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    Lucky 13
    Lucky 13
    Lucky 13
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Lucky 13

    By Phil M. Cohen

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Among the thirteen stories in this collection, you'll meet Nick Friedman PI on his morning bike ride around Prospect Park.  You'll listen in on a confessional near the New Jersey Turnpike. You'll watch a dystopic courtroom adjudicating the cases of the disabled young under the new Cuddle Law.  You'll eat lunch at a deli in the Bronx. You'll experience a not-so-good magician's piece de resistance.

    Many of these stories are flash fiction, stories of 1,000 words or fewer.  Some are memoir; others sci-fi.  Some rework famous Old Testament stories. All are tightly crafted tales woven by a master story-teller, easy on the eyes, and challenging to the heart and mind, often offering the reader a wry smile

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhil Cohen
    Release dateMay 12, 2019
    ISBN9781393592792
    Lucky 13
    Author

    Phil M. Cohen

    Phil M. Cohen has been a rabbi, a college professor, a Jewish campus professional, and an author. His short stories and flash fictions have appeared in a number of journals, including commuterlit.com.  His first collection of short stories is a quirky melange of styles and lengths, some memoir, some sci-fi, some absurdist, all told with wit and insight.

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      Book preview

      Lucky 13 - Phil M. Cohen

      Dedication

      Grandparents speak of their grandchildren in tones of love, amusement, and, I think, a certain degree of awe. 

      Love, that’s obvious. No further explanation required.

      Amusement, well, that has to do with those early years especially as, for the most part, they unselfconsciously engage in those, well, amusing things young’uns do, as they stumble along their developing path, things that grandparents just adore, every smile, every imitation, every mispronounced word, every tooth, every effort to crawl, to stand, to walk, sing, dance, read, color, write.  It’s all just so darned amusing.

      Awe, well that’s possibly a species of the same thing, but deeper, an enduring experience of amazement as that tiny thing acquires consciousness, and then more consciousness, and more and more, as she fills her body and her mind, as she embarks on the adventure of their developing humanity, her unique individuality.  And to see this happening from a grandparently remove is, well, man, like, you know, awesome.

      At the moment I have one of these critters, this little joyful diminutive girl, Ava Ruth Cohen Roytman.  We may be blessed with more of these critters, but this one’s a great blessing all by her lonesome.

      It is to her I dedicate this first publication of mine. 

      Preface

      Welcome!

      It’s my pleasure to welcome you to Lucky 13, a selection of stories that have occupied my attention for the last couple of years now. 

      These tales comprise a mélange of styles and themes.  Two are slightly fictionalized memoirs. Three are versions of biblical tales.  A few are science fiction-y. Others are just regular old fiction. Ten of the thirteen are, or were, flash fiction.  I mean that when first written they conformed to the flash fiction rule of 1,000 words or fewer.  Since I’ve put them here and not a flash fiction mag, I’m liberated from the tyranny of the exactitude. In revision, then, I’ve allowed them to exceed the 1k max by a few words here and there.  If you like your flash fictions in at 1k or fewer, please forgive my transgression.

      I hope this to be the first of many eBooks that will accompany more ambitious publications.  The initial effort of this work’s a bit of an experiment. I’m more than satisfied with the tales themselves, but less certain of the technology. I’ve employed the services of Draft2Digital.com to launch these stories into the stratosphere. The good folks at D2D promise rather unbelievable service in a number of ways, making this production easy to publish. Given D2D’s reputation, I expect great things. I intend to begin playing around with marketing, and in doing so I hope that these various tales will find a readership among friends old and new.  To make a few dollars would be nice.

      I owe several folks words of thanks.  Prominent among my editors for this collection is Robin Lippincott, who offered insightful advice and important encouragement for most of these stories (he didn’t read all of them).  More, when someone tells you your writing reminds him of the great Grace Paley, well that’s a shot in the arm. 

      Pete Duvall commented on an early version of  #XIIILive Wires. 

      Michal Koren read a late draft of these stories. 

      The good folks at CommuterLit.com saw fit to publish #XIISlight of Hand, while, Jewish Magazine published a very different version of Moses and Aaron. LongStoryShort.com, RIP, published an earlier version of #XILive Wires. 

      Jewishfiction.net published an early version of  the first chapters of Nick Bones Underground.

      A special thanks for my friend, the playwright Dr. Michael Stang, whose critical eye and facility with words helped, especially with #VIII His Father’s Voice."

      Above all, my love and gratitude go to Besty Gamburg, my wife, who’s seen more drafts of my stuff  and corrected more things in the my writing then there are days in a decade.

      A special note about the final piece, #XIII Nick Bones Underground. This is the first several pages of a full-length sci-fi tale filled with quirky characters, sardonic humor, and challenging questions befitting the secular, transhuman age we’ve entered upon.  This story is the beginning of my upcoming novel bearing the same name.  The full book is due out September 14, 2019 by Koehler Books.  Enjoy these first pages, and keep a lookout for the whole latke.

      I would like to thank Arkady Roytman, my son in law, for the art that concludes each story, and Michal Koren for the dramatic cover art. 

      Words of encouragement and constructive criticism may be delivered to: lucky13philm.cohen@gmail.com

      Enjoy.

      Shalom,

      Phil

      Phil M. Cohen

      Nick Bones Underground

      September 14, 2019

      Koehler Books

      I. Scrabbled

      To celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary, Gustav and Iris launched their sailboat from Miami for a month’s cruise around the Caribbean.

      As they neared the Bermuda Triangle, tragedy struck. A freak storm sank their boat.  Gustav and Iris managed to save themselves, and, like modern day Robinson Crusoes, they found themselves on a tropical island alone among the flowers and the trees.

      That their daily routine was disrupted was most distressing. In particular, they now couldn’t engage in their daily Scrabble game. 

      In good times and bad, wherever life carried them, Gustav and Iris had played Scrabble every afternoon at 4 p.m.  So evenly matched were they that over the years neither dominated.  Their sally into the famous word game increased their vocabulary even as it continually sharpened their ability to squeeze every last point out of any situation on the board the fates might take them.  Their scores were always high, rarely more than a few points apart one from the other. 

      On the island they were bereft of the tools required to play: the board, those tiny squares containing letters and their point value, those wooden stands for the letters to rest upon, and, naturally, a dictionary to provide the element of truth to their wordplay.  Not that they would ever cheat, heaven forefend. But every now and then their Webster’s had to be pressed into service to adjudicate a claim that this or that word actually existed and was actually spelled that way. 

      In the early days on the island, as they scrambled to establish the means needed for long

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