James Pyles's Blog, page 220
January 12, 2017
The Prayer
Gary was the only one in church. Everyone else was dead or changed. He was temporarily safe. They dared not enter a Holy place. But soon hunger and thirst would force him outside to forage. If he prayed hard enough, maybe God would have mercy. His wife and children were killed in the first attack, […]
January 11, 2017
Taking Care of the Family
It worked. I changed everything for the better. Now my son Charles marries a hardworking, loving wife and mother instead of a depressed lay about. Now my son Chris makes his career decision five years earlier and gets a tenured position before the recession hits. Now my wife has that business she’s always wanted and […]
The Friendly Dinosaur
Ginny remembered her Daddy as she stood overlooking the railroad yard. She was just three years oldwhen he showed her that first train up close. It was moving slowly; large and stately, like a friendly dinosaur. The engineer looked down at her and smiled. She waved shyly back. She’d loved trains ever since. Someday, she’d […]
January 10, 2017
Uncle Eli’s Machine
For two weeks, Evan had been investigating the odd, sprocketed contraption in the basement of the house he’d inherited from old Uncle Eli, an eccentric inventor who’d been tinkering with it for the past sixty years. Evan didn’t fathom the machine’s purpose, but he did think he could get the gears moving. He made one […]
Daylight
It had been sixty-two years since Sean Becker had last seen the light of day. He had been thirty-five years old when he was murdered in the early morning hours of July 23rd in his native Los Angeles. Cause of death was a mysterious loss of blood. For six decades, Sean walked the night and […]
January 9, 2017
Praying on the Shore of Eternity
“Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.” –Yehuda Amichai Ever since the Israel-Palestinian Accords of 2022, it was illegal for a Jew to even visit the Kotel, let alone ascend to the top of the Temple Mount. The Muslim Holy places, the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Dome […]
January 8, 2017
First Contact Imperfect
To their credit, the Qredderq came very close to their goal of communicating with the human race. Very close. However, being just a little off was going to have difficult if not disastrous results. The Qredderq were not aliens in the sense that they came from another planet. No other planet in the known universe […]
January 7, 2017
The Monument
The Moti Mahal monument in Burhanpur, India, can be found on the bank of the Pondhari River to the southeast of the village. Ross Hunter graduated from San Francisco State University four months ago and had been wandering the Asian subcontinent ever since. With a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and a $100,000 inheritance from a […]
January 6, 2017
Who Is A. Isaacs?
It was the third time this week that Jerry got an upgrade request for the server farm he managed from the mysterious “A. Isaacs.” Upgrade requests for the database from Operations and Development weren’t unusual, but ever since A. Isaacs joined the Ops/Dev team in Palo Alto, he or she had submitted the vast majority […]
January 5, 2017
Tales From The Dystopia: Training The Toxic Dog
Carl Jason had been wandering in the woods for three days when he saw the lights through the trees. He’d gone for a hike away from the camp and became disoriented. He had a knife, so he cut fir branches to cover himself at night so he didn’t freeze as he slept. He knew something […]
