The TAF Omnibus: Stories & Poems

The

TAF

Omnibus

Triangle Association of Freelancers

(Stories & Poems)

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Arlene S. Bice

Contributing Editor

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The TAF Omnibus Triangle Association of Freelancers (Stories & Poems)

Copyright © August 2022 by Arlene S. Bice 

All rights reserved.

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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the copyright owner, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Each author published herein is the owner of his/her copyright in their respective selection. Following this first publication of the selected works, the authors are free to re-publish these selections elsewhere. For permissions related to The TAF Fiction Omnibus or the individual selections within, email:  info@tafnc.com. 

For more information about TAF and the authors published here, visit the TAF website at www.tafnc.com.

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PurpleStone Press

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Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

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Arlene S. Bice, Contributing Editor

Dedication

This book is dedicated to our faithful readers and to our brave writers who parted from their usual genres to stretch their imaginations and create interesting, suspenseful, loving, or humorous stories, and poetry for you.

Additional TAF Publications

A Taste of Taffy: Samplings from Triangle Area Freelancers

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TAF Stays Home: 29 Freelancers Writing

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The TAF Reader: Books on a Freelance Writer’s Shelf

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Find all TAF publications at the TAF website.

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To survive, you must tell stories.

—Umberto Eco

About TAF

Triangle Association of Freelancers (TAF) is a writers’ organization founded by Don Vaughan.  Our members can be in touch daily, available by email. If you are a novice writer stumbling over a problem, ask and you will receive multiple thoughts and opinions on the subject. When experienced writers have a thought that may help a member, it will appear in the TAF thread for any member who may benefit. Support and advice is always for the asking. A shared Bravo or equivalent appears for successes and words of compassion for any disappointments. Laughter gets tucked in between to keep us uplifted.

We are a writing family that began in the Raleigh (NC) area in 2003. From there we’ve progressed to non-profit status while growing members from across the country, yet kept the intimacy of hometown. Our first, annual WRITE NOW! conference opened its welcoming arms in 2008 with in-person conferences each year following until COVID-19 closed personal contact in 2020. This year, we successfully returned to our in-person conference.

When our actual meetings and conferences were denied us, Don created and moderated TAF Talks. This series of informative, lively conversations with impressive, high-profiled, professional writers, and editors is conducted by Zoom. Members are able to ask questions and interact with our guests.

Our monthly meetings continued, now virtual, usually with an interesting guest onboard. Members have offered additional helpful information by conducting virtual mini workshops. We network, share leads on job opportunities and markets; at times reveal personal experiences in business, good or bad. Our members represent all areas of the writing industry; publishers, formatters, editors, coaches, consultants, etc.  Many of our writers of various genres are multi-published and award-winning.

Often, as with our anthologies and this omnibus, we open the way for a writer to be published, adding to the resume they are building.

Please visit our website: tafnc.com.

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Arlene S. Bice, Contributing Editor

Introduction

Stories. I was lucky enough as a youth to experience the story telling around the campfire after hunting season ended and the hunters cooked venison for us families.  We were surrounded by deep darkness in the pine forests of New Jersey that intensified the teller’s story. As the night went on I sat enrapt, eyes glued to the voice, my imagination growing by the minute. As the adults consumed more beer, the stories got wilder and louder. But the evening always ended with guitars strumming and singing to send us youngsters off to bed with happy endings. Hence the writer already within me, marinated.

Stories. My brother Bob and I sat on the carpeted floor, glued to the voice from the big radio that stood tall in our cozy living room. We anticipated the buzzing sound that introduced The Green Hornet, or a deep voice announcing The Shadow Knows, or Inner Sanctum that came with the squeaky door. It warned us what was coming next. We loved stories of all kinds from library books to comic books (called graphic novels today) we traded with friends.

Fiction. Many of our members are writers of non-fiction for magazines, journals, blogs, and various publications that call for interviews, articles about parenting, health, animals, local events, etcetera, and books of memoir, poetry, essays, history, etc. But sometimes in the back of the mind smolders a challenge to write a fictional story, to stretch the imagin-ation and see what comes. It teases until an opportunity arises.

Gathered here are 18 members who stepped outside their familiar creative zone to stretch their imaginations and to expand their writing skills. They answered the call of opportunity. Writing fiction is different. Creating memorable characters, good or bad, breathing life into settings the reader can visualize is the enticement. Add having a plot that intrigues, catches your attention and holds it. Writing fiction is definitely different.

Here we offer you a wide selection of stories and poetry to suit your mood and exercise your mind and heart. Enjoy the stories TAF members have penned for you, the reader.

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Arlene S. Bice

Contributing Editor

Contents

About TAF

Introduction

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Time Warp by Lauren Clemmons

Imprint by Marvis Henderson Daye

The Betrayal of Sarah by Chanah Wizenberg

A Man Walks into a Burger King by Don Vaughan

Colorado Blue by Barbara Burns

Lament by Barbara Burns

Bed Springs by Barbara Burns

Murder at the Market by Barbara Burns

Down in Pisagitoches by K Ann Pennington

Justice for Liberty by K Ann Pennington

A Moment in Time by Rebecca Dalton

Paper Tiger by P. J. Black

Rush Hour by Lois T. Bartholomew

The Cloak by Lois T. Bartholomew

Cookie and Chip and Spandex by Erika V. Hoffman

Splintered Heart by Patricia Bumpass

In Good Hands by Teri DeGezelle Michels

Lovers’ Leap by Edward Wills

Truth by Sarah Merritt Ryan

Alive by Sarah Merritt Ryan

Fallen Blue by Sarah Merritt Ryan

Small World by Drew Becker

Hope Avenue by Ana Shapkaliska

A Rose from Richard by Nancy Lee Badger

Lessons from My Cat...the Dog by Nancy Lee Badger

Deep in the Forest by Arlene S. Bice

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Our Writers

About the Contributing Editor

Acknowledgements

Lauren Clemmons is a published author based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her essays, poetry, and fiction appear in anthologies, including TAF publications.

Time Warp

Carl slumped nonchalantly in his desk, more in the manner of a stylish, bored executive than in the manner of a rebellious student. His nonchalance was characteristic of his attitude toward himself. He had always considered himself a polite, yet direct person who knew where he was going and when he would get there. The only problem, it seemed, with his life was time. There was too much of it and it moved quickly, but not quickly enough. Time was in his way.

Although the days went by fast, there were so many more that he had to wait for and to live through. Today, he thought, was a day like any other school day, the kind that came and then faded without notice, the kind which caused him to wonder whether or not it had really been there. He had thought enough about reality and imagination in conjunction with time to the point where he wondered what really existed and what did not. Sometime he even wondered if his thoughts were real or imaginary, existent or nonexistent. He was puzzled but he had a solution. He knew that it would be futile to ponder the problem, especially if he really did not exist in the first place, so he concluded that time was irrelevant. His only hope was for his eighteenth birthday because, contrary to popular scientific belief, that year was the true ending of the gestation period of the human being. Until then, Carl wrote off time as being one of life’s deceptions and left the matter at that.

Carl straightened from his slump as Mr. Hadley came bumbling into the classroom in his usual, fast-paced duck walk. Hadley, or Dave, as the students had informally christened him, was likeable but only partially respected.  His thick-lensed glasses coupled with the disheveled brown hair on his balding head lent themselves to the look not of intellect, but of absent-mindedness.  On several occasions, when Hadley was busy grading papers, Carl had discreetly studied the flurry of Hadley’s motions. The jerkiness of the left hand holding a pen and the scratching marks on the paper conflicted with the syncopated tapping of his right foot on the floor and his right hand on the desk in between a background of sighs, sniffles, and occasional pencil-gnawing. Carl figured that Hadley’s lack of bodily control demonstrated an inner sense of extreme conflict and tension.

For some reason, Carl wanted to attribute Hadley’s oddities to those thick-lensed glasses, but Carl did not know exactly what he could, or should, infer. Carl himself had often tried to look beyond the barrier of the glasses to see if he could amass any thoughts or motives stirring like trapped butterflies in a jar. After careful peering and squinting, Carl deduced from his intense, analytical observation that Hadley had the beadiest eyes that he had ever seen and if a thought did reside in Hadley, it was held back by those two vacuums of prescribed glass.

Hadley stood, his back to the class, and made a mark on the chalkboard.  He slowly rotated and faced the class. Hadley had the most bizarre-looking grin on his fact that Carl thought was fiendishly possible. Class, said Hadley in his famed matronly tone, Class, this is a dot.

No kiddin’ Sherlock! mouthed an obnoxious guy in the back row.

Hadley smiled again, in a curt sort of way, and then continued. This is a dot.  For your assignment today, class, you are to write a creative story. You are to describe the dot and the circumstances of its existence by answering the questions: who, what, when, where, why and how.

The obnoxious guy in the back of the class groaned. The boy seated across from Carl and hunched over with his head on his desk obviously did not hear Hadley because he continued to snore. The petite girl in front of Carl rallied to the assignment as if it were a cry to right the wrongs of the world. She nibbled at her pencil, scribbling down famous phrases in between clamps. The remaining members of the class, the unthinking mob that they were, methodically drew out paper and pens and began the torturous miracle of transporting words from the brain to the paper along a transit system of nerves, veins, pores, and pens.

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The only exception was Harmony, who rhythmically twisted her long brown ponytail around and around the middle finger of her right hand. It was a mesmerizing motion. Carl suddenly longed to touch the ponytail himself. He wanted to breathe in the scent of her Gee-Your-Hair-Smells-Terrific washed hair.  All the popular girls in 9th grade were using the shampoo. Once, and only once, Carl had been close enough to Harmony to whiff her scented ponytail.  It had been a random timing of events.  Carl was uncharacteristic-ally running late to Hadley’s class. Harmony was, as usual, destined to arrive in Hadley’s class mere seconds before the tardy bell on account of her participation in the daily popular-girl-meet-up between 7th and 8th periods.  That day, in his effort to beat the tardy bell, Carl ran the last twenty steps to the classroom door and found himself literally on Harmony’s heels as they passed through the threshold. He had been able to breathe in her scented pony-tail as they crossed the threshold together followed by the tardy bell clang. The fragrance immediately calmed him and erased his tardy bell anxiety. The moment etched itself in his mind as his only, and therefore, best experience in getting close to a

popular girl.

As he watched Harmony twist her ponytail around and around, it occurred to Carl that Harmony was discretely giving Hadley the middle finger. Carl dismissed the thought. That just was not something a sophisticated popular girl like Harmony would do.

There was something, however, about the middle-finger twisting the ponytail that triggered Carl to come to the true realization of Hadley’s being. Hadley was not absent-minded or even stupid. Hadley was crazy! How in the world could he, Carl, write intelligently, or even stupidly for that matter, about a yellow dot of chalk on the board? The idea was absurd, ridiculous! Something must be done to stop Hadley.

Then it occurred to Carl that these events were not real. Time was playing tricks again, deceiving him into thinking he existed when he really didn’t. Carl looked over the petite girl’s shoulder. She was writing something about a dot...no, a balloon and a girl at a fair. It was the balloon of love.

Oh brother, thought Carl, had that girl actually written that? He glanced at the dot on the blackboard. The blackboard had always reminded him of a dark, dusky night. He liked walking at night along the road to his house because the night gave him the feeling of peace sublimed with horror. This juxtaposition of feelings sufficiently provided him with the high of an adrenaline rush.

As he walked down the road in his imagination, he began to feel different, yes, almost like another person. In his mind, Carl became another person. The person that Carl had become was commissioned X-7 and he was uniformed in a shiny, metallic suit typical of those worn in the 25th Century. He was walking along a road on a grassy hillside. The night air was still and silent.

X-7 was not alone. K-7 walked in-step beside him. X-7 placed his arm around K-7’s shoulder and hugged her closer to him as they walked. He loved her long brown hair.  It shined like glass, even in the dark night. X-7 often found random strands of K-7’s hair clinging to his metallic shirt sleeves after they had been together.  He took it as a sign that they would be together forever.

Playfully, he ran his hand down the length K-7’s long brown ponytail, giving it a gentle twist as he reached its end.  X-7 felt a rush of intense comfort from the flowery scent of her hair which wafted through the still night air like a drifting, downy feather. K-7 smiled.

They were so perfect for each other. Of course, they were.