Author Archives: James Pyles

The One-Eyed King

solar eclipse

©bigstockphoto.com/mazzzur

Captain Edgar Barron cursed his luck. His ship the Noble, in the North Pacific between Hawaii and Japan, was in the grip of a vicious storm. He had hoped to make landfall at Hekili before this, but they had encountered doldrums last month which delayed their journey significantly.

He had eagerly read and re-read Edmund Halley’s 1715 publication on the Moon’s Eclipse of the Sun, and the path of that shadow was to pass over these seas today, 25 May 1770. Had they made Hekili island as scheduled, he could have witnessed the eclipse first hand, or rather second, since it was known to be dangerous to view the event directly.

Now the Noble was taking on water, her main mast was cracked and threatening to break, and her sails were in tatters.

“Captain, she can’t take this much punishment forever. I’m afraid it’s Davy Jones Locker for the lot of us, God have mercy.”

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The Tower at Meropis

shark

Photo: Discovery Channel

The Megalodon was swimming straight for the Nereid. Avoiding a collision seemed impossible so Captain Owen Redfeld did the only thing he could think of. He ramped up the engines to full and accelerated toward the (supposedly) extinct shark.

“Everybody in your seats. Strap in. Brace for impact.”

The six time travelers obeyed out of a sense of discipline and self-preservation, but Travis yelled up at the submariner, “Have you lost your damn mind?”

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Melvin’s Basement

© A Mixed Bag 2012

It had been two years since their divorce was final and Melvin finally had his basement set up. It was the toy room he dreamed of as a child. Space, the final frontier, and all of the aircraft, rocket ships, and space stations he thought would be reality in 2017.

“I was promised my moon base.” Melvin murmured. “Where is my moon base? Where is my rotating ring space station? Why haven’t we colonized Mars yet?”

When he was twelve years old, Star Trek first came on the air and Melvin dreamed. Then he got older, went to college, got a job, got married, and had kids. Jeannie had been the practical one in the marriage. She detested clutter, so out went his models, his comic books, his scifi novel collection.

Married life became an exercise in control and being controlled. That ended two years ago to the day. He had spent a fortune to rebuild his paperback and comic book collection.

“I’m free.”

Melvin sat down near the basement door and admired his toy room. Now if only he had someone to share it with. Melvin was free of his family and now he was free to be alone.

I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fiction Writing Challenge for August 20th, 2017. The idea is to use the image above to craft a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 199.

I think anyone who’s been married for any length of time knows that there’s quite a bit of compromise that goes into a marriage. Sure, you need to live out your dreams but you also need to make room in your life for what your spouse needs. Apparently, that didn’t happen between Melvin and Jeannie, but then again, we haven’t heard her side of the story. Sadly whatever happened has left Melvin a very lonely man.

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

Seeing Red

amanda red

Actress Amanda Seyfried in the 2011 film “Red Riding Hood”.

He heard her coming, knew she was a “she” by her scent. He was confused. It was night. Humans didn’t visit the forest at night, especially during the full moon.

He avoided humans or tried to. In spite of his reputation, all he wanted to do was hunt prey, tonight it had been a large and tasty hare, and experience the world around him. He had cataloged all of the woodland animals within a five mile radius merely by sound and smell. His meal had satisfied him, so he was no longer dangerous unless cornered or attacked. None of the creatures in the forest were foolish enough to do either…

…except maybe her.

Like all wolves, he was partially color blind, at least compared to humans. He could see blues and reds. She was wearing red.

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The Defector

wroclaw

Foggy Town © Olgierd Rudak/Flickr

“Remember, stay in the compartment under the truck’s bed until you’re past the last checkpoint and Franciszek gives you the signal. If the truck is stopped, do not make a sound or the soldiers will shoot you both.”

Dominik Zheutlin was peering up at the member of the Fighting Solidarity movement. Normally, they didn’t take these kinds of risks, but getting him out of Poland was a vital.

“Dzieki*. You don’t know what this means to me.”

” I know in the West you’ll find a way to free the world, Dr. Zheutlin. Good luck.”

The final board was placed over the defector. A nod to Franciszek told him it was time to depart for the German border. The resistance movement was counting on Zheutlin developing something that would finally defeat the Communists by changing history. Zheutlin was the only man in the world who could build a time machine.

*Thanks.

I’m writing this for the What Pegman Saw writing challenge. Today, Pegman takes us to Wroclaw, Poland. The idea is to use Google maps images of the location as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 150 words long. My word count is exactly 149.

I’m leveraging some information from a story series I’m writing as an homage to the works of science fiction writer Andre Norton (Actually her name was Alice Mary Norton). One of my characters is a historian and linguist named Aiyana Zheutlin. In 2017, she’s in her early 30s and works for Project Retrograde, an American time travel operation attempting to find and correct the historical causes of climate change (the most recent story as of this writing is Nereid).

Her father was Polish and her mother was English. In her original timeline, the Soviet Union still existed in 2017 and her father defected from Poland a few years before 1985. He didn’t invent time travel in my actual storyline, that was another defector, but I had fun merging those two histories.

When I looked up Wroclaw, I found out an anti-Communist movement called “Fighting Solidarity” was founded there in 1982. They primarily fought the communists through disseminating information, but in this case, I gave them the opportunity to occasionally help defectors escape from behind the Iron Curtain.

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

Nereid

atlantis

Atlantis: The last sunrise by batkya

Now in this island of Atlantis, there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia…But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the substance of the island.

Plato from Timaeus 25

“You’ve done what?” Aiyana Zheutlin knew their next mission would be particularly dangerous and it would be difficult to travel back in time to an island that does not exist in the present, but what Colonel John Kelgarries was telling her sounded insane.

“Given the extraordinary situation we’re presented with, I think it’s the most reasonable solution and the Temporal Research Group, including Dr. Barnes, agrees with me.”

Ashe’s team was meeting with Kelgarries for the pre-mission briefing, however in addition to Antoine Barnes there were two other people seated around the conference table who were not normally present. The first was Thomas Lucius, now the top time gate technician at the Project and sometimes called “the Control Voice”. The second was a Naval Officer who introduced himself as Captain Owen Redfeld.

“Dr. Zheutlin, I would not have authorized this if I didn’t believe it was perfectly safe. True, it is an unorthodox application of our temporal technology, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work.”

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Ashurbanipal’s Library

london being nuked

Image: Getty-US ENERGY

Aiyana Kaleya Zheutlin had been reading strange languages for the past three weeks, ever since returning to the present and the arctic base of Operation or rather Project Retrograde and discovering how much of the present they’d changed. Something Kelgarries and the fastidious and annoying Dr. Antoine Barnes had mentioned in their briefing when the six time agents got back caught her interest.

She was pouring over photographs and reports on The British Museum’s collection of clay tablets originally discovered in the ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard in 1849. The Library of Nineveh’s King Ashurbanipal was a monumentally historic find. It contained important works, all on baked clay tablets, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Law Code of Hammurabi, the former included a non-Biblical account of a great flood like the one in the Book of Genesis.

The Museum’s collections database counted 30,943 tablets in the entire Nineveh library collection. Most were written in cuneiform and a few in other near east languages. However, Aiyana was looking for clues of the use of a previously unknown language in these records.

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Cowboys and Sorcerers, Part Two

black dragon

Found at wallpapersafari.com

The 22nd Story in the Adventures of the Ambrosial Dragon: A Children’s Fantasy Series

Clayton, Yao Jin, Landon, Mitchell, and Illanipi were trapped in a narrow canyon which was blocked at both ends by black clad gunmen, all firing their six-shooters at our heroes. Landon’s lantern amulet was shining a bright white light under his shirt indicating great danger.

Jake “the Magician” Mitchell turned his horse sideways, whipped out twin Colts at lightning speed and started firing a seemingly endless number of rounds in both directions.

Only Illanipi was totally calm throughout the battle. The trio from the future were ducking, even Clayton, a dragon disguised as a man, since he, the sorceress, and the eight-year-old boy were in between the gunslinger and his targets.

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The Shower Scene

bedroom

© Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

The old motel wasn’t what Norman imagined. He thought an old Victorian in the California countryside converted to an inn would be charming and tasteful. But his room reminded him of “old woman bedroom.” Oh well, at least there was plenty of hot water for a shower. Cheap shower curtain but that part didn’t matter.

“What?” Norman thought he heard something but the shower water was too loud. “You know, if I didn’t know any better…”

The last thing he saw was the shower curtain being ripped aside and the old woman plunging a butcher knife toward his chest.

I wrote this for Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Friday Fictioneers writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above as a prompt to craft a piece of flash fiction no more than 100 words long. My word count is 99.

As I hope you can see, I was going for a twist on the 1960 film Psycho which starred Anthony Perkins as the infamous Norman Bates. Unfortunately, 100 words isn’t a lot in which to be able to build suspense before the reveal.

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

Reggie

coffee cup goo

© artycaptures.wordpress.com

“What the hell is it, Neil?”

“I don’t know, Doctor. It was in my coffee cup when I opened the lab this morning.”

Louise Manners wrinkled her nose. “I told you never leave your dishes in the lab over the weekend. We work with biological…”

“Doctor, how could left over coffee turn into…into that?”

“We’d better not expose ourselves. Get the Hazmat gear. Let’s get it into a containment box.”

“Oh, there you are, you naughty fellow.”

Louise and Neil whirled at the sudden intrusion. Archie, the night janitor, was standing at the doorway. Ignoring them, he headed for Neil’s cup.

“That’s not your coffee.” He became aware of the two biologists staring at him.

“My pet fungus Reggie. I bring him to work with me for the company.”

Archie turned back to the cup. “You come with me now.” Walking out of the lab with the cup, Archie called over his shoulder. “I’ll bring this back tonight.”

Neil turned to Louise. “Pet fungus?”

“Neil, what if we could market it? Let’s get to work.”

I wrote this for the FFfAW Challenge for the Week of August 15, 2017 hosted by Priceless Joy. The idea is to use the image above as a prompt to write a piece of flash fiction between 100 and 175 words long with 150 being the ideal. My word count is 175.

To me, the image seemed hideous and humorous at the same time. I was in the midst of writing but having trouble creating the twist at the end until I considered Simon Pegg’s rather funny take on the character of “Scotty” in the “Star Trek” reboot movies (the movies themselves aren’t that great, but I like Pegg’s performance). The story then wrote itself.

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