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    Strange Shores and Other Stories
    Strange Shores and Other Stories
    Strange Shores and Other Stories
    Ebook47 pages24 minutes

    Strange Shores and Other Stories

    By Sam Kates

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    About this ebook

    Three short stories that share a common theme: the search for lost loved ones.

    In Strange Shores, a schoolteacher hits upon a drastic method of attempting to escape the sadness of his existence in this world.

    Joy or despair may be found in Alfonso's Looking Glass. A bereaved husband is willing to risk one to find the other.

    In A Matter of Perspective, an unlikely pair traverse a post-apocalyptic landscape where violence and death are constant companions.

    Three genres. Three tales. One theme.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSam Kates
    Release dateOct 11, 2015
    ISBN9781912718160

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      Book preview

      Strange Shores and Other Stories - Sam Kates

      Strange Shores

      and other stories

      Sam Kates

      Copyright © Sam Kates 2015

      All rights reserved

      ––––––––

      This is a work of fiction.

      All characters appearing in this work

      are products of the author’s imagination.

      Any resemblance to real persons,

      living or dead, is purely coincidental.

      ––––––––

      ISBN 978-1-912718-16-0

      ––––––––

      For news of releases and promotions:

      http://www.samkates.co.uk/stay-in-touch/

      Contents

      Strange Shores

      Alfonso’s Looking Glass

      A Matter of Perspective

      About the author

      Author’s note

      Strange Shores

      The man who reminded me of Rusty was bending over in the frozen food section of the supermarket, rummaging in a freezer. As I walked down the aisle towards him, he straightened, a carton of ice cream in his hands, and the resemblance struck me like a slap: slim almost to the point of gauntness; long, stick-like limbs; hair sandy and unkempt.

      He glanced at me, frowning, and I saw the dissimilarities: eyes brown, not green, and too far apart; jaw too weak; nostrils flared, not pinched.

      I looked away, pretending to examine the frozen fish. Shaken. Not so much by the resemblance, but by the jolt it had given me.

      The memory of Rusty had faded to the back of my mind like the recollection of a recipe or old girlfriend’s phone number or anything else insignificant. Yet he was the man who had changed my life.

      * * *

      Although Rusty didn’t teach me until I reached the sixth form, I’d heard the rumours—rowdy classes, ineffective teaching methods, indifferent manner and whispers about a wife killed by a drunken driver.

      His name was Edward James. I had to plumb the shadowy depths of my mind to pluck that out because I always knew him, and remembered him to the extent that my traitorous memory allowed, as Rusty. It’s what every kid in school called him on account of his unruly mane of hair lending him a vague similarity to the animated character Mr Rusty from that wacky old children’s programme, The Magic Roundabout.

      We didn’t call him Rusty to his face, of course. School kids can be cruel when running in a herd, but tend to have strong instincts of individual self-preservation, though since I’ve started thinking about him again, it’s occurred to me that he was unlikely to have thrown a wobbly, as we used to say, if someone had called him Rusty to his face; he was too distant, too preoccupied. Being addressed by a childish name would not have registered high on his list of things to get annoyed about. Besides, ‘Rusty’ was tame compared to some of the nicknames given to his teaching colleagues.

      There was nothing distant about his teaching style. His lessons were... different. He once spent an hour bouncing a ping-pong ball on his desk.

      Does it stop there? He jabbed a spindly finger at the ball as it reached the top of its bounce and started its descent. His eyes gleamed as he turned to us, giving lie to the rumour about his indifference. "So? Did the ball stop? Come on, think! In the instant before it started to fall... did it stop?"

      The silence

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