The Case of the Tenacious Typist (Speculative Fiction Modern Parables) / Speculative Fiction Modern Parables (ePub)

The ship was storm-tossed, no one at the helm, its sails tattered and ragged.

Unless the couple got to the ship's wheel soon, they and the ship would be destroyed.

It seemed years before the couple could struggle against the rocking waves and gusting wind to reach the quarterdeck - to at last get control over that ship's wheel.

The two of them were able to finally wrestle the ship's rudder to start pointing the ship's travel with the waves instead of being rolled by them.

Side by side, they were being driven to an unknown future. On a storm-driven ship that could do nothing but run before that tremendous wind.

The storm-drenched man looked down at his partner, her own bodice full, straining against the tightness of the drenched fabric. The silk was hardly a match for the salt water spray which forced the fabric to disclose every detail as it clung...

"Cut. CUT. CUT!" The woman shouted over wind and water. Clear as a bell. A loud bell. Very loud.

The storm was suddenly still. The wind gone, the deck level. Like a movie sound stage.

A small boy named Marcus stopped tapping away at his clattering typewriter and looked up from a folding table that supported it on the main deck.

The pair at the ship's wheel stood with open mouths at the sight of the boy.

It was their own twelve-year old son who sat there, writing them into his story...

Excerpt:

A couple waited inside the small cabin. It's walls also had crammed-full book shelves, but only a single solid-wood pine table occupied the cabin's center, with six ladder-back chairs pushed in along its sides.

The man stood in clean work-dungarees, with a red pocket t-shirt stuffed into them. The woman wore a beige pin-striped suit with a simple white blouse below. Her blond hair was wrapped into a tight bun with two ivory stickpins through it.

A wide door, almost a duplicate of the one in the family's home, opened on its own and exposed its own misty interior to the room.

Its greenish glow tinted the furniture, walls, and the couple's faces.

A human trio stepped through. Two adults with a pre-teen child.

Micah lead them ahead so the door could clear.

Julie and he were smiling wide, while their son Marcus was wide-eyed, taking in the small cabin almost at a glance, absorbing all the details for later assimilation.

The couple came together on one side of the table while the door shut silently again on its own.

The two men shook hands, the women hugged. Marcus stood alone, his work-worn typewriter under one arm.

Julie did the introductions. "Marcus, this is John and Sal."

Sal was blond, dressed in a gold pinstriped business suit, her hair in a tight bun with two ivory pins through it. She smiled wide and came forward to hug the boy.

Once she was done, she stepped back and John came in to shake his hand. His grin was infectious, and the boy mirrored it as reflex. "I've heard you came to get some advice about your writing."

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