These tales range from the almost normal to the fantastic, from the tragic to the comedic, from dark to light and from dark tale to fairytale. You'll encounter a mind cleaner who enters the mind of an angel, a rodeo cowboy who's beleagured repeatedly by a black angus bull in the arena and a raven-haired woman in his dreams, what happens when the one woman whom Giacomo Casanova has loved down through the ages finds a way to bring him back to life, and the story of a Death Valley hiker who encounters, and questions, God face to face. You'll accompany a writer as he makes his way by pickup over rough terrain through a nuclear holocaust, narrowly avoids plummeting into a canyon and fears he's about to be eaten by wolves, and you'll watch a storm chaser in Oklahoma remember who he really is and become an integral part of the storm. You'll share the frustrations of a rural boy who, after being forced into manhood by the death of his father, watches helplessly as his future is washed away in a flash flood, and you'll learn the ground rules about frightening little things we don't generally admit to noticing at all. You'll consider euthanasia and how you might one day pay the oldest debt, you'll watch a boy who loves to crush bugs get his comeuppance (maybe), and you'll accompany a Cajun man on a single-minded mission into the backwoods of Louisiana. Finally you'll witness a hell on earth in "Six Days in May" and then relive the story of Little Red Riding Hood with a new, improved Red who believes in magic and herself. I hope you will enjoy these stories.
As an added bonus, interspersed among thse tales in the style of Papa Hemingway, is an extra story marked in chapters and not indicated in the table of contents. It is at once a story, a recollection, a history and a confession. It is truth and fiction, reality and fantasy. I'll let you choose which is which.
