by J. Richard Jacobs “There’s been another murder, Mary,” Stan said loud enough for her to hear over the whining blender. He sat at the dining room table, a cup of coffee in one hand, the morning paper in the other. Mary turned from the stove where Stan’s breakfast was taking shape. “Oh, no. Where …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Cloud
by J. Richard Jacobs Deep space, they call it. That unimaginably large area between seething spheres of fusing hydrogen, vast regions of gas and dust. It is often thought to be empty, a void, but it is not. Far from it. Debris of all kinds travels there. There are homeless planets, chunks of rock, ice, …
Alive
by J. Richard Jacobs You step closer, looking for detail Lost in distance and you now see There is much more revealed than before. See the people scurry, heads down With purpose, seeking destinations Dry and wind free. All seem caught up in their shuffling, Boots squeezing water at every step. Umbrellas tilted to the …
Anopheles Gambiae
A flash fiction by J. Richard Jacobs Dr. Lo Hung Phat and his young assistant, Shun Yu Mi, were working late. The sun had set but the heat and humidity of the day lingered. Sweat dripped from Dr. Lo’s chin. The shallow glass bowl they were peering into was filled with a thick, sickeningly greenish-yellow fluid …
Sleep, Mr. Teasdale. Sleep
by J. Richard Jacobs Like all backwater, private institutions of purported higher learning, MegaTech of Dimwater Bay owed much of its available funding to three basic components. First, it complied with federal and state regulations regarding curricula and teaching criteria. Second, they offered several off-the-wall degree courses that could be found nowhere else on the …
A TOWI in Time
by J. Richard Jacobs A dark figure moved quietly…his head held high through the rushing, heads-down flow of Friday evening pedestrians as they scurried for subway and bus connections that would take them out of this south side neighborhood and dump them in another, safer place. Any place would be safer, truth be told. They …
A Uniform Shade of Red
by J. Richard Jacobs The road to judgement is a twisted one indeed. Giving due consideration to the circumstances, Theodore Nathaniel Pendergast died well. He walked the long, dimly lit hall, chatting with his companions about the miserable conditions in the world, late-breaking news events, and traded plain old small talk with them. Even told …
Silver Moon
by J. Richard Jacobs A tall and lanky man, delicate of feature with long, silver-gray hair cascading to just a bit below his broad shoulders, moved with a feminine, animal-like grace through the mob milling on the narrow walkway. Crowds of shoppers, gogglers, pickpockets and homegrown experts at shoplifting spilled out into the center of …
Clear Shot
by J. Richard Jacobs An undulating mob of grim faces obscured behind veils of glinting, wire-framed sunglasses and dusty beards flowed along the beach toward Aaliya Haskin’s lair. Their weapons were held at the ready and a look through the scope revealed fingers caressing pressed metal strips inside the trigger guards. Inside. They were serious …
Flight Into Hell
by J. Richard Jacobs On the morning of October sixth, 1918, Lieutenant John R. Cochran was caught napping. It was Sunday and nothing much happened on Sundays. He was watching the ground for any sign of troop movement and not paying attention to the sky around him—a bad thing for a fighter pilot to do. …
Just the Other Side of Reality 