Rod Kackley's Blog: St. Isidore Collection , page 5

Wicked Revenge: Book 2 From the St. Isidore Collection by Rod Kackley

Wicked RevengeBook 2 From the St. Isidore Collection

Bree and Beth, barely old enough to be street legal, could become richer than even their wildest dreams. But first they have to scramble to hide St. Isidore’s crime of the century, while they run from an ex-cop who has vowed to kill them, and dodge the bodies that are snapping at the neck in the Suicide Forest. 
Bree was kidnapped in A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection. Bree’s parents were murdered, and her family’s home was destroyed. But it was all Bree’s idea. So, Bree was doing just fine until her world started falling apart.
Beth loves Bree and will do anything she can to help. But will her best be good enough? Melinda loves Bree, too. She wants to help, but that’s the last thing Beth wants. 

More people are going to have to die.
Wicked Revenge: Book 2 From the St. Isidore Collection is available wherever books are sold including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Kobo.

Tim and Cheryl: So Young, So In Love, So Dead by Rod Kackley

Tim fell in love so easily. He fell in love with every woman he saw on the street. He had only been loved back once. Just once. He was sixteen. She wasn’t. She was jail bait. It was the best year of his Tim’s life.
He was thinking about that while driving on a street where he could see the parking lot at St. Isidore High School. Too early for the kids. Still dark. Even though he was behind the wheel of his Chevy Lumina, Tim had that feeling again, the feeling of being loved as only a sixteen-year old can.He tried to park on a different street every time he came. Once or twice he had even rented a car so that no one would recognize him. A disguise was tried one. The mustache fell off just as some girls were looking in the window.They laughed.Tim followed them home.The girls were so into themselves they didn’t notice him until Tim pulled up alongside them and got out with the gun.The Smith & Wesson.Nobody can fight one of those.He had rope in the trunk. Just in case.The girls never laughed at him again.He tried not to think about that day too often, but when he did, it did make him feel warm. Tim never wanted to kill. It was never part of the plan.Well, hardly ever. But there were times when things just go wrong.Sometimes things break.Most days Tim did his best to hang on to that feeling  of young love whenever he parked by the school. It only lasted for just that long. Never long enough. Even when he was in bed with Anne he didn’t get that feeling. He hated losing that feeling. He always did his best to hang on to the memory.That’s why we keep our eyes closed, right?Life as a sixteen-year old was perfect for Tim. Girls were just starting to bud like the beautiful cherry blossoms in St. Isidore Park and he and his friends were just starting to realize the difference.“None of us even noticed the girls until high school,” Tim told an online friend. “But then one morning, it was like we woke up and they were everywhere.”Tim and his friends chased every girl in school. One chased Tim. She caught him. The first love of his life. The love that only a sixteen-year old can have. Love heavily salted with lust. Lust the girls can easily confuse with love.

The boys can get mixed up too. Lust is always there.Undeniable. Indisputable. In the driver’s seat. Foot on the pedal, pushing it to the metal. No apologies requested. No apologies given. No quarter asked. No quarter given. 


Tim and Cheryl: So Young, So In Love, So Dead is a flash fiction, short story in the St. Isidore Collection available on Kindle. To download immediately, click here. It's an important story for all St. Isidore fans to read because it shows you how the serial kill of A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection  learned to do what he does best: Murder and disposal.

Library Man: The Short, Short Story of a Bibliophile by Rod Kackley

Library Man: The Short, Short story of a Bibliophile is the latest addition to the St. Isidore Collection. It's based on true stories but of course everyone and everything in this flash fiction short story is fictionalized, right? Here's a taste -- Rod


Adam, Dan, John, Mark, Aloysius, Bradford, Samuel, and Kent were the suburban Easy Riders. Everyone had a bike.  Everyone rode their bikes everywhere they went.The Riders always had a baseball glove over the handlebars of their bikes because they never knew when a game was going to break out. Such were the summers of their childhood in St. Isidore.Summer was also the aroma of eight-cylinder engines that powered their parents’ cars mixing with the smell of the oil, gas and blue smoke putt-putting out of their fathers’ lawnmowers and the heavy scent of the blades of grass newly cut by the blades of those mowers.It was the sound of a baseball game on so many radios in their suburban community that the Easy Riders never missed an inning as they raced home during the evenings before the street lights came on.It too was the sound of the Riders yelling at the girls in the neighborhood who had not been noticed until the first few started growing breasts. Summer was also the sound of Al Jr’s mother yelling out the window, “Aloysius, come home and do the dishes.”It was all they knew. Who could want more?Except for Adam. He knew the library and he wanted more. Adam loved the library. The world opened up to him in the stacks of books. The possibilities were endless. And no one, not even the grown-ups told Adam he couldn’t read what he wanted to read.Don’t think Adam wasn’t good on the ball field. He was. Never great, and he never would be. But Adam was good and that was good enough for him. Adam could hit, run, and catch with the most average of the rest.It was in the library where he stood above the crowd. Adam put himself into every book he read. Biographies of great explorers, sports heroes, scientists, chronicles of the war during which his father and his friends’ fathers had turned from boys into men, and fiction that took Adam anywhere the imagination could lead.It would be a mistake to think Adam was some kind of a bookworm slug who sat and read all day. He never slowed down. Up at dawn. Breakfast with his big brother and sister at seven a.m. while they fought over the toy in the Captain Crunch box. Then he’d grab his baseball hat, glove and bat, and Adam was on the tree-lined streets of St. Isidore by nine.On his bicycle — ball glove over the handlebar, baseball hat on his head, bat over his shoulder — Adam wouldn’t think about going home until lunchtime at noon.There was a day Adam didn’t come home on time. He ran away once, just  this once, but came home before the street lights came on.Asked by his father if he had learned anything from the ordeal, Adam replied, “Yes, never run away on an empty stomach.”Yet, as busy as these days of summer were for this boy of St. Isidore, for one solitary hour, from nine a.m. to about ten a.m., Adam was his own man. None of the other kids would be outside until the crack of nine-thirty or ten, so he went to the library.
Adam loved the library. He loved being around the books. To him, it felt like an indoor version of the ball field behind St. Isidore Elementary.Just like the ball field, the library had its own sights, sounds, and aromas that were  golden to Adam.The library, even more than the ball diamond, was Adam’s second home. It was even better than the ball field. Adam never had to pretend to care inside the library. And it was much better than his first home if only because this is where Adam could be his own man.
Best yet, when he started reading, Adam could be anyone he wanted to be.


This is just a taste of Library Man: The Short, Short Story of a Bibliophile by Rod Kackley.  To read more and order your copy for just 99 cents on Kindle, please click here.

Lies We Tell: A Short Story of Marriage, Infidelity and Love From the St. Isidore Collection By Rod Kackley

1“Doesn’t it bother you that we have to tell so many lies to make this happen?” Cathy said as she cuddled with Phil in the front seat of his Kia.He understood what she meant, but really didn’t care. They might have been sitting in his 2011 Kia, but they were parked in the same place they had been more than forty years before when he had learned enough about parallel parking to get his driver’s license. Phil took the opportunity then to take Cathy to St. Isidore Park, just like scores of teen drivers had done with their prey of the night for decades. When opportunity knocked again thanks to Facebook, he didn’t hesitate to open the door.So, here they were, back again, trying to recapture the magic after spending four decades apart. Again, Phil was taking advantage of an opportunity, just like scores of Baby Boomers were doing now that they could see the finish lines of their lives.For so many years, Phil and Cathy had only been the memories behind late night smiles on each others’ faces until Facebook brought them together along with the rest of the St.Isidore High School Class of 1973 for a reunion at the Lamplighter Bar & Grill.Nostalgic curiosity and wishful thinking took them to the Lamplighter.Lust took them to St. Isidore Park and put them in the backseat of Phil’s Kia.The pot had helped too.
St. Isidore Park hadn’t changed a bit. The oak and maple trees were taller, true enough, but their leaves were still as golden, red and brown as Cathy remembered them being the first time Phil had opened the clasp of her bra and then dipped his fingers below her panty line, whispering and spitting into her ear.The years since high school had not changed Phil and Cathy all that much, either. Phil was a little smoother, Cathy thought. He still whispered but he didn’t spit, and his digits’ dive into her bush was much more confident than it had been the first time they heard  Seals and Crofts playing “Summer Breeze” through the dashboard of his 1965 Dodge Coronet.Phil was thinking the same thing about Cathy. She seemed so much more confident than forty years ago, so much more sure of herself, and so much more willing to do whatever he wanted. What the hell? It’s not like she’s going to get pregnant, right? That certainly helped. Say what you will about menopause but from the guy’s point of view it relieved much of the pressure and worry. Not that teenage boys worry about their girls getting pregnant when what needs doing is being done, but it has to be at least in the backs of their minds.Maybe it was that. Maybe it was the scores of women that Phil had taken to backseat and bed since his first time with Cathy.
I wonder if she feels the difference, he thought. I hope I can be as good as I once was.
Lies We Tell, a short story of marriage, infidelity, and love: From the St. Isidore Collection is available on Kindle, Kobo, Scribd, and Page Foundry 

A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection by Rod Kackley

Bree's a teenager who wants the abuse to end. She's ready to do whatever it takes to make it stop, to make him stop. But Bree knows she's going to need help.

Her best friend and lover is ready to do whatever she can. Bree knows she can count on Beth. She’ll do whatever Bree wants.

Still, our female protagonist knows she needs one more person for her little team.  It can’t be just anyone. Certainly it can’t be any of the morons who go to school with her at St. Isidore High. 

They’re just kids. She needs an adult. Could be a man or a woman, Bree has experience with both camps. Just ask Beth.

But it has to be someone who is just as ready as Bree is for the ultimate commitment. 
It would also be best if this new team member didn't know he or she was part of the team. In order for this to work, they have to be kept in the dark.

That shouldn’t be a problem. Bree’s been wrapping the middle-aged men, and some of the women, of St. Isidore around her little finger for years.

But this won’t be easy. Bree has never before aimed this high. If she succeeds, all of her dreams come true, and the abuse stops.

If she fails; well, Bree would rather not think about that.

Bree knows it will be a challenge. However, Bree believes it is possible. She is going to become a teenage assassin, without getting her fingers bloody. 
Bree just needs one more person to bring this plan together.

A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection tells Bree’s story and introduces you to the suburban community of St. Isidore, where the top cop is named Lumpy, murder is the subject of dinner-table conversations, and dead bodies are routinely discovered swinging from the trees.

The St. Isidore Collection is a series of dark, disturbing novellas and stand-alone short stories that tell the tales of what could be the most dysfunctional suburb on the planet, and the people who call it home.


A Wicked Plan, previously published as Sometimes Things Break, is the first book in the St. Isidore Collection, a psychological, crime and suspense thriller series that is available wherever books are sold including: Kindle, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Oyster, Scribd, Kobo and Page Foundry.

Revenge Is Best Served Bloody, A Short Story of Workplace Violence, From the St. Isidore Collection by Rod Kackley

This man's American Dream has turned into a nightmare. He decides it's time to share the agony. 


Here's a preview:



Henry Branson walked into SIS Computer Services locked, loaded and soaked with the blood, brains, and whatever else had splashed back from his assault on his former coworkers and his supervisors’ families.
Everyone who survived the initial attack was waiting for execution in the conference room, the four supervisors, all of whom where young enough to have pestered Henry when they were in grade school and he was in high school, all four who had persecuted him as young adults.The hipsters had been brought to ground with their styled hair, tight jeans and black horn-rimmed glasses. They were bloody from the tips of their manicured fingers up to the elbows of their tattooed arms.Henry had forced them to stack the bullet-riddled bodies of their colleagues up against the front and back doors of the software company’s office. Five bodies piled at each door should slow down the counterattack, Henry thought.Those who were doomed to die were crying softly, afraid to attract attention. All except one. Henry too was doomed to die. But he felt like he was already in heaven. So he was not crying.Henry had dreamed of this last night. This is how he fell asleep, thinking of murdering the people who humiliated him at work, dreaming of their agony, their misery and their death.Henry had decided some time after midnight a simple bullet to the forehead would not be justice. He wanted to see suffering. He wanted to experience their pain, to savor their agony. A bullet to the forehead would have not be enough for them or for him.Still, even if they died slowly, screaming, begging for mercy, it would not be enough for Harry.So he killed their families, recorded the murders on his smartphone camera, and brought the video into the office to share.

A fucking, bloody show-and-tell.




Revenge is Best Served Bloody: A Short Story of Workplace Violence from the Stories of St. Isidore, available on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Kobo and everywhere ebooks are sold.

Waiting, The short story of a woman who was born to be on top, by Rod Kackley

WaitingPart Onefrom the Stories of St. Isidore




Anne should be opening the basement door and walking down the stairs any minute now. She would find Adam where she had told him to be, waiting in the corner of her basement. Hands against the cold wall. Feet spread shoulder width apart. 
Eyes closed. No blindfold. No rope.Submissive. Vulnerable.Waiting.
Not knowing what would happen when Anne came downstairs, but knowing everything that would happen would be what she wanted. That’s the way Anne wanted it. That’s the way Adam knew it had to be.Such is the life of a submissive, even a part-time submissive. A submissive who never tops from the bottom, but who knows the one who dominates him would never really hurt him.
Much.
“Until you have given yourself up totally to me, you can never been totally free,” Anne told him once when their relationship was just beginning.Those were the days when he would resist. 
Those were the days when all of his misconceptions about himself, about her, about what they were doing, all the fears, all of the angst, all of everything that held him back was still holding him back, blocking his plans, his hopes, his dreams and even his fears.After the first time, Adam vowed never to do it again, to never, ever see Anne again. To hide in his house when she left hers.So there was the second time, and a third and a fourth and so on.
And so, Adam joined the St. Isidore Spanking Society. 
Even though they were sharing beds in each others’ homes on a very regular basis, whenever he saw Anne, Adam’s heart still raced. Its beat took him back to the place that he needed to be. The place that he had to be. The place that..well...the place where Adam knew he always should have been.
“When did you know?” Anne asked him once when they were laying naked together in bed, which by the way was one of Adam’s favorite times. They would lay naked. Cuddle. She would do the cuddling, he would be cuddled. It felt so damn good, so damn right after one of their “sessions,” as Anne called them.“When did I know what? The capital of Montana?”
“You know what I mean. Don’t be coy,” Anne said as she slapped his bare bottom that was still red from the paddle and belt.“Butte.”Adam on his stomach, Anne on her side, her head on her left hand, her right hand caressing Adam’s back one minute, her fingertips following the scratch marks she had left on his back, the next.“Tell me,” she said with a harder slap. “When did you know that you needed to be spanked?”
This was tough for Adam. He was not able to let go. Annes said he had to. So, eventually he knew he would.Spank“Now say it. Tell me when you knew.”Slap“First grade,” he said. “We had a teacher, a woman, who gave each kid a birthday spanking on his or her birthday.”She would put the little girl or boy over her lap and give them a birthday spanking in front of the whole class”“You’re kidding,” Anne said. It was a little hard to believe for even someone with her years in the dominatrix arena, but Adam turned his face to hers and she knew it was true.“Wow. Incredible.”“It was for me,” Adam agreed. “I couldn’t wait for my birthday.”“Oh my God. Was it everything you expected?”“Funny thing is, It was over so fast I didn’t even know she had spanked me. Didn’t feel a single spank,” he said. “But I will never forget looking at the class, my friends, as I went over her lap.”“Disappointed?”“You’re kidding, right?”“By the way, the capital of Montana is not Butte. It is Helena.”Spank
And so Adam waited. He waited for Anne, the one to whom he had finally, totally submitted and promised to never submit to another, unless she approved or better put, ordered.
That happened. There were parties.
Adam was amazed to find there were so many people into this lifestyle — and a lifestyle it was, he discovered — so many people who “the others” would consider normal.
“If only they knew the truth,” said Adam.
“What is normal anyway? Who gets to decide that?” said Anne.
So what is normal, Adam wondered as he stood naked, his feet shoulder length apart, palms of his hands against the cold cement basement wall, eyes closed, pecker coming to attention. Just what the fuck is normal?
Mary smiled. She was upstairs with, her best friend, since the insane asylum on the lakeshore, Anne. Mary was going to be Adam’s surprise. Mary was going to stretch his boundaries and expand his limits. 
Mary knew what Adam was thinking. She had been there. She could hear his thoughts clear as a bell, and she know exactly how he felt. “People say we are all the same,” Mary told Anne. “But we are not. We are all different. We are all unique, dead or alive, angel or demon, all are unique.”So she didn’t know exactly what Adam was feeling at this bare assed, naked moment of anticipatory excitement. But she knew. “You know?” she said to Anne.“Anticipation can be so delicious,” said Anne.
“That’s really the foreplay of what we do,” Anne told Adam when he expressed his amazement at how good it could feel to just wait.
Adam was waiting, in kind of a dream-like limbo land, where he was totally into the moment, smelling concrete, feeling so naked, feeling so submissive and feeling so vulnerable.
Adam had been waiting years for this. 
If only he had known.

(c) 2014 Lyons Circle Publishing Inc.


Waiting is one of the Stories of St. Isidore, available exclusively through Kindle and wherever ebooks are sold including Nook, iBooks and Kobo.





A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St.Isidore Collection tells the story of a young girl who is kidnapped by her sex-crazed high school teacher. He kills her parents and burns down their home.
And it turns out to be all her idea. 
Bree wants her parents dead. Tim has been killing people all of his life. He’s never been caught and Tim wants Bree. She will be able to control Tim, right?
A Wicked Plan Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection is available wherever books are sold including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, and your favorite indie bookseller.

Stories of St. Isidore

This is the second book in the St. Isidore Collection series. Thought I would share the introduction with you...

Introduction
Welcome to the city of St. Isidore, a community of 175,000 souls, many of whom are Baby Boomers still hoping to realize the dreams they had in high school, while discovering that most of their nostalgia is not much more than wishful thinking.
On the other side of the spectrum, are their children, the teenagers, young enough to want it all and believe they deserve it all.
In the Stories of St. Isidore, we will meet Anne and Adam. While they weren’t born for each other, they were made for each other, the same way a stone at the bottom of river bed is shaped by the water that runs over it day after day. So Anne and Adam have been shaped by their families, their experiences, their quirks and their kinks.
Anne started her life with a dysfunctional family on a farm in the country. Adam was raised in a suburban ranch in the city of St. Isidore, also with a dysfunctional family, at least the way dysfunctional is defined in the twenty-first century, but actually very average for the twentieth century.
Anne and Adam couldn’t have been more different as children and young adults. Yet in middle age, they were drawn together just as they were shaped. It was like two stones in a creek, shaped by the constant flow of water that moved them ever so slightly closer together day after day, year after year, their rough edges smoothed and contoured so that they fit perfectly together.
And when the time was right, they clicked.Anne had always been a serial entrepreneur. She started businesses every day of her life that began in the middle of the twentieth century.
Anne had her own business as these stories were written, making this day no different from any other day, except that now she was making laundry soap.
It’s not that she has or ever has had a love for laundry soap. However, Anne knows that everyone uses laundry soap. Her entrepreneurial sixth sense told Anne there had to be money to be made giving them what they want. And, people not only want laundry soap; people believe they need it. Do they really?
Anne knows it doesn’t matter if they really need it or not. Fact is, perception almost always trumps reality.
Yet, she also knew that her soap had to be different. There were so many soaps on the shelf, how could hers stick out? What would motivate a person to buy Anne’s soap over another?
The answer came to her slowly as most good things did in Anne’s life. The answer was “green.” She would create a soap that would clean clothes better than any other and would also be environmentally correct.
Ever since she was a kid, Anne had been finding ways to make money. Legally, illegally, and skating the thin line between the two.
The dollar has never been almighty to Anne. However, when she sensed the delightful marriage of opportunity and money, Anne turned into a heat-seeking missile.
Anne is the same way with sex. Good sex. Hot sex. Average sex. Even solitary sex. Anne likes sex and has not even thought about apologizing for that in maybe a decade and a half.
When she senses the opportunity, Anne becomes like Gore Vidal who advised once to “never turn down the opportunity for sex or to be on TV.”
Anne soaks up all the free publicity she can get, too. That goes for her private life as well as her business life. To Anne, there is no difference.
She will talk about either to anyone who will listen, understanding that many who don’t, will, in time.
Anne discovered her sexual kinks at the age of thirty-nine. Now twenty years later, she is living her sex life at full throttle with no safety net. Condoms, yeah. But no safe words. Never. Nada. No way. That would be like taking the gravy off the mashed potatoes in the St. Isidore Diner. And no emotional safety net for Anne, either. No one would ever hear her say, “I love you,” and she would never hear anyone say that to her, ever. Until Adam came along, those were the rules she lived by.
And then there was Adam.
Adam, another of the half-century old St. Isidore residents who had yet to reach his sixth decade, had a business too. The Reading Room was a bookstore and coffee shop. He too was an entrepreneur.
However, Adam’s plateau of business acumen was nowhere near Anne’s entrepreneurial level. He would just as soon give the books away as sell them, and often he did pre-Anne, especially when he knew just the book the customer needed, even if the customer didn’t.If it wasn’t for Anne, Adam would have given away the store long ago.
You see, Adam didn’t spent his early years dreaming of being in business. Money never meant much to him, and still doesn’t.
Adam loves books. He can still remember the books he read as a child, he can still remember spending rainy days inside the St. Isidore Public Library, and an old man in his childhood neighborhood that became his adult neighborhood who walked to and from the library with books under his arm two days a week, every week, every month, every year.
Adam loves books and the people, like him, who love to be around books.
Adam never saw himself as a business person, but he took a real leap of faith, one that many Baby Boomers like himself had taken, when he opened The Reading Room.
Many of the Boomers in St. Isidore who opened their own businesses could be called entrepreneurs of necessity. They had lost their jobs for one reason or another, usually because they were just to old, to highly paid and to entirely dispensable.
Adam was not one of those entrepreneurs, exactly, but he starting his own business was a necessity because he just had to get out of where he was working.
After a confrontation with the boss, Adam sat down on the toilet at work, St. Isidore’s radio station, WSIR, and realized his life was not going to get any better. All he could hope for, unless he changed directions drastically, was that it wouldn’t get any worse.So, Adam flipped his turn signal, pulled some money out of the bank and drove off in a new direction. “Why not? You can’t take it with you,” he said to those who were younger, still dreaming of a higher run on the corporate ladder.
“You can’t take it with you and I can see the finish line. If I turn a profit, that is great. But all I really want to do is pay for my retirement. And I want to live my dream, period.”
“Life is so short, why spend it doing what other people say you should be doing?”
Anne reinforced Adam’s decision to go into business for himself. It was Anne who said, “You know you’re miserable. You are there already. How much worse can it get?”
Adam bought into it not because he dreamed of independence or of owning a business or even of spending the rest of his life around books.
Adam bought into it because he was dreaming of Anne, and because of his kink.
That kink is what brought Anne and Adam together and would change his life as much as hers.
Besides he owned his house and cars free and clear. Nobody was going to throw him out into the street.
If you’ve got nothing to lose, why not go all the way?
Bradford Glasscock, the undertaker’s son, is another member of this community who is finding his dreams coming true thanks to the tutelage and domination of Anne and another of the St. Isidore Boomers we will meet in the Stories of St. Isidore.
It was never easy being the undertaker’s son, living above a basement full of dead bodies and a main floor of grieving people. The last thing he could see himself doing was returning to St. Isidore after college and going to work in the family business. But like so many Baby Boomers, Bradford missed the fork in the road, went back to where he had been and found out it was good enough for who it was for, like his mother used to say.
On top of the undertaker thing, and the Baby Boomer “my life didn’t change a bit” problem, Bradford was gay. That made everything more difficult in the first forty years of his life, but not so much now.
The world changed, St. Isidore changed, so Bradford didn’t have to change, at least not much. It didn’t hurt that he found the best friend of his life in St. Isidore.
He found Anne. Anne found Bradford and together they formed the St. Isidore Spanking Society.
We will also meet Tim Sheldon, a biology teacher at St. Isidore High School, who is doing exactly what he went to college for and just what he was afraid would happen when he left high school.
Tim came back to St.Isidore, is still there, and yes, is still miserable. He is one of the Baby Boomers who has yet to make his dreams come true.
He only has one dream: To meet the love (or lust) of his life. Tim has come close to love but never quite made the match. He is not sure why, it just doesn’t work out.
So far he’s coming closer on the internet. But Tim has also discovered that close isn’t nearly good enough.
Well, there was one girl in real life, when he was in high school, Cheryl. Tim’s dream came true earlier than most, but unfortunately for less than eight weeks. Cheryl left Tim. Actually, truth be told anywhere outside of a courtroom; Tim broke Cheryl.
Tim’s relationships don’t all end tragically. He rescued Paul Desmond from life as the butt of all jokes and St. Isidore’s leading nerd. They were friends forty years later.
Tim’s brother John was a leading member of the St. Isidore Police Department, but left the community unexpectedly, because of what his brother had done. But he’ll be back.
And then we have the teenagers, St. Isidore’s teenagers, who are led by Bree Van Housen, a sixteen-year old girl who is young enough to want it all and believe that she deserves it all.
Beth Flounders was rescued by Bree much as Paul was rescued by Tim, but there’s a difference. Beth fell in love with Bree. But maybe that is not so different from what happened with Paul and Tim, expect for who stayed in the closet and who stepped out.
I think that’s enough to get us started. We’ll meet other members of the St. Isidore community along the way, but let’s begin The Stories of St. Isidore.
We will start with The Lies We Tell, the story of Cathy and Phil who were in lust with each other in high school and may rekindle those emotions, albeit tinged with forty years of life experience.
Tom is the only problem standing in the way of Cathy and Phil’s lustful dreams, just as was the case in high school. You see, Tom loves Cathy and Cathy loves Tom. The lust just isn’t there.
There you have some of the main characters in The Stories of St. Isidore.

Welcome to St. Isidore. It’s a city you will never forget.

Of course Stories of St. Isidore is available through Amazon. It's a free read for Prime members and those with Kindle Unlimited memberships.
Stories of St. Isidore


—Rod

The Natural by Bernard Malamud

Finished The Natural last night, the 1952 book that inspired the movie of the same name starring Robert Redford, last night.
I always hesitate to read books that have a movie connection after I have seen the movie because I tend to see the actors who were in the movie in my mind's eye, instead of letting my imagination create the characters.
The Natural, the book, is so different from The Natural, the movie, that was not a problem. The movie was based on the book, but only loosely. The ending was as different as you can imagine, and was much stronger in the book.
Now I am reading a new one by Roddy Doyle, The Gut. I have been looking forward to getting this book after hearing Doyle interviewed on NPR a couple of weeks ago.
I'll let you know how it goes
RodSometimes Things Break

Never fight an ugly man. He's got nothing left to lose

Best Advice: Never fight an ugly man….

Never fight an ugly man. He’s got nothing left to lose. The advice holds true in many situations besides a barroom brawl. Think about a business negotiation.When the other side has nothing to lose, and you have something to lose, who do you think has the advantage? And as for a personal relationship, need I write more?


Best Advice: If they worked, don’t you think everyone would have a pair?

My son, when he was ten years old, has some Christmas money that was burning a hole in his pocket. Together with his stepbrother, Ben went to the back pages of a comic book and found what ten-year old boys had wanted since comic books were first printed.

“X Ray glasses that will allow you to see through clothing.” Wow. Remember now, he was ten. That is the age when he started asking what I thought Victoria’s Secret did with the posters of women in lingerie when they pulled them out of the windows in their Woodland Mall store.
You know what he wanted to do with X-ray glasses, right?
So, as a father I had to do something.

“Those never work.”
“Oh yeah how do you know?”
My son really thought he had me with that one.
“Yeah, how do you know?”
“If they worked, don’t you think everyone would have a pair?”
Ah. Wisdom. They weren’t going to waste their money on something that obviously was a fraud.

My son invested his Christmas cash in a remote-control, electronic Whoopee Cushion.
It was great fun.
His grandmother jumped through ceiling and his grandfather nearly died laughing.
Advice taken.
Money well spent.



Sometimes Things Break: The first novella in the St. Isidore Collection, it tells the story of Bree, a girl young enough to believe she can have it all, and Tim, a middle-aged man old enough to know better, who promises to make her dreams true.
Sometimes Things Break is available now through Amazon.Sometimes Things Break