Lucy:  Fire Bombs
On the third floor of the Compound orphanage, a high, keening wail woke Lucy. Her feet hit the floor before her head left her pillow. Without thinking, she scrambled upright, shoved her feet into her fuzzy slippers, and grabbed her robe. The wail continued to rise and fall as Lucy fumbled her way out of her room and down the hall to the boys’ rooms.

U’Kee stood in the middle of the hall staring down at the wailing Alan on the floor. “We’d been playing cards and just went to bed when I heard someone in the hall. Major Michael was doing a check on us because the orphanage in Sylvana was fire bombed. I guess Alan heard the major and me talking.”

The gorge rose up in Lucy’s throat, but she put aside her own reaction to the news of a bombing to deal with Alan, who sat on the floor outside his room wailing and throwing his torso and head against the hall wall. 

Lucy grabbed his shoulder. “Alan, it’s okay. We’re safe. Please Alan, you’ll hurt yourself.”

Alan ripped himself loose from her grip as he threw himself backward against the wall.

Lucy looked up at U’Kee, who still seemed frozen in place, his face unreadable as he just stared at Alan. “Get Medic Kai. I think Alan has cut open the back of his head, and this meltdown isn’t going to stop without help.”

U’Kee turned and ran, thankful for something to do that took him away from Alan’s screams.

Backup arrived immediately in the form of Lizzie. The big white dog crawled into Alan’s lap stopping the forward motion of his rocking, thus easing the force with which he could hit the wall.

As Alan threw himself backward, Lucy tried to cushion his head with her hand, but his skull hit it so hard she yanked her hand back and held her wrist as pain shot up her arm. She wondered if her hand was broken.

“I’ll get his blankets and pillow.”  Nicole had arrived and darted into Alan’s room to retrieve his bedding.

Lizzie, Pooh and Thomas, the three big orphanage dogs, had been trained for therapy. Pooh loped down the hall, followed by some of his human orphan family. He spread his weight over Alan’s legs while his sister sat up and leaned heavily on Alan’s chest.

Martha knelt on Alan’s other side. “It’s okay, Alan. We’re all here. We’re safe. Just wrap your arms around Lizzie. Give Lizzy a hug. That’s right. Good job. Lizzie loves you. Hold her tight.”

Nicole and Lucy managed to stuff Alan’s blankets and pillows behind him to protect his head.

Subdued by the big dogs and somewhat comforted, Alan’s rocking slowed, but he continued his high-pitched screams.

The third dog, Thomas, arrived, inspected his siblings efforts, and carefully settled himself on Alan between his litter-mates. Lizzy shifted her weight again and started licking at Alan’s tears.

Lucy looked around at the crowd of kids from all the houses. Most of them were crying. “Does anybody know what happened in Sylvana? Are the children okay? Who’s hurt?”

“They were fire bombed. What do you expect?” Miranda screamed back. “Don’t you ever think, Lucy? They’re probably all dead. You’re so stupid. Those protesters will be after us next.” She broke down again in loud sobs.

Lucy stood and glared at Miranda. “Stop with the weeping, now. The kids at Sylvana could be fine. We were firebombed once, and we were fine.”

U’Kee and Kai arrived at a full-out run with Troy, Lizzie’s brother trained for security, loping beside them. Troy stood and wagged his tail at his siblings while Kai dropped to the floor beside Alan. “U’Kee, hold his arm for me. Dogs, hold him still.” He swabbed Alan’s arm then inserted a needle. Alan continued to scream and tried to hug Lizzy with both arms.

Lucy asked, “Kai, do you know anything?”
 
Kai removed the needle and rubbed Alan’s arm. “No, we passed two security agents in the hall. They didn’t know anything except they’d been ordered to their posts. What set Alan off?”

A chorus of voices answered Kai with conflicting information. Alan’s wail fell to a low moan, and he slumped sideways.

Lucy massaged her sore hand. “Kai, I think Alan may have cut his head open hitting it on the wall.” She glanced around at the hall full of whispering and crying youths. “I think we need to know what’s happened. I’m going to the president’s office.”

“You can’t go outside,” U’Kee said. “those protestors in the park will attack you and the building is on lockdown.”

“I’ll go through the attics.” Lucy patted Alan and said to the dog, “Good girl, Lizzy. Stay with Alan.” She stood.

The rest of the orphans fell silent. The thought of walking through the dark Compound at night sent shivers down everybody’s spine. Rats lived in the basements and scurried through deserted halls. Spiders and occasionally bats lived in the attics. The children feared fugitives, thieves, or squatters lived among the maze of unused rooms and dungeons.
​
Lucy grabbed Alan’s flashlight from his room. “Troy, take me to President Jake.” She set off toward the stairs with Troy at her side.

​

​CHAPTER ONE
 
​“Hal, there’s a customer wants to see you in the front office.”

I looked up from the engine well of the Firebird where I had been watching one of my two high-school interns install the intake hose on the new radiator.

Dutch, the owner of Dutch’s Antique Auto, had crossed the yard from the front office. He was a few years older than me, black and fit in a clean white tee-shirt, sharply-creased khakis, spotless loafers and a curl of frat-boy hair falling across his forehead. He kept his hands in his pockets, safe from dirt and grime.

I turned back to the two girls. “Time’s up. Finish what you’re doing and clean up.”
I picked up my cane from where it rested against the side of the car and fell in beside him.

“One of the cars you did last week,” he said. “The tune-up on the sixty-three Volvo.”

I frowned. “There’s a problem with it?”

Dutch shrugged. “Not that she said. She just wanted to talk to you and said I couldn’t help her.”

I remembered the Volvo, Olga, and her owner Mrs. Parker. I didn’t see how I could have made a mistake with a simple oil change and checkup. I had changed the timing belt and some hoses, cleaned the plugs, general TLC for the most part. I might have missed something, but I couldn’t think what.

Mrs. Parker waited in the lobby, a woman of energetic seventy with weather-worn cheeks, wearing a beige, shin-length skirt and buttoned blouse. She beamed at the sight of me. “Henry Crompton, I thought that was you. We were all so relieved when your mother said you were home from the hospital.”

Her dog, a German shepherd roughly the size of a steer, grinned at me with his tongue draped out one side of his mouth.

Dutch raised his neatly-groomed eyebrows and retreated to his office.

On entering the lobby, I’d instinctively cocked my head to conceal the scars that disfigured the right side of my face. I forced myself to face her squarely. “Call me Hal, Mrs. Parker,” I said, “Is something wrong with Olga?” I held my deformed right hand across the countertop for Baron, the dog, to coat with foamy saliva.

“Well no, not wrong,” she said. “I wouldn’t say wrong, but I would like to know what you did.”

“It’s all on the work order. I can get you another copy.” I turned to look for the three-ring binder that contained carbons of all the work orders we completed.

“No, I don’t mean that.” She dismissed the notion of a work order with a wave of one work-gnarled hand. “Anyone can do that sort of thing. I want to know what you did.”

I shook my head. “I don’t follow, Mrs. Parker.”

She leaned over the countertop and glanced from side to side for eavesdroppers. “You know.” She winked.

I shook my head again, completely bewildered.

She straightened. “Well, ever since you did her checkup, Olga…well, she arrives everywhere five minutes before we leave.”

“Five minutes…”

“Before we leave. I leave the house at three-fifteen and arrive at the supermarket at three-ten. I’ve timed it.” She held up the thumb-sized watch she wore on a chain around her neck. “Five minutes. Every time.” She grinned at her little pun.

Behind me, something tittered from the back of a shelf displaying models of vintage cars. Always teatime, never tea, Hal darling.

Mrs. Parker couldn’t see or hear Little Samoth, my unwanted demon familiar. I said, “You mean you’re actually turning up earlier than when you left?” A year ago, I would have dismissed the claim as nonsense, but lately, I’d seen stranger things than time-traveling cars.

“That’s what I said. Are you sure you don’t know how you did it?”

Apart from replacing the timing belt, I couldn’t begin to imagine.

Little Samoth shrieked with laughter from under the counter near my feet. 

I tried to think of the correct response for the circumstances. Please accept my condolences? Get well soon?

Mrs. Parker shrugged. “Well if you don’t know, I suppose I’ll just take my little time machine home. You’ll do all Olga’s work from now on, won’t you?”

“If that’s what you want, Mrs. Parker.”

She plucked her purse from the countertop. “I wouldn’t have anyone else touch her. Baron, come. Love to your mother, Hal.” 

Woman and dog exited the lobby. Mrs. Parker circled the front of the car, patted Olga affectionately on the nose, and held the door for Baron to squeeze in the back. Then she got behind the wheel, presumably to arrive home five minutes ago.

I stood for a good two minutes blinking at the open parking space at the curb. 

Behind me, Dutch said, “Well?” I turned around and found him in the door of his office with his thumbs hooked in his pockets and one eyebrow arched.

“Well what?”

The mechanics, Finny and Stick, crowded into the lobby through the back entrance. “What was it this time?” Stick asked Dutch.

Dutch just shrugged and looked at me.

Jasmine and Amber, the high-school interns, had come in behind the mechanics. “What was what this time?” Jasmine asked the room in general.

I looked from face to expectant face. “She called it her little time machine.”

Finny whooped and raised his hand to Stick for a high-five. “I get the pot,” he shouted.

“What pot?” I frowned at Dutch for an explanation, but he just raised one shoulder.

Finny was dancing in place. “I called it. Time travel. You said flying car, but I said, ‘Nah, it’ll be time travel.’”

Jasmine jammed her fists on her hips and pursed her lips. “What are you talking about?”

I raised my voice. “Somebody tell me what’s going on.”

Stick had an oddly high, thin voice for a man six foot six and three-hundred fifty pounds with a biker beard pouring down his chest. “We’ve been getting phone calls all week. Remember that teenage kid who bought himself a junker and his dad said he had to pay all the gas himself?”

I remembered the freckled and pimpled sixteen year old who might have a chance at stepping up the social ladder if he just had some wheels under him. He’d looked at Jasmine like Romeo looked at Juliet, and she’d had eyes only for the car, a seventies station-wagon the kid had bought for five-hundred dollars—the price being so stiff only because it actually ran.

Stick said, “Yeah, well, he drove it two weeks and brought it in a few days ago because he thought the gas gauge was broken. I gave it a look, and the tank was topped-up full. That old clunker should have drunk gasoline like an elephant, but the kid said he’d never put a drop in it since the first time he filled it up.”

I waited for Stick to explain the joke.

Jasmine said, “Cool.”

Finny said, “Oh man, plus the doctor who said he never hit a red light on the way to the ER, but he made up for it when he drove to the marina to take out his boat.”

Dutch leaned his shoulder against the frame of his office door and crossed his ankles. “The city planner who busted up his Jag three times this year driving too drunk to see straight. Now the Jag won’t start when he’s been drinking. Any other time, but not when he’s sauced.”

“He was not a happy man,” Stick said. “He said he’d never bring the car back here.”

Dutch grunted. “I’d have kicked him to the curb years ago, but it wouldn’t have been fair to the car.”

“That is so totally cool,” Jasmine said. “When you do mine, can you make it fly?”

Shy, blond Amber said, “What about making it so you never get lost?”

Jasmine tossed her head like a movie star. “That’s what cell phones are for. I’ll decide what I want it to do when I get it.”

I scowled at Dutch. “Nobody thought they should mention any of this to me?” I had worked on more cars than the ones they had listed. There was no way to tell how many people were driving around in time bombs. Time. I shuddered. Where was Mrs. Parker going to wind up if Olga took a wrong turn through time?

Finny said, “If we’d said anything, it might have jinxed the bet.”

“What bet?”

“You know, the one about what you’d do next. Stick said flying car.”

Stick interrupted. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t really taking it seriously.”

Finny ignored him. “I said time-machine like Doc Brown in those movies, and Dutch said being invisible to radar.”

Dutch looked sheepish. “I wasn’t taking it seriously, either.”

Finny jabbed an index finger at him and waggled it around. “Your loss. I was serious, and I got the pot.”

Jasmine pouted. “How come we didn’t get to bet? I’d have said...” She squinted at the ceiling, thinking.

“There’s a pot?” I asked.

“We put in twenty each.” Finny did a hip-wagging dance. “And I am forty dollars richer, thanks to you, Doc. That’s your name now, dude. You’re Doc Brown.”

I decided it was marginally better than Phantom Swordsman, which had been hung on me after I was caught on video fighting off a swarm of tentacled leviathans with the blade of my sword-cane.

Dutch pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket, peeled off three and handed them to Finny. “Are you going to finish the Pontiac before five?”
​
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Finny waved the bills in the air and hip-wagged out the back door, dancing to an inner beat.



Available on Kindle and in paperback Free until Oct. 30. https://www.amazon.com/White-Knight-Blackwood-Curse-Book-ebook/dp/B07J5MBG2Q/ref 
#Paranormal #Adventure
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What don’t we know? 

Some scientists tell us that an electron can behave like either a wave or a particle. Oooookay. Actually, we’re pretty familiar with the properties of particles.They’re reliably solid. We can manipulate, weigh and measure them. We can interact with particles as we build roads, buildings and machines. Particles are the building blocks of our history. 

On the other hand, what is hidden in our history? Could it have been a basic understanding of how waves work that built Stonehenge? What have we dismissed as impossible? What science and knowledge has gotten thrown out as superstition or witchcraft?

We don’t have much information on waves. Most of what I was taught, even in college, has been proven wrong. I was told that sound waves are nothing more than a bunch of particles bumping into each other. Thoughts are particles in the brain arranged in such a way as to stimulate a certain sequence of neurons to fire, giving us the thought that we like chocolate ice cream. This has been our contemporary understanding.

However,  if electrons behave both as particles and as waves, how do we interact with them as waves? I think the recent historical answer is that we don’t. I suspect that answer is wrong. It is more probable that it is impossible not to interact with electrons as waves. We just don’t understand how that is done. We don’t recognize it when it happens. We are so immersed in Western logic and scientific thought that we cannot see something that has not been named and described for us.

We’ve long recognized the problem of not being able to see something because we don’t have a word for it, particularly in low descriptive languages. Some early languages don’t have a word for blue. It gets classed as dark along with black and green. Brown is often called orange. As an English speaker, I see a big difference between brown and orange and all the shades in between. People who don't have the words for brown or blue can't identify them as different from orange or green. We've all learned that people living in the far north have many words for snow. For those of us who don't live with snow constantly, we don't see many of the subtle differences and don't know what they mean.

In the same way that naming colors influences perception, recognizing those aspects of our lives that are influenced by wave mechanics might be easier if we named them. Perhaps we do have some names for encountering wave mechanics. 

We talk about energy waves, which sounds like a bunch of electrons acting like waves. The theory, I learned for feeling warm when the sun strikes me, is that a bunch of electrons get excited by heat from the sun and bounce around hitting me causing my electrons to bounce around faster, and I experience this as heat. I think we can talk easier about the phenomenon if we forget the bouncing particles and go straight to waves. Waves of energy from the sun strike my skin, and I experience this as heat. Who knows maybe the sun waves turn some of my electrons into waves? The point is, we don’t have words to describe the phenomenon.

However, we know humans have built machines that observe electrons acting as waves. What do we do with this information. Why is it important?

I think it is important because limiting ourselves to the use of particles only limits our potential. Refusing to look at waves and consider the possibilities is willful ignorance. Will understanding Wave Mechanics help us understand our history and the ancient myths and legends? What impact would an understanding of Wave Mechanics have on our spirituality or on our relationship to music? Where can we go? What can we do, and what can we be if we study waves? How do we study them? How do physicists begin?

Physicists don’t begin the study. Writers and artists begin the study by naming ideas and imagining what can be. We like to laugh at how many of the devices seen in the Star Trek episodes have been developed into actual products. Our flip phones couldn’t communicate with the space station, but we have developed means to communicate with the space station and with our explorers on Mars. We have a space station. We need our writers to name ides, concepts and possibilities so that we can talk about them and begin to play with the concepts. 

We need to relearn what the renaissance artists knew. Science and art are not two opposing fields, They are connected. Artists must have some sense of spacial relationships, human nature, perspective, and the properties of their materials before they can create. On the other hand, it is the imagination of the artist that gives birth to scientific study.

***


My daughter, Melissa doesn’t agree with me on the role that wave mechanics plays in quantum physics. We are only amateurs, after all, in the study of physics, but she performs her job as a writer by giving names and descriptions to the concept of overlapping universes in her Blackwood Curse series. She thinks her physical objects slide through overlapping universes. I’d write them as becoming waves that pass through matter, space and time. https://www.amazon.com/Blackwood-Curse-Queen-Corruption-ebook/dp/B077CWT6JB/ref

"Why would anybody in their right mind want to live on an island with no bridges? The only way on or off is by ferry boat!" I think I've heard this question a thousand times. It is also many people's fantasy to live on Vashon Island and run a small farm. This isn't my fantasy. This is what I do. When I visualized a set of photo blogs about my home, I visualized blue skies and warm sunshine. Blue skies and warm are a fantasy. This island is somewhat southwest of Seattle. We get clouds. Situated in the middle of the Puget Sound, which is part of the Pacific Ocean, we never get too hot or too cold. My commute involves hauling bouquets of cut flowers from my farm to my roadside stand in Burton. I do this five days a week.