Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [36]

Dead Pool

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

Charlie took a giant step over the body and into the shower and washed the blood off of himself, trying not to look at the mess that covered the bathroom floor, which had been a man but a few minutes ago. He stepped out and inched along the wall, finding it hard not to step in the pool of shiny red fluid. The gun was lying against the wall. He picked it up using the bath towel and taking care not to smear the blood.

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [35]

Border Crossing

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

Charlie heard back from Agent Nowak later that night. Nowak and Morris would be coming to Nicaragua Friday afternoon, flying into Emerald Coast International Airport and then taking a D.E.A. helicopter on down to La Virgen, which was on the shore of Lake Nicaragua. Charlie was to call them upon his arrival.

The Loneliest Liberal:Putting reality TV aside

By James Knudsen

Before 2018 officially ended, I found myself writing a play, just sorta happened. It remains a work in progress, but how I wound up writing a play – which at the moment is still just a conversation between God (he's a she) and President Donald J. Trump – is something I’m still processing.

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [34]

Bedfellows

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

Charlie still had a key to his rental house, whose lease wasn’t up until the end of the month. He parked his bike beside the front door and went in. He hadn’t seen the blow-up coming. Maybe he should have, because he knew that the killing of the guard had more of an impact on Margot than he had foreseen. But he never thought he would find himself alone.

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [33]

After the Storm

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

The trucks had been running non-stop for a week bringing first large boulders, then smaller stones, and at last gravel. An enormous roller packed each load down into the mud. The stretch where the mudslide had taken out most of Margot’s exit now looked like a road again. Charlie’s motorbike had been the only way in or out for them for two weeks.

Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: Paint Cans and Pecans

By Roger Owens

If you head out of Jasper, Florida, going north on State Road 129, before long you will cross the Georgia state line, and pass through the small town of Statenville. As recently as 2010, Statenville boasted a population of just over one thousand souls. Once known as “Troublesome,” Georgia, Statenville is named for Captain James Watson Staten, a Confederate officer who is said to have opened the first store in the town, selling staples like rice, beans, sugar, flour, and coffee to the loggers and turpentiners who “cat-faced” the slash pines for the turpentine, something like how maples are tapped for the sweet sap used for syrup. Turpentining is about the hardest, most dangerous, and least profitable work a man can do; it was mainly done by poor blacks and white men on the run from the law, usually in concert with their production of bootleg liquor.

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [32]

The Storm

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

The report that his warehouse had been broken into sent Tai into a rage. The first thing he did was fire all the security people and brought in Taiwanese who lived in San Jose. The second thing he did was telephone Taiwan and request more men.

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [31]

Lost Innocence

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

The ferry docked the next morning at 10:30. Juan felt it would be better if they weren’t seen together, so Charlie walked off the ferry while Juan drove past him on his way home.
    The town was abuzz with the killing at the warehouse, and police were wall to wall. Charlie walked toward the little soda (café) that he, Edgar, and Rufino had first gone to. He was in sight of it when two policemen stopped him and asked for ID.

Hush Hush (a poem)

By Felicia Zapata Finnegan

Mommy there’s a sickness
Going round in school
I heard it from my teacher
She was speaking to the nurse
They said the symptoms are
You’re always in a daze
You seldom do your homework
And you never want to play

Poetry & Portraits: Mystic

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Mystic
By Eric Meub

[Originally published on June 10, 2017]

It’s simpler than you think. A note will cup
the monastery bell, and birds fly up
as if the vault they soared before was but
a painted blue above a virgin, shut

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [30]

Roll the Dice

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

At 5 p.m. Juan pulled up at Charlie’s house, and five minutes later they were on their way. As they drove toward town, Juan said, “You know it’s high tide and we’ll need to go in by boat, don’t you?”
    “Hell no, I hadn’t thought about it. Aren’t low and high tide the same time every day?”
    “Charlie, have you ever been around the ocean before?”

Goines On: Ho, ho, I’m so jolly

By Moristotle

“Ho, ho, I’m so jolly,” Goines recited under his breath. “Ho, ho, I’m so jolly.” He had woken up with some determination he wouldn’t be depressed today. Not on his birthday. “Ho, ho, I’m so jolly.”

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [29]

The Break

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

Charlie was mad. He didn’t trust Howard and what really got him was that Margot didn’t trust his judgment and sided with Howard.
    Instead of going home, he turned toward town. He accelerated his little motorbike on the beach road. The buildings and palm trees raced past and became blurs as the small engine screamed from the strain. At that time of night no one else was on the streets as he flew past the closed shops.

On Franklin Hill Farm: A little bit of heaven

By Bettina Sperry

About a week ago, early in the day and in the rain, I got on the tractor and headed over to the machine shed, and though I traversed a relatively flat area, the soil and shale were so saturated with water that it was like freshly cooked pudding pouring through the pasture and horse paddock. Hours later, the sun started setting. I realized I had spent my entire afternoon tending a mudslide. Hours of it. Mud had moved and settled in places it really wasn’t supposed to be. With the tractor, I tried to move it along the banks of the run, to serve later as barriers to flooding, but it lay in formless heaps. Mud was everywhere.

Growing Up in America

Bright College Years at Yale

By Rolf Dumke

When I applied to Yale for admission in 1960, I was one of the top boys in a big graduating class at Shaw High in East Cleveland, Ohio, where I had been learning about middle-class life in America. Yale would enlarge my scope of persons, values, and life styles to encompass the upper end of the social scale in America. During the first ten years following my immigration from Bavaria, beginning with my initial half-decade (1953-57) living in the Hough District in Cleveland, a notorious black ghetto, I would have zipped through three class environments in America: really lower, middle, and upper-middle to upper class.

A Technological Assault on the Human Brain

By Dr. Ely Lazar & Dr. Adele Thomas

[Republished here by permission of the authors from their “Lifestyle Tips for Over 50s,” affiliated with their website “Passionate Retirees,” January 2, 2019.]

Five decades ago I read a book with the title As A Man Thinketh. The phrase that stood out for me was, “As a man (woman) thinketh in his (her) heart so is he (she)”. The concept in the statement is that your dominant thoughts tend to reveal where your life is going. What you focus on will demonstrate your purpose in life. There is a lot of truth to this principle. Today our focus is so inextricably linked to technology that there are disturbing new developments in what is happening to our brains.

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [28]

To Con or Not to Con

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

Charlie was driving himself crazy with worry. The thing with Howard was bad, very bad. If indeed Howard was working with Mr. Tai, that meant that Tai knew who they were and what they were up to.
    None of it made sense to him. If Howard was working for Tai, he thought, why didn’t he fly right over me as I lay on that beach and let me die? Why did he help Margot year after year? Charlie had to come up with a way to test Howard’s loyalties. They had to be sure, one way or the other. That was Charlie’s problem: he had no ideas as to how he could do that.

Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: The Chain Gang

By Roger Owens

The summer I was ten, I was riding with my grandpa, Amon William Dedge, in his brand-new F-100 Ford pickup truck along County Road 6, headed from Uncle Guy’s Shell gas station west towards the town of Jasper, Florida. At that time Old Red – as the pickup came to be known – was not old, but still Ford eggshell white, not the dull red it would be for many years after, red being the cheapest color you could buy to paint a truck back then. Its wide expanse of hood the day of our drive reflected the unforgiving Southern sun into our eyes as it descended, in infinitesimal increments, toward the distant, cool dream of evening. On either side of the flat, straight, jet-black brush stroke of the newly paved highway, fields of corn, soybeans, and tobacco baked their way ever so languidly up into the steaming July air. The deafening screams of cicadas filled the cab of the truck with their incredible hissing, a high-pitched screeching so ubiquitous that it became a silence more profound than that found in any graveyard. Grandpa didn’t much care for small talk, and, little chatterbox that I was, I had learned that if I wanted to stay on his good side, I would curb my wandering tongue or get left behind on trips like this one. I liked having Grandpa to myself; as one of four brothers it was all too easy to get lost in the crowd. That day was the first time I noticed that I had the same knobby bumps on my wrists that he did. My brothers didn’t have them. I had no idea then that those protruding bones were the early telegraphs of a debilitating arthritis; I thought it was cool that my hands looked the same as his. They made me feel connected, whole, complete.

Fiction: Finsoup (a novel) [27]

Traitor among Us

By edRogers

[Reviewed here on the novel’s publication day, October 6, 2018: “Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?”]

Charlie’s cell phone rang. “This is Tommy. I need to see you.”
    “Sure, Tommy, come on over.”
    “I need to see you in private.”
    “I’m meeting Margot later for dinner, but there isn’t anyone here now but me.”
    “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”