The Taste of Fire

Taste of Fire

And Other Short Stories

––––––––

by

Joseph Kessler Adams

Table of Contents

Title Page

The Taste of Fire

Introductions

The Alarm

Striding to Mars

An Exercise of Intellect

Bernie and Baxter

The Ghost

The Third Day

Metamorphosis

Nhiall’s Dream

The Taste of Fire

Microscopic Sledge

Oak and Lotus Publications

Raleigh, North Carolina

Copyright 1982-2014 by the Author

All Right’s Reserved

Introductions

Doesn’t everyone have other lives they live in dreams or in short sallies into fiction? We may just have a fantasy of someone living a life better than our own – more romance, more passion, more adrenalin, more money, more sex?

From my first truly aware moment, in my teens, I began to view the world as moving stories. I grew up in Los Angeles and would stand on freeway overpasses, watching the cars stream by and would remind myself each car had at least one person whose life was as important and my life was to me. Just as complex, tragic, triumphant, illustrative and instructional as my own.

And I did the same in cafes, or sitting on a brig wall on the Venice boardwalk, watching the locals and tourists work out their stories as they passed by.

I slowly had to give up my idea of villains. And heroes.

I have learned to see the world as a massive, teeming dance of us.

Some of these are not full stories and I almost hesitated to publish them.

But I was taught that the mark of a story is the moment of change – where the character changes from one thing, to another. It may not be a monumental change, but a moment of clarity, of awakening, or perhaps a moment of decision.

In that, I think these do their job. Some better, some worse, but at least capable of standing on their own to reach the reader.

A few words about the individual stories.

The Alarm

This was supposed to be the opening chapter of a novel, but I decided the novel was not something I wanted to put out to the world. I would hate my idea to inspire someone to do something wrong in our shared real world.

In my novel, they would do something that could only be considered as a felony, which would come back to do more damage to those they love. So I decided not to tell that story.

But these are my people and there is a sense of community among them that I have not found in the middle class world, or above. There was a sense of connectedness that I have been lucky enough to experience.

They are my relatives, many of whom have lived through the tragedy of losing a spouse or a child, and pushed forward.

That is a story I do want to put out in the world.

Striding to Mars

Most of my writing is driven by dreams and was a dream about possibilities. I wish I could tell you what it means, but it was delivered to me in one chunk.

I shared it the best that I could.

An Exercise of Intellect

I tried to write in Hollywood but like most people who tried to write in Hollywood, that didn’t work out. But I had an agent who encouraged me to write for other media.

So I thought I’d try a submission for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. And, to be honest, it was never submitted. I got into a fight with my agent and this wound up in a file and ignored for several decades.

I got in a lot of fights with people who could have helped my career. I was a different person back then. I hope I’m better now.

Bernie and Baxter

One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn is to not give advice no one asked for. A friend lost a dog that had been their only companion for many years.

I thought that waiting to try to fill the voice was a mistake, but it wasn’t my choice to make.

So I tried to express what I had hoped would happen with a short story. Like many other stories, this was developed in a dream and when I woke it was a struggle to capture what happened in my sleep.

Ghost

A short piece based on my connection with many people, women and men, who are dealign with the scars of childhood sexual abuse.

You can move away. You can change your name. You can try to get into a relationship but the past robs you of your ability to be a full, adult participant in a working relationship.

Sometimes you connect with the right person, can tell the truth and move forward from a new foundation. Such beginnings should be recognized and appreciated.

The Third Day

Guilt has motivated me on more than one occasion, but I didn’t always know where it was going to appear.

This is a story – it is not what happened to me. But emotionally it remains true.

Metamorphosis

There was once a neighborhood bookstore called The Lazy Lion in Fuquay Varina, near Raleigh. They hosted a short fiction competition and we had a fair sized community of writers and the competition was friendly.

It was a Halloween competition and I just don’t think I’m a Halloween kind of guy. They wanted a short-short horror piece. I don’t really know horror, but I think I understand creepy.

It came in second and the night when they announced the winners was nice little party.

The Lazy Lion is gone now, and much missed.

Niall’s Dream

Dreams dominate my creativity and my writing, but I don’t think I’ve had a dream dominate one of my characters. The Lost Boys of South Sudan have been a story that crops up in the media from time to time.

Theirs is a wonderful story of struggle, horror and triumph of spirit. But when I see them interviewed, there is always a painful loneliness of having been pulled halfway around the world to escape the horrific stories that created the moving river of refugees in sub-Saharan Africa.

I know none of them personally. I don’t know why they erupted into my dreams through Naill, but one night the whole story appeared in my dream. I woke and, before eating or taking my necessary medications, I had to type the first draft of the whole story. I took a break for health and nutrition, they was back on the keyboard.

With one break in nine hours of typing, the entire story appeared and was given a second draft.

I am happiest of this story in my entire collection. I am more proud of two plays and my second novel - Climbing the Spiral Mountain - but this is my favorite among pieces of my short fiction.

The Taste of Fire

This is the oldest story in the collection. It was written in 1982 during a cycle of intense radio theater production. I have always been fascinated by empathy. The experience of many friends and myself into an area that cannot be confined with a simple, scientific definition. It is about feeling what another person feels, or perhaps another mind, human or not.

Rupert Sheldrake, a philospher on the fringes of science, made comments in a talk that effected me powerfully.  He said the human spirit operated within the physical body as a field of energy. The energy has a frequency. When we die, the frequency does not fade away immediately but maintains itself from sheer familiarity.

That frequency finds harmonies. When it finds a sympathetic frequency we say the two people involved are ‘in harmony’. When the sympathy of their vibrations is stronger, we say they are empathetic. If the vibration syncs tightly enough, we call it ‘telepathy’.

If the vibration does not die away immediately, we say we have communion with the dead. And if the echoes of the vibration continue for a long time after death, we pick them up and call it ‘remembering a previous life’.

I have had all of those experiences - except for the dying part. But I suspect I have had a moment of harmony with someone recently passed.

It may explain why I describe myself as an old hippie - I have always gone by the vibe. In fact, there are people I have met with whom I have been so in tune I called it remembering someone from the future.

But I wondered about the practical application of the idea.

I had an office in those days, before the Wizard of Oz subway station at Hollywood and Vine. The story was sparked by biting into a piece of burned chicken stand. The chicken shack was a little white building by a car wash cross the street from the Pantages in Hollywood, where I usually got a chili-dog for my Friday obligation (long story).

This piece of chicken wasn’t just burned, it had the ghost of a fire in its spiced carbon.

That ghost gave me the story and was the mother of the medical empath.

Microscopic Sledge

This is the only sequel I’ve ever written.

It was clear my Medical Empath and his best friend’s mother had more of a story to tell.

Once I envisioned a whole series of Medical Empath stories, but I think it will just be the two. But I think both of them stand.

The Alarm

The alarm whistle sounded three times in short blasts at a few minutes after eleven in the morning.  It was four miles away and a few birds complained as they were startled from their comfortable pickings in the leavings of harvested backyard gardens and larger fields, but they settled back in the cool autumn morning. 

The whistle sounded a second time and came out like a weak whine but it made the hundred or so adults in Squirrel Top stop their business and look up.  Three distant bursts from the steam whistle and silence.  By the time the third alarm had began, the people were in motion.

In the large field behind her unpainted, three room cabin, Susan Mae Browning dropped just-washed laundry in the dying fall grass and yelled for Ellen, her oldest daughter, to finish hanging the wash before she walked quickly from the rope line across the field and began to trot toward the road.  She immediately thought about the work she had planned after laundry that would have to wait.  But there was no question that it would be there for her when she came back.  Whenever that might be.

Across from her home, the rise they called Miller’s Hill echoed the fall signs of her own woodlot in brown, yellow, and red leaves framed with the deep evergreens and yellow green of the last growth of grasses and weeds, ready to fall with the next frost.  Shadows of clouds moved across the valley leaving batches of bright color in the sharp sunlight that contrasted with the pastels in the rolling shadows.  Here and there threads of gray smoke trailed up from the wood burning cook stove chimneys of her neighbor’s kitchens and she could see a few rooftops of green and black asphalt paper poking through the cones of changing leaves.  A few other houses sat on the upper slopes with their attendant gardens, worn fences and fields, as they had for as long as she could remember.

The floor of the valley below her was dominated by the dark brown mud road and the Miller's large fields. She saw other people moving in the same direction, flowing downhill toward the origin of the whistle.  The men from the fields were dark in their work clothes.  The women were paler dots of faded dresses who streamed like fallen blossoms from the scattered houses. 

In one field a team of workhorses stood where Alden Adams had left their plow.  They had been unhitched before Alden headed across the field where the stubble of the harvest had been halfway plowed under.  He trusted them to find their way home for their evening feed.  For their part, the horses were content to be free of the heavy harrow and began to pick casually at bits of straw and fallen crop in the broken earth.

On the porch of a slightly larger house on the slope below Mrs. Browning, with traces of ancient yellow paint clinging to the aging home-cut walnut siding, Louise Elaine Teller took the baby from her lap and handed the boy to Oliver, her eight-year-old son.  She brought her six children onto the porch to let them enjoy being outside on one of the last pleasant Saturdays of the season.  The three oldest worked on their studies from school, the twins were happy to dig in the moist earth beside the steps with a bent tablespoon they shared reluctantly.

Give him his biscuit and set him in the crib, Louise called as she moved quickly down the steps and onto the green and brown lawn framed by the failing planks of a generations-old fence.  Before the older boy could complain, she was through the gate and trotting along the path that led down the hill to the road. 

Ollie was a good boy and she hoped he would know that if she wasn't back by lunchtime, to give his brother and sisters bowls of the stew she had warming on the cook stove.  And if he couldn’t do that, they wouldn’t starve before supper.

Louise pulled her stretched hand-me-down sweater tighter and gained a little speed as she went.

David Willets paused in cutting lumber from a cabin that had fallen in from age and looked across the narrow valley.  He chopped and sawed the salvaged cabin wood into small pieces for the cook stoves of his neighbors and had a few more days of cutting to do before he was done.  As he saw the figures of the women moving down the hillsides toward the road, he stepped to his rusting, battered vehicle that had once been a touring car but had since been refitted to serve as a flatbed truck.  David slid the axe and his saws under the seat and started the engine.

His mother had taught him to serve when he could, and the wives would get to the mine faster if he gave them a ride.  He let the engine warm while he stepped into the back of the truck and took a gunnysack to wipe wood chips, leaves and dirt from the bed so the women would have it a little cleaner for the ride.  He lifted the stake-bed frames from the side and leaned them against the back of the open-top cab, then tied them firmly to the pipe frame he had welded in to support the folding canvas roof.

After a moment of cleaning as best he could with the muddy burlap, he stepped off the bed, took one step onto the running board to swing into the cab, and settled into the torn driver's seat.  He automatically looked at the fuel indicator, adjusted