Author Archives: James Pyles

Exclusion

 

exclusion

Illustration by: C R Sasikumar – found at the Indian Express

“George Phillip Meadows, you have been found guilty of Betrayal of Trust, Neglect, and Excessive Absenteeism. Your sentence is set at ninety days of exclusion. Do you have anything to say before sentence is carried out?”

“No, Your Honor. I accept the sentence.”

Without another word, George picked up his suitcase and walked out the front door. The taxi was waiting for him and the driver put his luggage in the trunk.

“Geary Apartment Building,” George told his driver after he got into the back seat.

“Yes sir. I know the place.”

For the next three months, George would have to live in a one room apartment in the Richmond District, apart from everyone he loved. His wife Stacie had been his judge and his three kids, Mark, Peter, and Amanda had been the jury.

He’d been found guilty of staying too late at the office, not attending Mark’s soccer games, missing Mandy’s music recital, and bringing work home over the weekends. He’d been found guilty of neglecting his family and the sentence was not having a family for three months.

He’d excluded them from his life, and now they were excluding him. George missed them already.

Written in response to the Wednesday Writing Challenge at Angie Trafford’s blog. The one-word prompt is “Exclusion”.

Chasing the Zodiac

photo prompt roger bultot

© Roger Bultot

Martin Fields looked out window of his rented condo at a street recently swept of snow. “So primitive, Isis, but we won’t be here long.”

“It’s your fault we’re here at all.”

Fields turned to face her. She was beautiful by design, reminding him that she wasn’t human.

“How could I know he’d find my time machine? It was a one in a million shot that he figured out how it worked.”

“We gave you time travel so you could enforce justice.”

“We traced him to 2014, forty years after the Zodiac Killer disappeared. This time he won’t get away.”

I wrote this as part of Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Friday Fictioneers Challenge. Using a photo prompt, authors are supposed to write a piece of flash fiction no more than 100 words in length. My wee missive weighs in at exactly 100.

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

There are two influences for my story. The first is the Star Trek original series episode Assignment: Earth. The starship Enterprise travels back in time to Earth of 1968 to do historical research and encounters a human being beaming from a planet light years away to New York City accompanied only by a black cat.

The man is the descendent of humans taken to another planet thousands  of years ago by an alien race to be trained as secret agents intended to guide humanity to become a peaceful race. The agent’s name is Gary Seven (played by the late Robert Lansing), and he made a similar statement about primitive humanity looking out the window of his penthouse down at the streets of Manhattan. His cat was named “Isis” and was actually an alien metamorph.

The second influence is the 1979 film Time After Time. In late 19th century London, writer and visionary H.G. Wells (played by Malcolm McDowell) invents a time machine which is then stolen by his friend Stevenson, who has been discovered to be the notorious murderer Jack the Ripper (played by David Warner). Wells chases Stevenson to 1979 San Francisco to stop him from killing more women and somehow to bring him to justice.

In my case, I changed Jack the Ripper to the Zodiac Killer, who is believed to have murdered up to 37 people in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s and 70s.

I added a twist. Future humanity didn’t invent time travel. It was a gift from non-human entities who have chosen certain people to act as their agents, doing justice across history.

I know. You’re probably getting bored  of  time travel stories by now, however I want to see how many I can write based on these prompts.

Addendum: If you liked this story, I’m featuring the same characters in another, slightly longer tale called On Wednesday the Time Traveler Got Wet.

You Never Have To Wait For A Time Traveler

time travel

Image: BBC News

Pamela had an unusual job; she was a time traveler. She worked on contract for the Department of Temporal Affairs. She was one of a dozen or so time workers who traveled up and down eternity detecting and correcting potential rifts in the time stream, events that, if left unchecked, would threaten the static history her society depended upon.

Every weekday morning at precisely 8:01 a.m. and 10 seconds, she put on her time harness, kissed her husband Morton good-bye, and left for work, vanishing from the center of their living room…

…only to reappear one to five seconds later. Her work days might be an hour or several days long, but she always returned to Morton as soon as possible after her departure.

“I love you, Mort. See you in a few seconds.”

“I love you too, Pam. Have a good day at work.”

They kissed, Morton stepped back several feet so as not to become caught in the harness’s temporal field, and watched his wife of six-months wink out of existence…

…only to wink back in three seconds later.

“Miss me?”

Continue reading →

Left Alone

boy alone

© Jessica Haines

Joey was softly crying. His Mommy forgot him, forgot to pick him up at the Boys and Girls Club where he went everyday after school. Now everyone was gone and he was alone. It was cold and wet out and he was scared. Where was his Mommy and why didn’t she come to get him?

Car after car went by. He looked at each one with hope and then despair. None of them were Mommy. Should he try to walk home? Maybe he could ask a policeman for help, if he could find one.

A car! It was pulling into the parking lot. “Grandpa!” He’s come to get me. He’s getting out of his car to come get me.

“Grandpa! I love you.” They hugged.

“It’s going to be okay, Joey. Your Mom was in a car accident, but she’s going to be okay.”

They went to visit Mommy in the hospital. She was going to get better soon.

Written for FFfAW Challenge-Week of January 31, 2017 in response to the photo prompt above.

The word count limit is 100 to 175 words and mine came in at 159.

Read other stories inspired by this challenge at InLinkz.com.

The Dossier

Trump and Putin

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Aleksey Nikolskyi/Getty Images and Jim Watson/Getty Images.

Ex-KGB Chief Oleg Erovinkin was found dead in the back of his black Lexus just blocks from the Kremlin. The cause of death had not been revealed, but it was under mysterious circumstances.

Thousands of kilometers away, MI6 Agent Christopher Steele bought a “burner” phone and made a call to a number less than a dozen people knew about.

“Station Sahara. The line is secure.”

“This is Christopher Steele. I have the dossier. I want to come in.”

“Requesting identity confirmation.” The voice on the other end was deliberately distorted and Steele realized he had minutes before they traced his call.

“November three sixteen charter gulf forty-seven.”

“Identity acknowledged. Continue.”

“I want to be brought in by Adam Hunter personally. I will call this number again in twenty-four hours and will give the location of the meet only to him.” Being brought in from the cold by MI6’s Chief of Operations was a lot to ask, but they’d do it. The dossier was that important.

Steele didn’t wait for a reply. He broke the connection, threw the burner on the concrete floor of the basement apartment he had rented, and crushed it under his foot. In twenty-four hours, he’d be in a different country. He had to come in before the Kremlin reached him.

Ten minutes later, he had hired a taxi and was headed toward the Athens airport. He had the dossier on a thumb drive. Everyone, including his colleagues at MI6, believed it held incriminating evidence against America’s newly inaugurated and widely hated President Donald Trump.

The Russians had killed Steele’s confederate Oleg Erovinkin so he couldn’t reveal the truth and now they were after him. Steele found Trump as reprehensible as many others in the western nations, but he was not the subject of their exposé, and it was worth his life and the lives of anyone who he’d come in contact with to reveal his information.

Steele made the mistake of allowing himself to relax in the back of the taxi, so he didn’t immediately realize it was pulling over on a nearly deserted stretch of road.

“What?” Steele opened his eyes to see a silencer fitted over the barrel of an automatic. “Time for you to join Erovinkin.”

The taxi driver emptied his clip into Steele’s chest, relieved him of the thumb drive hidden in the inner lining of his jacket, dumped the body on the side of the road, and then drove away.

An hour later, the assassin was on a flight to Moscow, the dossier once again secure in Russian hands. No one must know President Putin’s true ally in the American government. Not until it was time to act.

This story, including the characters, is based on an actual news story published at a number of independent sources including this one. It strongly suggests that the Kremlin had former KGB Chief Oleg Erovinkin killed because he had helped compile a dossier implicating Donald Trump in illicit cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. MI6 Agent Christopher Steele is currently in hiding, supposedly because his life is at risk as well.

I decided to twist the information into the realm of fiction for the sake of suspense and intrigue. I have no idea how true any of the information is at my original source, but it seemed worthy of a small, modern-day spy story.

The story is somewhat similar to one written by J. Hardy Carroll which was also based on a true event. Hopefully, my spin on the tale makes it unique.

The Dream Master

Morpheus

Morpheus, Greek god of dreams

In spite of his exhaustion, Ian Mohr had to battle the demon Morpheus, god of sleep and dreams, every night to enter his realm. There were whole nights when the demon was successful in denying Ian entrance, but eventually the man’s sheer fatigue would defeat the sleep god.

As long as Ian entered the dream realm in a state of mental collapse, the realm and the god were safe, but Morpheus could never take the chance that the man might someday gain entrance with some psychic reserves intact.

However even gods err, and after several decades, Morpheus had a minor lapse, one significant enough to allow Ian access with some strength left within him.

This was all that it took, for once in the twilight realm, the guise of Ian Mohr fell away as he recalled his true nature and name: Phantasos, the demon’s brother.

Jealously long ago caused Morpheus to expel his brothers from the neither realms, cursing them with moral identities. Only Phantasos remembered, and only then in fragments of dreams.

Now it was Morpheus who walked the Earth as a man, one who could not quite recall who he was, what he was. Would the human that is Morpheus age and die and then forever cease to threaten to regain the dream world, or would he too remember and retake what was his?

The answer could only be found in a dream, if Phantasos would allow it.

I didn’t get much sleep last night, so this story is a natural consequence.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane

super boy

© iStock

“Jimmy! Get off of the roof! You’ll fall!”

Eight-year-old Jimmy Parker had climbed out of the loft window onto the shingled roof and stood poised to fly, dressed in his complete “Superman” costume his Mom and Dad gave him for his birthday.

“I’ll be okay, Mom. Don’t worry.”

Jimmy thought Mom always worried too much. She’d been in the backyard hanging wet clothes on the line when she turned, looked up, and saw her only child surveying the horizon.

“Jimmy! Please! You know you can’t fly.”

He bent over slightly, almost losing his balance, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “I’ll only be up here for a minute.”

It was super cool to be standing on the roof dressed up as his favorite hero. Yeah, the guy on the Superman show said it wasn’t the cape or costume that made him fly, and Jimmy knew he’d been born in Omaha, Nebraska and not on Krypton, but he wanted to feel the wind rippling across his cape just once while he stood someplace high.

Mrs. Helen Parker, Jimmy’s Mom, was terrified, but not for the reasons most Moms would be. Jimmy’s Dad was at work at his job as a fireman, and this being a bright Saturday afternoon in April, anyone might catch sight of Mrs. Parker’s little boy. If they looked at the wrong instant, they’d take him away from her forever.

Jimmy saw his Mom still looking up at him, afraid to move. He felt sorry for her, even though he knew he wasn’t going to get hurt.

“I’m coming down now Mom.”

Just like Dad told him, he looked around to make sure no one was watching, then he blinked and he was standing right in front of Mom on the grass in their backyard.

superman

From the “Adventures of Superman” television show

“See? I told you it would be okay.”

Jimmy’s Mom bent down quickly and hugged her baby boy. “Don’t ever do that again, Jimmy. I was scared to death.”

“Okay, Mom. I just wanted to feel like Superman a little bit. I won’t do it again.”

He also wanted to see if he could teleport all the way from the roof to the ground. He’d never jumped more than from one room in the house to the next before.

Jimmy Parker wasn’t an alien born on another planet, but being a mutant born in the midwest still had certain advantages.

I really did have a Superman costume complete with cape when my family and I lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa in the early 1960s. I didn’t go up on the roof of our house, but I did run around my backyard with my arms stuck out in front of me pretending I could fly.

I wrote this just for the fun of it.

Meeting the Future Mrs. Shaw

London 1890

© London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images – Found at NPR.org

William Shaw was stepping out of the pub on Northumberland Street near the Charing Cross railway station when he quite literally collided with his next wife. He’d been looking at his pocket watch and calculating how much time he had left to catch his train, and she had been rearranging the parcels she was carrying as they had begun to slip from her hands.

“Oh, I am terribly sorry, Sir. I didn’t mean to…”

“Think nothing of it.” He bent forward to retrieve the parcels that had fallen to the pavement when they ran into one another.

Handing them back, he executed a small bow. “Mr. William Shaw at your service.”

It was difficult for her to return the courtesy given she was once again laden with physical burdens. “Miss Julia Witherspoon, Sir. Thank you for returning my parcels to me.”

“Please, you seem to be having difficulty. May I assist you?”

The offer was generous, but she was hesitant to accept the help of an unknown gentleman, even one with such apparent good breeding. On the other hand, her employer wasn’t particularly forgiving and she was already late.

“Very kind of you sir. I’ve been purchasing provisions for my employer and must meet my train to return to his domicile.”

“I would be honored to carry your parcels to your train, Miss Witherspoon.”

Thus the immortal Mr. William Shaw, for that was the nom de voyage he used these days, accompanied his future wife to Charing Cross. She was unaware of this, of course, though she found him quite charming and amusing.

He, on the other hand, was absolutely sure they would wed before the year was out (and was satisfied he was missing his own train for the right reasons). He had buried twenty-one, or perhaps twenty-two brides since he began his long journey through the corridors of history, the last one a mere two decades ago.

The future Mrs. Shaw would make a comforting companion to share the next fifty or sixty years with. He had a feeling that the 20th century was about to begin on the right foot.

I’m leveraging characters I first introduced in the flash fiction piece Traveling the Road Back, a tale about an immortal named William Shaw who, a century prior, made the mistake of letting his wife and one true love Julia board the doomed HMS Titanic. It takes decades, but he finally invents a time machine so he can go back to the early 20th century and save her life.

I’ve gotten more than one request to expand their story, so I wrote this in an attempt to “try out” writing about turn-of-the-century (20th century, that is) London and the first meeting between William and Julia.

How did I do?

Two Lost Children

yacht

© C.E. Ayr

The miniature yacht and skiff pulled floaters as it drifted up channel. The yacht’s deck was covered with torn tarps from the storm it weathered the night before. The current carried the pair up river by midday. They were noticed by a lone Ranger, who called it in to the Park Service.

A small police boat pulled alongside, tied up to the larger vessel, and Officers Bridger and Kahn climbed aboard. The children were huddled in the main cabin, terrified.

“It’s okay, kids. We’re here to help.” Madelyn Kahn loved her own children, and loved everyone else’s. One moment, Erin and her little brother Matty were cringing from the strangers, and the next, they were sheltered in Maddy’s embrace.

Craig Bridger left them to search and found nothing on the yacht.

Then he used his binoculars to scan the skiff. It was another alien Time Skimmer. It used the storm to pull the vessels from the past to escape the temporal police. It probably killed the parents, but needed indigenous beings to time travel on Earth. Unconscious, they’d take it into custody and turn it over to the time authorities.

The two kids could be re-educated to transition from 1922 to 2016.

Written as part of Sunday Photo Fiction – January 29th 2017, which uses a photo prompt to inspire flash fiction of no more than 200 words. My wee tale comes in at exactly 200.

To read more stories based on this week’s prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Their Only Playground

Urban Street, Buffalo, NY

© Google 2015

The elementary school on Urban Street had been abandoned ever since the fire gutted it. The city finally budgeted the money to tear it down. Twenty-four boys and girls lost their lives in that fire. The building’s destruction might bring some closure to their families.

Frank Hurley had retired as Fire Chief last year. He had been in charge of containing the three alarm inferno. His crew were called heroes for saving over two hundred children, but the screams of the twenty-four they couldn’t save haunted Frank every night.

He was inside the school now, but instead of silence, he heard children laughing and running. They were all still here, separated from the living, perpetually playing with the dead.

He had to stop the demolition tomorrow. He’d failed to save their lives five years ago. He wasn’t going to be a party of destroying the only home they had left.

I wrote this flash fiction story in response to a photo prompt provided by What Pegman Saw. The word count limit is 150, and my piece is exactly that.

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