Recent Stories

Tautologies

By J. J. Mounts-Miller

For Appaloosa Radio

October 2024

I have been thinking a lot about something I read in a magazine. I had read: “Brain waves spike during death.”

Researchers found that in the process of dying, brain activity increases. When it is graphed, it represents a distinct series of sharp, upward spikes. Before these spikes, there is usually a period of low-level dormancy, typically a relatively flat line of limited brain activity. Then, during death, brain wave activity spikes.

This has taken me into an extended philosophical meditation about logical truth and the nature of consciousness.

Echoes of Barbara Mandrell

Appaloosa Radio offers “Echoes of Barbara Mandrel,” a poignant new audio drama that explores love, loss, and the power of memory.

Charles lives in the Oak Knoll Memory Care Facility, where his memory disease has robbed him of his memories, emotions, and personality. He exists  in a perpetual gray fog that makes him unresponsive to what is around him.

When Charles receives an experimental treatment to restore his lost memories, he’s suddenly transported back to his experiences performing with country legend Barbara Mandrell. Vivid recollections from decades past flood Charles’ mind, and fantasy and reality begin to blur. Believing Mandrell is in danger, he embarks on a quixotic quest to save her. Charles’ harrowing journey plays out over the infectious melodies of Mandrell’s classic hits, building to a bittersweet finale where Charles’ musical memories prove more powerful than death itself.

My True Love is a Sonnet

A Story and a Song Taken from  Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Ghosts of the Artic

a song and story

As the people whispered in their own dread

“Now there were new ghosts, with very white faces long beards and blue eyes.

Those ghosts haunt the land and the ice.

Lost. Never knowing where to go or what to do.

Help us, they wailed. Save us. Feed us. Bring us warmth.

Lost. Never knowing what to do.”

Escape!

A work of fiction based on a true story                                                                —      A Story in four parts

Nearly 23,000 American soldiers were captured during the Battle of the Bulge. Among them were three G.I.s from Western Pennsylvania serving in the 422nd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division who were captured on December 19, 1944.

This work of fiction tells about their escape from the notorious Stalag IV-B P.O.W. prison and their eventual (and eventful!) return to the medical amenities of Camp Lucky Strike.

The events included in this part occurred northeast of Leipzig, near Sieben-Arm-Säule during early April 1945.

It is a work of historical fiction based on the actual experiences of Vernon J. Cumberland, Bruce Waldo, and Horace Catheay, to whom it is dedicated.

THE RIDE

In June 1979, two brothers drive an electrical contractor’s work truck up to the Mojave Desert from Huntington Beach, California.

They could not be more different. Professor Tomar Hinton is an “up and coming” philosopher now teaching at an exclusive private university in North Carolina. His younger brother, James, is an electrical contractor leading a crew which is constructing huge windmills on the crest of the desert’s mountains. Tomar has returned to his parents’ home to facilitate the funeral arrangements for their father. James offers his older brother use of the contractor’s work truck, but still needs a ride up to the work site.

The trip up to the desert worksite will take three and a half hours and begins at an “ungodly” hour in the middle of the night. There is no radio in the old truck, and the brothers are forced, as a result, to talk with each other.

An intimate, yet powerful story, of communicating across vast differences.

Facts —

Just the Facts

“He had done this hundreds of times while working on hundreds of cases. The grizzled, veteran, police detective sergeant checked his notepad for details, and then he turned to the eyewitness to confirm the facts. His job was to confirm the facts. “Just the facts,” as the fictional radio detective Sergeant Joe Friday did every week on the show, Dragnet.”

The police dectective believes that there are facts. Discoverable, evidence-based facts. Hard facts, as the detective sergeant would say. Facts. Not fictions.

Facts are as real as bullets, burglaries, bullies, and bastards.

Facts are discovered. Uncovered. Revealed. They are not made up. Not mere possibilities. Not speculation.

Put all the facts together and you have a whole picture. You know what happened. You know what really occurred. You have the facts.

Yet finding the facts is more obtuse than it seems. In truth, it may not even be possible. Determining which purported events occurred and which did not may ultimately prove fruitless.

A Woman of Substance

by Kay Fetner

Eugenia was just thirteen when her father married her off to an older man. This is the story of a girl from Charly, Arkansas who drove her Model A Ford to freedom and a new identity, to become a woman of substance.

~~~

“I was playing with some of my cousins and my younger brothers up by the big chestnut tree, the one my Pap always refused to cut down. The tree had the blight and should’ve been cut down and the stump burned. But my Pap liked that tree. He would never cut it down.

To us kids, it did not matter that it had the blight. It was ours to climb on and to hide in. We were glad that he’d never cut it down.

Anyways, I was playing with my kin up by that big tree. Then, I heard my Pap say, “Eugenia!” He said it loud with a stern voice. I knew to come runnin’ when he called me like that.

He was sitting on the porch next to a gentleman wearing his best Sunday go-to-meetin’ dark suit. The gentleman had some gray hair at the temples, and he was beginning to bald.

When I came up the steps to the porch, both men stood up. My Pap spoke.

“Eugenia, I want you to meet Mr. Winston Garrison.”

“Please to meet you, sir.”

My Pap continued. “Mr. Garrison is an Engineer for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. He has a house up in Omega.”

His voice trailed off. I waited for him to complete his sentence.

“Eugenia, Mr. Garrison is going to be your new husband. I’ve promised him that we can make it official next week in the Parson’s House at the Presbyterian Church in Omega.”

I did not know what to say. I simply stood there. I was just thirteen years old.”

~~~

Sutter’s Mill

A spoken-word tribute to Dan Fogelburg’s classic song from his High Country Snows album.

One-Armed Guitar Player

The morning fog had begun to lift around the pier, and the weekend tourists were starting to leave their hotel rooms for a day at the beach.

The one-armed guitar player opened his guitar case and carefully removed his Les Paul Deluxe 3 E X model from its well-padded home. He put one foot on the small bench and then rested the instrument on his knee. Some would say that it was remarkable that he could do so much with only his left arm, but for him the routine was ordinary. He held the guitar close to his chest with his chin and then fastened the strap. Once the guitar was secure, he lowered his foot to the ground and stood erect, checking to make certain that everything was comfortable.

It was time to begin his daily show. He plugged the guitar to his battery-powered amplifier. Speaking softly to his guitar, he said, “Time, my sweet, for beautiful music.” He began a soft jazz riff matching his mood and the weather.

Furious

by D.R. Nichols

D. R. Nichols uses a rap-music style to tell the story of “Mary Lou” — one cherry racing machine.

This is the kind of driver you hate. He makes you furious.   “You hate him, you really do.”