Short Stories
Masks
The camp office had once been a farmhouse, in an earlier century. It was a single-story, wood-clapboard building in need of new paint, nestled between two ancient oak trees at the top of the hill overlooking the lake. Now it housed the camp director’s office, in the main room inside the front doorway, the infirmary, through a doorway on the left side of that room, and the camp store, through a doorway on the right side. None of the teenagers had ever noticed that it had an attic.
But it was now the weekend, that quiet period between when the previous week’s families had departed and before the next week’s arrived. So most of the staff had the day off. Julia, Anton, and Marcie were all in their first year on the summer staff, having just finished their first year of college. It didn’t pay much, but there were worse ways to spend your summer. They had been hanging out on the porch of the now empty office when they decided, on a whim, to explore inside. That’s when they had first noticed a narrow doorway at the back of the wall that the infirmary shared with the office. Opening the door had revealed a narrow stairway leading up to an attic. Read more …
Death
One day, in the middle of the afternoon, halfway through sketching a character for the next scene, Declan suddenly dropped his pencil, stood up from his desk, and stared, wide-eyed, at nothing in particular. He realized, at that moment, that he had seen Death.
Not the black-robed skeleton with the scythe. That would be too obvious. Death could not sneak up on you wearing something like that. Rather, it had been a well-dressed young woman. Someone who would easily fit in. Someone who had fit in – until now.
He had seen her off and on, recently. Passing him on the sidewalk on his way to work. Once in the subway. Once in a gallery at the Museum of Natural History.
These sightings were not remarkable, all by themselves. It was the last two, on successive days, that now caused the pieces to fall into place. When he was coming out of the hospital after visiting his ailing mother, she was there – waiting on the bench, right outside. Read more …
Guasha
Henry Gladstone was sitting in the office of the director of the Christian Missionary Society, discussing a project for a new Indian translation of the Bible. He had previously been a Classics scholar at Oxford, but had married into a little bit of money, and was now, in the fall of 1835, a gentleman of leisure, passing his time as an amateur philologist. He was a regular at the Philological Society meetings at London University.
The door to the office was open, so he could overhear something that was going on in the hallway outside. It caught his attention because it sounded, well, philological. Multiple languages being spoken, with apparently no common understanding. He walked over to the open door for a look, accompanied by the director. There he saw a beautiful, dark-haired young woman, dressed in what could only be described as a noble woman’s formal attire from the Caucasus. What had first caught his attention was hearing her calmly say, “Adyghe.”
“Who is she?” he asked the director. Read more …
Unpublished Stories
All of these stories are finished, but currently unpublished. To protect that status for the preservation of First Serial or Digital Rights, they cannot be read on a public website. But it is possible to read them here, as long as they remain unpublished.
