Fiction

It was a typical Caribbean day: bright and sunny, the sky dotted with small puffy cumulus clouds drifting quietly and rapidly by. The harbor was busy with small vessels and larger ferry boats cruising back and forth on the sparkling, lightly white-capped waters.

A bow-legged man smacking his bum with a riding crop. A fat woman bouncing a healthy sixty-year old man on her knee. So-called eccentric’s rubbing his shoulders for a pound. He’d left one city for another and couldn’t tell the difference. He followed the vomit trail out of the subway and looked around. The streets where green and smelt of cider.. the people... multi-coloured and smelling of shite.  Then a taxi with cabbage-eating driver, taking him to his rented room in Junkhead Towers.

“I feel weird,” I said as we neared Buck’s Bar.

“You are weird,” my friend Chase joked. “We’re all weird, dude. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

“I just feel funny,” I said.

“Couple a cold ones will take care of that, Eric, my man,” Chase said.

“Sure,” I said. “That’ll do the trick.”

As I scribe and recount my experiences, it was as if a dream… to which I cannot return. He said his name was Colonel Virgil. In a vision, he offered me an opportunity to see what the future would hold. He was able to converse with me in my native Tuscan dialect and French. His English was of a dialect I did not speak. He explained much that I had yet to understand. He said he would be my guide.

Dickie Penn was an old-style entrepreneur, with the flair of Richard Branson, the slyness of Rupert Murdoch and the seething hatred of mankind as Lord Alan Sugar, with a dash of Lord Jeffrey Archer's mischievousness thrown in.

Barney’s first out-of-body experience came when he jumped into the public fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center. Lydia the sorceress smiled at the edge of the sequinned waters. It was seven days before Christmas, and the new cold weather was making the serpentine living around New York’s upper west side streets more acute and more immediate.

The Baby is born. It’s a boy, just like Michael had said it would be. Eve is sleeping, and we are safe. I hold this Baby in my arms, and I don’t know if I should be happy about this, or if I should wish that it had never been born.

The deer came out of nowhere. Before either of them could react, it was already over. For a second, Mike remembered the eyes of the creature, how bright and circular they were. Like moons, he’d thought, and then the car had impacted, sending the animal one way and the car the other. Then all had been noise, movement and finally, darkness.

The courtyards of Katsuro’s castle bustled with dozens of soldiers and servants who hurried along to fulfill whatever order the Daimyo had thrown their way. Some men carried individual weapons, while others lugged entire crates or barrels in their arms through the fortress grounds.