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    'Clasped in Prayer': Short Stories
    'Clasped in Prayer': Short Stories
    'Clasped in Prayer': Short Stories
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    'Clasped in Prayer': Short Stories

    By Lewis Hill

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    About this ebook

    'Short stories should be compact.They should create, conflict and conclude but in pages not chapters.'
    Here the author experiments with the dark chocolate side of fiction,nibbling away at bite sized short stories ideal for office lunch times.To be taken with a cup of soup these stories will whet your appetite for more.

    WARNING: some late night solitary readers may have to imbibe of something stronger by way of refreshment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse UK
    Release dateDec 27, 2011
    ISBN9781467877855
    'Clasped in Prayer': Short Stories
    Author

    Lewis Hill

    The late Lewis Hill, a beloved and best-selling Storey author, grew more than 20,000 trees on his farm in Greensboro, Vermont. He was also a member of the National Christmas Tree Association and the New Hampshire-Vermont Christmas Tree Association.

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      Book preview

      'Clasped in Prayer' - Lewis Hill

      ‘Clasped in Prayer’

      Short Stories

      39821.jpg

      Lewis Hill

      US%26UKLogoB%26Wnew.ai

      AuthorHouse™

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.authorhouse.com

      Phone: 1-800-839-8640

      © 2011 by Lewis Hill. All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

      First published by AuthorHouse 12/16/2011

      ISBN: 978-1-4678-7784-8 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4678-7785-5 (ebk)

      Printed in the United States of America

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      This book is printed on acid-free paper.

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Other books by this author include:

      Milestones: A Development      ISBN 978-1-4259-9939-1

      In Exilio                              ISBN 978-1-4389-8015-7

      Contents

      Kicking The Habit

      The Valentine Card

      Suspense Story

      The Flying Pizza Company

      Snowflake

      Walls of Illusion

      Kew Walk, Kew Walk

      Grace

      Dedication:

      For my Family and Friends

      Kicking The Habit

      However he looked at it, the resemblance of the amulet to his own facial characteristic was uncanny. Some say coincidence is the better part of superstition; others, while acknowledging apparent similarities, will deny that it is due to anything but chance. The overriding principle that totally mesmerised him was that the petrified archaeological remnant of carved tree stump that he turned, now this way, now that way, was very, very old: and it did look very like he did (albeit in a bad light) . . . at least that was what he had been told.

      After the line of traffic moved on past the yellow-jacketed workmen on the motorway, he slipped the Stone Age amulet into his pocket and headed for home. Absent-mindedly, he lit a cigarette, letting the sharp-edged smell cut away his lethargy and end-of-day tiredness: ‘his burnt-out ends of smoky days’ . . . or ‘short, square fingers stuffing pipes of his smoking habit’—to paraphrase (some say misquote) the poet.

      A pair of abstracted T.S. Eliot ‘tobacco phrases’ appraised themselves about him, lingering like an odour on a tweed jacket before eventually curling away into nothingness as an exhalation of thought. Once, when he had first heard one of the sentences, he had wrongly imagined very squat plumbers trying to push dirty, ragged material into copper tubing (squat, square fingers stuffing pipes) before giving up in disgust to console themselves with bowls full of sauce and pasta and riotous families of seventeen. He watched a small light aircraft as it crossed overhead to land in an airfield not far away. As he held the match for a second, realising his unthinking mistake, he began to extinguish his tobacco, his bad habit that would no doubt be the end of him. And he thought of his family far away in Falmouth and he sighed.

      The sun was setting in the sky and hung low like a shimmering portal of perception. A sharp intake of breath and he chucked the spent cigarette onto the motorway. A clash of orange splintered on the tarmac briefly indicating where he had been. An external observer would have been distracted by the speed of the traffic around him and quickly forgotten this mindless act. He sped on into the evening, alone with a few tapes. Soon he was pulling off onto a service station stop and checking into a motel for the night, handing over his company card.

      After a fitful, dream laden sleep where he dreamed of climbing up along the canopy of a rainforest before launching into fight, it was only because of the roar of traffic from the motorway that he rose dishevelled and hungry. He could feel the smell of the countryside riven in two by the noise of lorries and cars travelling north and south. The momentary dream-like quality of this synaesthesia numbed him for a minute, as it prejudiced itself away darkly in to an erosion of other night-remembered thoughts and before his consciousness finally took hold the reins of his mind. Shaving in front of the mirror, he remembered the stone figurine that stood taut against the breakfast tea tray, complete with sugar sachets and biscuits. He looked again at it and was as amazed as he was the first time. This feeling of historical synchronicity transported him in one indulgent act of conceit across thousands of thousands of years to an earthbound time before time itself was counted.

      He imagined a fortified village within a clearing, fortified by a palisade of felled trees that keep the wild things out. Several fires around the enclosed village burnt a series of thin wispy lines of smoke into the cloudy overcast daybreak. Tethered goats recoiled as snapping dogs, fed up with the scraps and bones left under the tables, engaged in one snarling match of supremacy. Low dying smoke hung like mist among the animal furs. Somewhere two huts along a baby cried, berated by an older child…

      And if you want to know why Tast—EEZ soap suds are so good for you, you’ll just have to buy them for yourself. His radio switched itself on, interrupting his reverie as dramatically as a police squad might remove a Newbury protester from a clearing.

      An article on the morning show about a fresh crop of circles in a farmer’s field reminded him of his stone based village adventure. He could almost smell bread that had been prepared that morning in the kitchen of the major hut.

      Without undue haste (so as to hold the spider web of the savage garden uppermost in his consciousness), he picked his way like a hung-over barfly to the breakfast room, after dressing, and ate a hearty breakfast.

      Condemned to live in the present, he climbed back in the car and sped into the morning tumult of moving vehicles. Once up to speed all other thoughts pressed themselves away and then, reaching for his first midmorning smoke, here, he checked himself and sought out his nicotine chewing gum instead. He touched the stone amulet, scratching his nail with a jarring feeling that made him shudder, and he wondered why he had intended driving through the night to meet this client who might or might not buy an insurance policy from him that morning.

      He drove further through the countryside, occasionally recognising some town he might want to visit simply because he had seen their names on the road signs. Rather as you might take a detour through ‘Stoker Poges’ and be surprised by the unexpected development of discovering both the home of Gray’s Elegy and the tomb of William Penn. And coming up to a major city with lots of road, lots of cars, lots of jams and road works, and a bulging unjustified reputation for being a smoky queuing system, he now joined another traffic jam.

      Chewing another stick of gum, he began fretting that he would miss his appointment. He switched on

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