Victorian farmhouse as the front door banged open in the foyer. She flinched. Wind and rain snatched at curtains and rattled pictures on the wall. Vor scurried to close the door wondering, Where is everyone? “Mom?” She called up the wide staircase which lead from the front door to the second floor.

“We’re in here.” Called Stella from the kitchen. 

Down a short hallway from the foyer to the back of the house, Vor made her way to the kitchen. Her foot sent a small object skittering to bounce off the wall. Curious, she bent over to examine it. A cream-colored piece of chalk the size of her thumb rested on the wooden floor. Rounded on one end from use, and jagged on the other made her look for another piece. Finding none, she slipped the piece in her pocket and pushed the kitchen door open. 

Charlie, a mouthful of cereal, looked up as she entered. Mark’s sullen glare remained on the table, his bowl of soggy contents untouched. Stella, pouring coffee into a mug, smiled at her. 

“Did none of you hear the door bang open?” 

“Of course we did, dear,” said her mother. “I knew you were out there and would get it. That stupid latch seems to be faulty.” 

“Why don’t you fix it?” she asked, walking around the table to pour a mug for herself. 

Stella laughed, “I keep meaning to and I forget. It works well enough, I suppose.”

Vor rolled her eyes. “Mom, this house will fall down around you if you don’t maintain it like Daddy did.”

“I know.” Stella replied softly. Sadness twitched at the corners of her smile.

Mark growled, a soft noise of frustration. “What’s with him?” she looked at Charlie, but it was her mother who answered.

“Seems he woke up in a foul mood this morning.”

Mark growled again.

Vor frowned at him. “Mark, do you suppose you could use your words?”

Charlie tipped his bowl and slurped the rest of his cereal in his mouth, swallowed, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and said, “He hasn’t said a word since last night. Never seen him in this bad a mood before.” he shrugged, bewildered.

Vor sipped her coffee. Remembering the piece of chalk in her pocket, “Oh Mom, found this in the hallway.” 

Issuing a low growl, Mark lunged for the piece of chalk she held out to Stella.

 Recoiling, she dropped her mug. Ceramic shattered on the tile floor, splattering coffee. Mark yelped and backed up against the wall. Charlie shouted, “Mark! What the hell, dude!”

“Oh. Oh, no!” cried Stella, examining the chalk she somehow retrieved in the chaos.

“What’s wrong?” asked Vor as Charlie handed her a roll of paper towels.

Stella hissed and looked at Charlie. “Was Mark using this?”

Charlie shrugged. “Looks like the piece he was using yesterday. We needed something to draw outlines with for the car we’re working on. Mark found it somewhere in the house.”

“My studio is likely,” she frowned. “Vor, run, get the keys from the hook on the foyer wall.” the command in her voice was at odds with her calm demeanor. “I need to have a closer look at Mark.”

“Key’s? You mean daddy’s shop keys?” Vor hadn’t moved. 

Mark growled as Stella neared him. 

“Charlie, come here. I need to look at his eyes. Can you make sure he doesn’t bite me? Let’s have him sit in the chair.”

“Mother!” Vor’s trepidation escalated. “There are no keys on the foyer wall. Daddy’s shop keys were missing after his funeral. I know. I went looking for them.”

“Nonsense.” Retorted Stella. She was peering into one of Mark’s eyes while Charlie restrained him. “Yep.” She declared. “He’s been using my chalk.” 

Vor glanced sideways at her mother. Was there more pride than worry in her voice?

Stella strode out of the kitchen to the Foyer. 

Vor and Charlie followed. Mark had not moved from his huddled stance against the wall, panting. 

“How did I not notice that?” Stella grunted, staring at the empty hook.

“Mom, what’s going on?”

Stella held up the piece of chalk. “Do you remember when you and Liv were children? You could use anything in the studio, except the chalk?”

Vor nodded. She hadn’t understood why, but something about those chalks meant danger. “What does the chalk do?” she asked, suddenly fearful of the answer. “Will Mark be alright?”

“Limestone and gypsum make normal chalk. This chalk crafted from extraterrestrial substances is unique. Each stick, represented by its color, performs a specific function, which affects the user. If the chalk remains whole and the user understands its properties, it is a powerful tool. This broken piece is as dangerous as using an electric tool with frayed wiring. As you can see, Mark suffers the effects. I can fix it, but I need that key to power the device to repair this chalk.” 

 “We need to find that key. I’ll check Daddy’s shop.”

“Charlie, check all the drawers in the house. Mom, go to the studio and get everything ready.” She directed as she slipped on rain boots and grabbed her father’s old great coat that lingered on the pegs by the door. She put her hand in the pocket. One of his pipes still lived there. Nostalgia twitched her lips into a sad smile. 

Wind pushed the door as she opened it. Head down, she sloshed across the yard between the wind whipped willow trees.

She pushed the door open to the shop, increasing her hope the keys were in there. Rain dripped off her, muddying the dust covered benches and floor. Stacks of paper, wood, metal parts, and jars of nails and odd bits filled one cubby hole lined wall, and shelves of boxes on another. Despair clutched at her stomach. So many places to look!

She closed her eyes and imagined where a key ring would land when a person walked in. Off to her right, she saw a rusted tool box. She opened it. No key ring. She searched a few more drawers and under dusty papers. Nothing. She turned to go back to the house and there, hanging from the lock on the door, was the key ring. She hurried back to the house.

In the studio, her mother unwrapped a large intricate device. It looked like a coffee grinder with a hopper on top and a small pull out chamber at the bottom. Next to the device sat an ornate metal box, opened to reveal several colorful packets, two cork stoppered jars and a bottle with an eyedropper. 

Stella placed the broken piece of chalk into the bottom chamber and removed the two small jars from the box. Using a miniature ladle, she scooped something out of each jar and carefully dumped it into the hopper on top of the device. Next, she added two drops from the small bottle. She rifled through the colorful packets, choosing a cream-colored packet, matching the broken piece of chalk. After adding the contents to the hopper, she took the keys from Vor. Pulling a small intricate key off the ring; she inserted into a slot at the back of the device. It whirred to life for several minutes, then slowed and stopped with a clunk. The chamber popped open, softly glowing with ethereal light. Stella picked up the chalk, relief expelled in her words. “If we were too late, the chalk would not have repaired.”

Vor sagged onto a stool. She wasn’t entirely certain what happened, but she was grateful she found the key in time.

Charlie, followed by Mark, rushed into the studio. “He has a headache, but he’s not grumpy anymore!” Declared Charlie.

Everyone but Mark Laughed.