Author Archives: James Pyles

Police Pursuit

steampunk city

Steampunk wallpaper – Found at 1zoom.me

Some people don’t believe in heroes, but they haven’t met my Grandpa. –Anonymous

Keisha sat frozen in the pilot’s seat of the airship Graceful Delight as the image of her Grandpa, forty years younger than the day he died, stood like a living apparition just ten feet in front of her.

“Did you hear me? Let me take the controls, quickly!”

“Oh, yeah.” She stood up just as the Delight pitched to port and she sailed to the floor.

“Grab the netting and hang on.” Isaiah Covington immediately took the chair she had just vacated and began to work the controls. “I apologize for my lack of chivalry and social grace, but I’m afraid saving our lives must take precedence.”

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The Forest

spiral staircase

© Sue Vincent

The Beginning of the Saga of the Davidson Children

Five children abruptly found themselves at night in a dark forest being drenched during a thunderstorm. “Mandy! What happened? Where’s Mom and Dad?” Thirteen-year-old Amanda Davidson felt panic rise her chest. Where were her brothers and sisters? What happened to their parents? How did they get here?

“I don’t know Paris. Stick with Taylor. Can you see Jake and Zooey?”

“Zooey’s here with me, Mandy.” Paris was holding her younger sister’s hand.

“Jake’s right next to me.” Taylor pulled his brother closer to him.

Mandy was trembling from the cold and terror at suddenly being alone with her brothers and sisters and lost in the dark.

“Everyone stay close to me. Paris, get right behind me. Jake and Zooey, get behind Paris. Taylor, you get behind Zooey and make sure everyone sticks together.”

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Aerial Encounter

airship

© Vadim Voitekhovitch – Found at Deviant Art

“Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.” –Alex Haley

Keisha guided, or so she thought, the ornately decorated airship “Graceful Delight” out of the gigantic hanger set upon a massive floating derrick just off of Alameda. However she was about to discover there’s a difference between reading and memorizing instructions, and real practical experience. She had never driven a car before, let alone piloted a fifteen-meter-long gondola suspended under a sixty-meter dirigible. When the propellers begin to drive the ship forward, they had spun up to a preset speed, dictating the Delight’s velocity, and whatever gas was inside the thin, metallic envelope above her head, was providing buoyancy and lift.

The Delight was accelerating upward and Keisha didn’t know how to stop it.

Frantically, she racked her memory for how to control the ship.

“Let’s see, these levers control engine speed, but how do I keep from going up?”

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The Family I Never Knew Before

skins

Found at the “Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner” blog. No photo credit given.

“What’s that, Grandpa?”

“Just stuff for the tourists, Jimmy. Come along.”

Above his Dad’s wishes, eleven-year-old Jimmy’s first meeting with his Grandpa included a visit to the Rez at Pine Ridge. Dad left home when he was sixteen, joined the Air Force, got married, had a son, and never looked back. But eventually it was time to tell his own son about the people he came from.

The boys and girls looked just like Jimmy did. Even though he felt like an alien here, it was also the first time he felt like he fit in.

“Why are the girls giggling at me?”

“Oh, them? They’re your cousins. They probably think you’re cute.”

“Cousins.”

The old man laughed. You have a lot of them. Here’s the sweat lodge.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a very spiritual place, Jimmy. It’s where we purify ourselves. Here’s let’s step over here and change. Get’s pretty warm inside.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“I want you to learn something about the Lakota. Your Dad walked away from us almost twenty years ago and I’ve only gotten a few letters from him since. I’m glad he brought you back to us. Come inside. You are with family today.”

I wrote this for the Flash Fiction for the Practical Practitioner writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 200.

The only time I met my Dad’s Dad was when I was eleven years old. We were driving across country, and stopped at my Grandpa’s farm in Oklahoma.

The only thing we know about my Grandpa was that he was an orphan out of Missouri.

Every once in a blue moon, an indigenous person will ask if I’m a native, too. Apparently I look like one. So did my Dad. Decades ago, I asked him about it, and he got so mad at me, I never brought it up again.

Who knows? Anyway, today’s prompt brought all of that to mind again, so I decided to create a fictional scenario around it.

My research included the Sweat Lodge, Lakota people and the Pine Ridge Reservation. Oh, I belong to a Facebook closed group for indigenous people (long story), and there’s sort of a running joke that if you meet a cute girl on the Rez, you pray she’s not your cousin.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

The Retreat

the retreat

© Karen Rawson

“You’re building a cabin here, Grandpa? Why?”

“There’s nothing here, Cece. I’ll have that wreck up top demolished and put my cabin there.”

The eleven-year-old still couldn’t understand. “But no electricity, plumbing, or wifi? Yikes.”

“Solar will provide electricity, and the water and sewage lines run this far out. No wifi’s the point”

“I’d die.”

“People my age get tired of the constant bombardment of opinions in social media.”

“Turn off your computer.”

“Can you?”

“What will we do when I visit?”

“Hike, fish, explore the beauty of nature. This is where real life happens, not on Facebook and twitter.”

I wrote this for the Rochelle Wisoff-Fields photo writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above to inspire crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 100 words long. My word count is 100.

I saw the challenge right after looking at Facebook and twitter, and frankly, sometimes the demand and entitlement qualities of some of the comments are pretty hard to take. I’m torn, because the internet has also become an important information source for me, as well as a method of communication (hence this blog), but it’s a double-edge sword.

Today’s wee tale is my commentary on all that. Sometimes you have to turn everything off for a while and walk away, remembering that social media is an illusion and real life exists “out there”.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

The Adventure Begins!

warehouse

Image found at ny.curbed.com – no photo credit available

“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.” –Lewis Mumford

Fifteen-year-old Keisha Davis sat on the concrete steps of the dilapidated warehouse with tears streaking her mocha cheeks. Her Grandpa’s journal was resting in her lap as she read the same paragraph over and over.

“I’ll never forget the first time I saw Keisha. She was perfect. My little grandbaby was only a few hours old and had just finished suckling at her Mama’s breast. Her Papa handed her to me and everyone except for the baby was grinning. I held her as gently as I could as I placed her over my shoulder. Holding this most precious life in my arms, I realized I had never known such a peace before.”

Isaiah Maximilian Covington had died in his bed at the age of seventy-six, his brilliant mind and robust physique both destroyed by murderous cancer. He’d refused chemotherapy, saying it killed a person quicker than the disease it was supposed to cure, and when he passed, Keisha’s Papa grudgingly consented to the old man’s wishes and had him cremated.

Keisha and her older brother Josiah scattered his ashes at Pepperwood Lake, his favorite “fishin’ hole.” The journal, key ring, and hatpin were delivered to her by messenger a week later.

Papa thought he’d had them sent to her as remembrances. If he’d read the note from Grandpa tucked behind the front cover, he’d have taken everything away from her and burned them to ashes, just like the author.

She wiped the tears from her face and turned the page.

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Rejection Newbie

rejection

Found at “The Zweig Letter” – no image credit listed

Hi, James,

[Story Title] was well received here, but we have decided it’s not quite what we’re looking for in the [name of publication/anthology]. Thanks for submitting it to us, and best of luck with finding a good market for it.

[Name of Editor]

Dear James,

Thank you for sending us [Story Title]. We appreciate the chance to review it. Unfortunately, the piece is not for us. Best of luck finding it a home elsewhere.

Things you might consider: The character is nice. The concept is familiar, but here there’s no real explanation of what happens. The backstory comes as something of an infodump.

Sincerely
[Name of Editor]

I’ve submitted eight short stories to various anthologies and periodicals during the month of April. The two quotes from above were emails I received from two separate sources rejecting…the same story.

That’s right. The same exact story was rejected twice within 24 hours.

To be fair, after I submitted it the first time, I waited weeks, and the response was actually very timely. I was waiting for a rejection of something. If you’re an author and you are sending in stories in response to an open submission, either it will be accepted or rejected. Rejection is inevitable.

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A Face or a Mask?

James

James – St George Utah – April 2017

Actors are so good at changing their faces, their voices, even their bodies as they leap from one role to the other, but you can never tell what’s really going on behind their eyes.

What is a portrait? A photo? A drawing? It certainly isn’t an image of the soul. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but I’m not buying it. First off, it’s a gross misinterpretation of Matthew 6:22-24, and beyond that, you can’t really look into someone’s eyes and tell anything significant about them.

Well, maybe if you know them really well, but certainly not a stranger.

That’s what we are to each other…strangers. Oh, we read each other’s stories and comment about how we perceive them, but internet contact is not the same as face-to-face human contact. Even Skype doesn’t fully communicate the full impact of being in the physical presence of another person.

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Keisha Takes Off

metal hanger

© Yarnspinnerr

Minutes ago, fifteen-year-old Keisha Davis had entered her Grandpa’s workshop, which was actually an old, dilapidated warehouse on the edge of town. The only thing Grandpa built that looked like it would work was the strange airship he christened “Graceful Delight.” Following the directions in the journal she had received by messenger days after he’d died, she donned the old leather flight jacket, with the matching helmet and goggles.

She inserted the hatpin in the keyhole, and then pressed the big red button in the console’s center while yelling “Contact!”

But instead of motors whirring and engines humming, she heard a loud, metallic “BANG!” and the Delight shuddered and trembled like a dog shaking off water.

Staring out the windscreen, Keisha saw she wasn’t inside the workshop anymore. It was a huge aircraft hangar, all steel beams, and corrugated metal. The Delight’s propellers were spinning up. She was lifting off. A large aperture was opening just ahead, as the girl used the old ship’s steering wheel to guide herself into a new future.

I wrote this for the FFfAW 165th Writing Challenge of May 1, 2018 hosted by Priceless Joy. The idea is to use the photo above as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction between 100 and 175 words long. My word count is 175.

A little over a week ago, I wrote a small tale called Keisha’s Grand Adventure about a fifteen-year-old African-American girl who, following the instructions in her recently deceased Grandpa’s journal, entered his run down workshop to discover the only thing he ever built that actually worked, a strange, anachronistic airship from early in the last century.

Today, it transports her into another world and the beginning of her “grand adventure to find an “alternate” version of her Grandpa, and then together, to save both planets.

To read other stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.

Find an expanded version of Keisha’s first two stories at The Adventure Begins!

Gerald, Chelsea, and Me

hipster

Found at pexels.com

Gerald was a “thirtysomething” hipster who tended toward being impulsive, and spoke in murmurous sentences heavily lasted with words victimized by elision. Passing him on the street, I would have considered him one of those nameless citizens of gentrified neighborhoods, but since he was dating my stepdaughter Chelsea, I was forced to give him more than a passing glance.

She considered him creative, though when I finally met him, it was quite a letdown to discover the impoverished nature of his spirit and character, plus Chelsea had to decrypt virtually every word he spoke.

After our first dinner together at the quaint Asian Fusion restaurant on Bryant and 25th, he mentioned something about an indie film he was editing, and with more than a little stealth, vanished as I paid the bill.

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