justdustwords

 Excerpt from my novel FATE.   Who's that Comes to Play...                                            The farmhouse stood eerily still on the paddie hillside, shrouded in a thick, swirling mist that hung to the ground like some living entity, its bamboo door half open. The widow could sense Yurei dancing with defiance within the sulfurous-smelling mist, flickering in and out of existence as if the very core of their domain was trying to break through to the Now.        As she stepped forward, she called out the family name, but only the whispering wind answered. The ground beneath her feet felt saturated and slimy, as if she were walking between two realms. She knew that texture, the liminal zone between life and death where she had often gone before to seek guidance from the spirits.        The fenced-in compound was...

      Excerpt from my novel FATE         It Was What She Knew    Tropical s cents   mingled with the pungent smell   of dried  and freshly  caught fish   coming from the busy waterfront, where Chinese junks and Malay payangs were offloading their catches of the day , and where the vibrant fish market bustled with the activity of men doing business and women doing the lifting .  As the sun dipped below the horizon, the  urgency  complete  their  work  intensified,   knowing that the sun would rise again to signal the start of another day  in  the relentless pursuit of earning a living by their sweat, which   highlighted  the   relation ship  between the rhythms of nature and the human...

 Excerpt from my novel FATE                                A Remembered Short Story               The sea, with all its beauty and danger, had now become a conflict zone for Captain Emmet Meagher, a place where he fought against his inner demons after the loss of his leg to the Son of Moby. While sitting at the waterfront longer than he had planned, gazing out at the place in the bay where, at one time, he liked to anchor The Lilly White, Emmet found himself among the ghosts of his past, again. He was mentally marred by the two seamen and the boy he had lost to drowning in the merciless Atlantic Ocean, near the west coast of Ireland, and not far from where the Spanish Armada sank.          An old sperm whale, disoriented in her death throes, struggling for survival, overturned their small boat with a violent thrust of her massive body...

 Excerpt from my novel FATE. A Limbo for Suffering Fathers   Each night as Emmet Meagher lay awake in the darkness, the events of that black day would play back in his memories, overwhelming him. The memory of his son with his bright smile and infectious laughter would flicker in and out of focus, a haunting reminder of the joy that once filled their happy family. The innocence of his eldest son Mark, was a stark contrast to the chaos that had engulfed their lives. Emmet felt a desperate need to protect Mark from the harsh truths of life, even though he knew that such protection was impossible and not fair to the boy.          That same recurring nightmare would play through his now-only son Mark. The echoes of his brother's laughter, a bittersweet symphony that haunted him, would dance through his innocent mind as he lay awake in bed trying to drown out all he heard, both imaginative and real. Emmet would sometimes hear ...