by Ed Hurst
Mystical Tales of Romance
Copyright 2013 by Ed Hurst
Copyright notice: People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior – “be sure your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23)
Permission is granted to copy, reproduce and distribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains in its original form.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Cavern of Madness
Pinch Me
Pinch Me 1
Pinch Me 2
Pinch Me 3
Pinch Me 4
Pinch Me 5
Pinch Me 6
Pinch Me 7
A Lady in Waiting
Lady in Waiting 1
Lady in Waiting 2
Lady in Waiting 3
Lady in Waiting 4
Lady in Waiting 5
Lady in Waiting 6
Lady in Waiting 7
Lady in Waiting 8
Lady in Waiting 9
Lady in Waiting 10
Lady in Waiting 11
Light Switch
Light Switch 1
Light Switch 2
Light Switch 3
Light Switch 4
Light Switch 5
Light Switch 6
Light Switch 7
Light Switch 8
Recovery of Rez
Rez 1
Rez 2
Rez 3
Rez 4
Rez 5
Rez 6
Rez 7
Rez 8
Rez 9
Rez 10
Rez 11
Rez 12
Rez 13
Rez 14
Rez 15
Foreword
The best fiction is reality dressed up for a night on the town. As such, the following tales are drawn from the direct experience or direct observation of the author. In terms of love and commitment between humans, these stories reflect what I live and what I see. I make no secret that this is propaganda; it is marriage counseling coming in the back door. It’s what the real thing looks like in different settings.
The issue is the inevitable debate about which version of reality that I’ve dressed up here. If you are a fan of Western Civilization, or one of the millions who simply absorbed it uncritically, you may not like what you see represented by these tales. If I could tear down the mythology, the cheap veneer pasted over the ancient truth of God, I’d do it in a heartbeat. What God revealed from the very beginning hasn’t changed a bit. Alas, I have to settle for slipping it into the clothes of storytelling and hope just a few get it.
Cavern of Madness
Love can reach beyond the boundaries of sanity.
Setting: Recent past, somewhere in the southern US.
Turning right onto the main drag, he aimed his aging motorcycle in the direction of the glinting spire a few blocks away. The local mall was a massive wall of glass on one side, the side facing him, and the roof peaked. It was as if a giant had chopped the building in half and slapped a glass cover on the open face. The other side looked like any other sprawling retail monstrosity. The old import bike still hummed smoothly in spite of its battered appearance. He never could afford the larger models, but the smaller one had the advantage of maneuverability. He was reminded of that when he had to swerve to avoid a heavy delivery van that darted into his lane seemingly from nowhere. He just managed to slip between its front fender and the stopped traffic in the center turning lane.
As his heart slowed from the adrenaline rush, he waited at the light for his turn to enter the sea of striped blacktop that surrounded the shopping mall. One of the few things he liked about this place was the reserved motorcycle parking not too far from the main door on the glassed side. Locking his helmet in its carrier, he shook off the remaining tingle from the near collision, smoothed his polo shirt and strode toward the entrance. Of course, the other thing he liked about this place was the great cafe they had just inside the door. His wife loved it, too. Today they had arranged to meet there for dinner.
Twenty years. Where had the time gone? Today was their twentieth anniversary, and he was in a very celebratory mood. They were nothing like the storybook couples. He was not some high school sports hero who went on to a massively successful career. He did manage to make the football team, only because there weren’t many volunteers for lineman. He made the team on the basis of his unusually stocky build alone. In spite of the coach playing him to death on both offense and defense, he was never a star player. He was just good enough, and reliable. Indeed, in his whole life, the one thing that mattered most to him was reliability. The old 300cc motorcycle was reliable, so he kept it. He was reliable on the various jobs he managed to land. Most reliable of all was his wonderful wife, Elise.
She, too, was no star. They met in high school, almost by accident, when he knocked her in floor as they both tried to enter the classroom door at the same time. It was the first day of the second semester. He kept apologizing as he helped right her, then pickup all her stuff. She couldn’t find the heart to stay angry more than a few minutes. As it was, by the time they were ready to sit down, the only seats left were two at the front of the center rows. During the entire period he wanted to crawl under the desk and hide from what had to be the attention of the entire room. She told him later the flaming red color never left his thick neck for at least a half-hour. By force of circumstance, they ended up working together, and he could never do enough for her the entire semester. As an ordinary, Plain Jane kind of girl, she wasn’t used to that. The net result was friendship, then romance. He never stopped trying to win her favor, and she never used his flaws as a weapon to hurt him.
He spotted her at their usual table, halfway across the floor space devoted to the cafe. The waitress had just poured her a fresh cup of coffee as she looked up and smiled at his approach. At that moment, no woman in the world could have gotten his attention away from her. He stopped and bent over to kiss her, holding the back of her head gently with his hand.
Without warning, a hand slapped him fiercely across the left side of his face. He jerked half upright, stunned. In one smooth motion she jumped up and shoved him hard in the hollow where his shoulder and chest muscles came together on the right side. Unprepared for any of this, the move spun him around. Tripping over a chair, he fell almost face down against the edge of the table, which tipped over the meet the tumbling chair, and he went down with crash. He lay in a tangled mess of furniture, tablecloth, condiments, and scalding coffee. From the corner of his eye, he could just see her low-heeled shoes receding smartly in the distance until they disappeared in a sea of other feet.
The pain of his body really didn’t mean much to him. It was the bitter voice of his Elise, playing over and over in his mind as she had pushed him away. “What do you think I am? Some sort of hooker? Whoever you are, you have some nerve, jerk!”
He lay there in numb confusion for some time. Finally security guard came over and gently nudged a wet spot on the back of his left shoulder. “Are you okay, sir?” He stumbled to his feet. In a scene that felt oddly familiar, he apologized repeatedly as he struggled clumsily to put everything back in place. The guard asked again if he was okay, and stammered, “Yes. Yessir, I’m alright. Sorry for the mess...” The guard stopped him and suggested he might want to go home and clean himself up, and see about that cut on his forehead. Mumbling agreement thanks, he shuffled away.
Reeling more from confusion than pain, he searched frantically in his mind for anything solid to grasp. Aimlessly, his hand passed over the paperback in his rig
ht rear pocket. It was a novel, a science fiction story this time. A voracious reader, he was seldom without a book of some sort. With his hand resting on the book, the only thought to surface was that he must have crossed a portal somewhere and ended up in a parallel universe. No, that’s just fiction! Still, it was enough to give him a purpose for the moment. With deliberate care, he backtracked his path into the mall. When he stood before his motorcycle, this tattered fragment of an idea simply evaporated. He turned and sat side-saddle. His left hand aimlessly pushed fingers through his dirty blonde hair, then grabbed and stopped. He sat like this in trance for quite some time.
Abruptly, he turned and mounted the cycle, dropped his keys, then snatched them up. Almost forgetting his helmet, he started the motor. He sat for a moment, then slowly putted out of the lot the way he had come. For the next 15 minutes, he rode mechanically in the traffic, with no conscious decisions on direction of travel. When he began shaking uncontrollably, he simply pulled off the road. Taking the helmet off, he stared up at the weathered front of an old abandoned store of some kind. The sign was gone, leaving the darker hued spot it had covered. He didn’t remember seeing the place before. He slid off the saddle, helmet still in his hand, and sat shaking among the weeds, trash and gravel.
The passage of time meant nothing, but in reality it wasn’t that long before he came back up from the well of confusion to realize his cellphone was ringing. Suddenly he yanked it off his belt, then froze staring at it, wondering what to do next. When it chirped again, he pushed the button and held it next to his chin. “Hello?” It was a croaked whisper. The voice of Elise, unmistakable even in the tiny electronic speaker, said
