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    Surrealities, Part IV
    Surrealities, Part IV
    Surrealities, Part IV
    Ebook63 pages1 hour

    Surrealities, Part IV

    By J. Dean

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    About this ebook

    From the mind of storyteller J. Dean comes the "Surrealities," short story series, a concept rooted in and inspired by weekly television serials such as The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and The Outer Limits, and classic radio serials such as Suspense, Dimension X, Lights Out, and other regular tales that take the imagination to the heights of exhilaration and the depths of fear.

    In "Allergies" a junior high boy finds himself plagued by something far more sinister than the regular pressures of every day school. The second story, "Turn Left at the End of the World" introduces a woman who receives a desperate but incredulous plea from a friend who begs her to look beyond the world she knows.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJ. Dean
    Release dateSep 16, 2018
    ISBN9780463570623
    Surrealities, Part IV
    Author

    J. Dean

    "Taking fantasy in a completely unique direction."This is what J. Dean intends to do with the Vein series. Instead of following the tried and true methods and paths of familiar fantasy mythos, he created an original world for an epic story. From his Michigan residence, he captures the fantasy world of the Vein (and other stories) and imprisons them upon paper, until the day when the words are set free by the imagination of those willing to read them. The Vein series is J. Dean's first venture into serious writing, and he hopes that you will join him on the twists and turns of this ride that is part excitement, part drama, part terror, and all adventure.

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      Book preview

      Surrealities, Part IV - J. Dean

      Surrealities, Part 4

      A short story by

      J. Dean

      Smashwords edition

      Copyright 2018, J. Dean

      For information and other literary works from J. Dean, please visit

      http://jdeanauthor.wordpress.com

      Cover photo by J. Dean.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.

      -C.S. Lewis

      ***

      Allergies

      Almost there now.

      Wayne Simmons pushed the bike pedals with a steady, relaxed rhythm, passing walls of trees on either side. Had he the time, he would have stopped to talk to every one of them, get to know them, ask how their spring was going. He would have laughed while picking off stray branches and studying the bugs crawling up and down the bark highways of each trunk. He would have communed with Nature for the entirely of this cloudless, warm day.

      It would have been a far more enjoyable time for him than being locked up inside that prison yard called Junior High.

      Wayne hated school now.

      Not that he liked it to begin with. Homework and studies and listening to teachers drone on and on about various standards mandated per the Federal Government sent him into an imaginary world of drawings and poem-writing that stretched his mind and really educated him. But all of that had been little more than a tolerable annoyance. That was par for the course of being a kid, putting in your classroom time like a criminal does in the Joint,ﾝ as his Uncle Reggie called it. And Wayne wasn’t a horrible student. Sure, he brought home some Cs and a rare D, but he kept most of his grades in the low A to high B range. Nobody would be asking him to give the valedictorian speech his senior year, but neither would anybody find him flipping burgers in his forties. All of that school stuff Wayne could live with.

      What Wayne couldn’t live with was Doug Jarrett.

      Especially now.

      #

      Wayne once heard his mother say that every single person has a twin in this world. If that were the case, then Douglas Jarrett could have also proved the exact opposite premise. Doug towered over Wayne’s stunted size by more than a head’s measure, had bulging shoulders and forearms in contrast to Wayne’s thin frame, and possessed skin as bleached as Wayne’s was dark. Doug became an instant favorite among the other athletes, and when football season started he made the starter position at tight end look easy, while Wayne struggled to remind the coach that he wasn’t the water boy.

      All of that turned out to be nothing more than an inconvenience for Wayne. As much as he thought of it as unfair, he could live with standing in somebody else’s shadow—literally, in this case. And for most of the school year, that was as bad as it got. Doug had been the star of the show in football, in basketball, and it looked like he would be a lights-out pitcher for baseball too. He walked into a classroom or down the school halls, and everybody forgot about the rest of the world to talk to him. Even Wayne’s own friends followed the crowd, leaving him at his locker to see their jock Messiah. It annoyed Wayne, and he took the time to say so to his amigos, who in turn ribbed him for being so sensitive (What’s your problem, Wayne? C’mon, Doug’s a great guy. I’ll bet you’d like him too if you took the time to chat with him).

      Wayne couldn’t argue with that last point. He had personally talked to Doug a few times, and while Doug did dish out a couple of jokes about Wayne’s lack of vertical stature, it was usually followed with an assurance that he was just joking. Remarks about Wayne’s height were nothing new to him; he knew that he lacked a competitive altitude, and he also knew that most of the remarks weren’t meant to be vicious. Still, there was something about it coming from Doug that made it different. When he said something, Wayne bristled and wanted to deck him: a foolish thought to act on, but a real reaction nonetheless. Why did the biggest, most athletic kid in the school have to notice his shortness, even in good-natured fun?

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