Author Archives: James Pyles

A Late Night Visit

shadow

Image: Business Insider

Jerry was finally dozing off when his doorbell rang. He had a tough time sleeping alone, but Susan and the kids were visiting her mother in California so he had the place to himself for the next week, whether he liked it or not.

“10:30 at night? Who the devil?”

Then he abruptly got out of bed and grabbed a robe. No good news arrives so late at night. What if something happened to Susan, Denise, and little Frankie? “Please don’t let it be the cops.”

Jerry pulled on his robe, turned on the front hall light, and then the one over the front door before opening it.

“Bill?” It was Bill Henderson, the guy he used to share a cubical with at work until…

“Let me in Jerry, it’s freezing out here. What took you so long to answer the door?”

“It can’t be you, Bill.”

“What? Are you blind? Of course it’s me. Let me in.”

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Who Represents the Deplorables? How Donald Trump Won the Presidency

trump

Donald Trump

I woke up this morning and hit a local news site prepared to face the report of Hillary Clinton’s inevitable win as the nation’s next President. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Trump had won instead.

I thought maybe a mistake had been made and checked several sources to verify the report.

Yep. Donald Trump is the President-Elect.

When I got over the shock, I experienced something else I didn’t expect: relief.

It’s not that I wanted Trump to become the President, I just was terrified at the prospect of Hillary Clinton in the White House.

I don’t consider myself a low information voter and I have two undergraduate degrees and one graduate degree, so I don’t think you could say I’m uneducated.

I’ve watched Hillary Clinton dodge one metaphorical bullet after another when it seemed readily apparent that at least one of them should strike. I’ve called her “The Teflon Lady” because no allegation against her seemed to stick.

You could say that they didn’t stick because they weren’t true, but based on all the scandals and the on again/off again FBI investigations against her, it sure seemed like if she was smoking, she was on fire.

Clinton was the person who could get away with anything no matter how outrageous. This morning I found out otherwise.

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What We Do For Love

galaxy

Image: Gizmodo.com

From the Flight Log of Freighter Pilot Camdon Rod

There are monsters living in hyperspace and they’ve sent spies into the Consortium. Okay, maybe they’re not monsters, but they definitely aren’t like any sentient life form known in our little corner of the galaxy.

Oh, my name is Camdon Rod and I’m the owner/operator of the jump freighter Ginger’s Regret. Ginger is the other half of the partnership and in fact, she is the ship, well sort of.

Due to a bizarre accident she had over fifty years ago, her corporeal body was vaporized as the Regret entered hyperspace but everything else she is, personality, spirit, force of will, became somehow fused with the freighter. I used to think she was a ghost, but speaking of monsters, that thing that had been posing as Calderon Zg convinced me otherwise.

You remember Zg. In my previous log entry, I mentioned how he held Ginger hostage and forced me to perform a hyperspace jump while he was outside the ship. I’d like to think he was just vaporized and that’s all there is to it, but at the moment of the jump, Ginger was able to sense what he was thinking.

They’re watching us, those things from hyperspace. Zg or whatever it was, went back home if you can call hyperspace home, but Ging said there are more of them here in our universe. We’re safe as long as we don’t discover their realm and how to enter it. If anyone does, the very least they’ll do is change hyperspace somehow so that jumping will become impossible. No more interstellar travel…ever.

And if that’s the least they can do, I hate to think of what the worst might be.

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Savior in a Storm

thunderstormThe Eighth Story in the Adventures of the Ambrosial Dragon: A Children’s Fantasy Series

Four months ago.

The little Ambrosial Dragon was totally outmatched by the huge Shadow Dragon. Somehow, his mortal foe had detected him crossing the spaces between worlds and had pursued him. The smaller dragon was already almost exhausted. He had been hiding out from Shadow Dragons for months, moving from one realm to another, barely staying ahead of them.

Tonight, his luck had finally run out.

“You will die like all of your kind, golden one. Perish in agony, fool!”

The larger dragon used a combination of magic and brute force, striking his smaller opponent again and again. The little dragon was getting weaker. Fighting back would be useless. He couldn’t even begin to penetrate the dark dragon’s defenses in the current circumstances. But if he could open a doorway into the world he detected earlier, the one where magic almost does not exist, he could escape. The portal would allow only the smaller dragon through. The Shadow Dragon would be much too big to follow.

The Ambrosial Dragon was getting dizzy. It was hard to focus the spell, but if he failed, he’d die.

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The Dragon With Emerald Eyes

dragon

from “The Hobbit” (2012)

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

Landon was playing with Baby, Scorch, and Sly in the field behind Grandpa’s house. It’s not unusual for a seven-year-old boy to play with friends on a Saturday morning, but in this case, Landon’s friends are living stuffed animals.

Well, they are living now, but they weren’t before the magic.

Through a rather unusual set of circumstances, Landon was imbued with magical energy and in order to learn to control it, his dragon companion Buddy had no choice but to train the child in the use of his magic.

This has caused some problems recently, but they were resolved when Landon formally became Buddy’s apprentice.

So on this bright, cold December morning, Landon is practicing magic with the aid of some of his stuffed animals, a small yellow giraffe named Baby, an equally small stuffed dragon with pink wings named Scorch, and a little red stuffed fox named Sly.

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Expendable

arena

Yokohama main arena courtesy of Yokohama.com

Decades of dispute between the two empires of Queen Rhoda and King Jon finally erupted into open warfare. Each ruler wanted to reign as supreme leader over the people of the Great Continent. They didn’t particularly care how they achieved their goal or how many had to suffer and die in the service of their ambition.

Each marshaled vast armies at their mutual border and targeted the other’s strongholds with weapons of mass destruction. The war, the great war of conquest would claim the lives of hundreds of millions. Both Queen Rhoda and King Jon were supremely confident in their abilities to send out their forces to battle and to win. Each were seated on their thrones in fortified bunkers awaiting the beginning of the first and last battle of the final war. After all, armies are expendable, sovereigns are not.

Rhoda grinned with evil intent imagining her troops and battalions smashing Jon’s fortifications and capturing him. She wanted the honor of slitting his throat with her own hand and then drinking his blood.

Jon had similar plans for the accursed Rhoda, though his personally violating the Virgin Queen’s body would proceed her slow torture and death.

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The Hopelessness of this Year’s Presidential Election

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Image: CNN.com

I voted early. I just couldn’t see waiting when I knew how I was going to vote, or rather who I was going to vote against.

I’ve been voting since the mid 1970s and I’ve never seen a Presidential race this bizarre.

Let’s cut to the chase.

I believe Hillary Clinton is one of the most corrupt human beings who has ever walked the Earth. I believe that beginning at a young age, she dedicated her life to political ambition and power. No other priority was and is higher in her life. She’ll do anything to advance her power. For Clinton, running for President must be like a junkie anticipating their next high. If she became President, she’ll run as fast as she can to please her billionaire supporters, both here and abroad, and to hell with the American citizens.

Donald Trump is a pig. I can’t believe he’s the GOP frontrunner (but then again, neither can the GOP). He’ll say any outrageous thing just because he can, and his supporters eat it up with a spoon. I still don’t think he actually wants to be President and that he’s doing all this just to see how people will react. If he became President, I don’t think he’d know what to do with it. He might just quit once elected.

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Entering the Slow Dark

wraith“Why am I so tired? Where am I? Is this my bedroom? Everything’s all gray.”

Rand Chambers found himself in an indeterminate environment. He was lying down and covered up like he was in bed, but this was different. He could neither fall asleep nor wake up and was suspended in a state somewhere in between.

“You all ask the same questions. It’s as if it hasn’t been explained to you before.”

He heard a woman’s voice but it was not kind. Rather, she sounded impatient and annoyed and bored, as if she couldn’t be bothered with Rand’s condition, whatever that was.

“What do you mean? Who are you? Where are you?”

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Leaving Mother

planet

Image: hongkiat.com

“But we don’t want to leave you, Mother. We love you.”

Shawna was the leader of the people from the NorAm Contingent. There were four Contingents on the generation ship, NorAm, SouAm, EurAsia, MedAfrica. When their ancestors left a dying Earth some two-hundred years ago, it was with the single hope that their descendents would perpetuate a thriving humanity on the second planet orbiting Proxima B.

It had worked. They had arrived. Thousands upon thousands of human beings were ready to occupy an Earth-like planet, this time turning into a garden instead of a cesspool. The lessons taught by their parents and their parents’ parents about living with a planet and not exploiting it were well learned.

The problem is, no one wanted to go.

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The Last Woman

seedy bar bangkok

Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Harvey couldn’t believe how easily he’d lured his latest victim out of that seedy bar and into an even more seedy motel room across the street. She was a beauty, a bit of a rarity in the places where he normally sought his prey.

The news media called him a serial killer. Seven women between the ages of 19 and 37 all strangled during the act of sex over the past fifteen months. The police couldn’t catch him. They had his DNA but it wasn’t on record anywhere else that would identify him. He moved from city to city, chose different venues to pick up women, a bar here, a concert there. He kept shifting his pattern around so they couldn’t predict where he’d strike next.

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