Coyote Prose

  The rest of the ride was eerily quiet. For my part, I couldn't put any useful thought into words. Colonel Killough had retreated to his enviable stoicism, wearing a glower that would've made Plato nervous. The Staff Sergeant and Crew Cut had disappeared behind their professional masks again. I pressed my cheek against the cool window glass and let my mind wander out of the jeep and into the sky, following ribbons of teal aurora over not-quite-solid stone battlements and into clandestine towers of gleaming brass. I imagined what it would be like to sit on the edge of those hard-light walls and watch the sunrise race toward me, or see the moon skim over the Sierra Nevadas. Normally, thoughts like that would've lulled me to sleep. Not tonight. Not after the bone-chilling revelation Chuckles—the comedian Colonel—had just dropped in my lap. Two weeks after graduating high school, I'd watched the Aeris kick the laws of matter and energy squarely in the teeth befo...

  I clapped my notebook closed, leaving my green pen between the pages to mark my place. It always pissed my research lead off that I wrote in green. I'd sat through far too many lectures on professionalism, but Acoustic-Harmonic wave theory was hardly the stuff of great focus and attention these days, so none of my superiors had much fight behind their bluster. Dubbed the "Music Class" of the scientific world, Acoustic-Harmonics (ACH) and their associated wave theories were all the rage when I was in primary school. People had an idea that the Violet Incursion was caused by radio transmissions from outer space interacting with our ionosphere. Basically, an intelligently designed aurora borealis. At eight years old, I was completely smitten with the idea, and I loved music. It felt natural, so I made it my mission. I'd listen to AC/DC's Thunderstruck and Pink Floyd's Learning to Fly while I did my homework and watched old clips of Odyssey Years with Dad in...

 It had been unseen for over nine years, and the tenth was drawing to a close with the flight of the fireflies and the last gasp of spring's chill before the rough heat and humidity of summer settled over the kingdom. The paling blue hue in the sky looked ordinary and wonderful in every way from the tops of the shrugging hills, where long grass swayed among lightning bugs. But the lights that flickered and danced across the yawning stone-and-metal meadow below radiated anxiety and enterprise. They told a story of opportunity and apprehension. The "ordinary" blue sky above abandoned its pleasant ruse without violence or alarm. Rather, it seemed almost playful as it shed its cloak of deepening black and indigo. The clouds rolled over and shifted into clear but luminous vapor. Where their ghostly outlines had been fading into the coming night, they took on solid form, tracing the shapes of the impossible. Meanwhile, the light reversed course, and color blushed back into the ...

  Penumbra Chapter 1 Shards of terracotta clay fanned out across the yellow dirt, skipping into Choya bushes and under what was left of the exploded boat. A disquieted critter, maybe a lizard, skittered from underneath the wreckage and into the treacherous thicket of cactus in the failing light. I dropped my Red Ryder down on the boat shell and shook my head. “Not making that mistake again” I muttered to myself. It didn’t matter if the mysterious critter had a diamond ring around its little tail. Nothing was worth going anywhere near a Choya bush. With gnarled, green limbs covered stem-to-stern in inch-long white needles stretching over 6 feet tall, Choya was called “Jumping Cactus” for a reason. If you so much as brushed into it, the inconspicuously barbed white needles would latch into your skin or clothing. Your well-intentioned response would be to pull away, which takes an entire segment of the vicious cactus along for the ride, turning one puncture into dozens. I wince, memo...