author Eliza Sherlock

Rapture

In these twelve stories, a brain injured young man rebels against his diminished life, a doorman at one of London’s exclusive hotels impersonates a deceased client, a retired banker tries to renew his importance by sculpting and erecting an enormous spire in his front yard, a young wife discovers the betrayal going on under her own roof, and in the concluding story railing against her daughter’s self-destructive life and wasted potential, the grieving mother longs to recapture the past.  The characters in this short story collection are possessed by varying degrees of obsession and madness.  The loneliness, longing and emptiness that lead to the search for meaning and connection in the midst of tumultuous personal change are achieved in unusual ways.  From diverse walks of life and settings, young and old, the characters’ every love relationship, every betrayal tests their assumptions and reshapes the future. 

author Eliza Sherlock

Rapture

( this is only a part of the first story )

Top Man

The windows in their flat were so fogged by condensation Emma and Jonathan couldn’t see out - the hot August day and boiling vegetables competed with weak central air for ascendancy. Jonathan had suggested salad for Sunday lunch but she couldn’t bring herself to serve Martin such an insubstantial meal. She checked her watch; he was due in half an hour, just enough time to mash the potatoes, set the table and change.

When the doorbell rang at noon, Emma buzzed him in. She listened to the familiar voices in the entryway, Jonathan’s low and calm, Martin’s voluble. As they entered the kitchen, Martin brusquely kissed her cheek and handed over the weekly bunch of flowers, a mix of white carnations and daisies, dyed strangely blue, which she felt compelled to admire extravagantly while arranging them in a vase. Last week’s bunch, wilted and tilting at different angles, splayed in a pickle jar on the kitchen counter.

Jonathan offered Martin a glass of sherry, and Emma, hurt by her brother’s coldness, began to dress the salad. Martin leaned against the kitchen counter and ignoring her, recounted his week. Jonathan murmured encouraging replies. Listening, she knew that though he resented Jonathan, he hoped to impress him, and she forgave Martin’s attempt to exile her for finding a new man. Conversation with Martin never an easy proposition, guiltily, she smiled at Jonathan, receiving in return a look she couldn’t interpret.

They moved from the kitchen through the dining area and into the living room, all three spaces interconnecting without walls. Cramped, they sat in a row on the sofa, Emma in the middle. She picked her cuticles, trying to think of something Martin would like to talk about. An avid moviegoer, he loved to discuss plots, and often gave them a blow by blow account, which drove Jonathan mad.

“Seen any movies this week?” she said.

He turned to her, his mood now improved.

“I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” He looked at Jonathan to gauge his reaction.

“Part two hundred and seventy one,” Jonathan said rolling his eyes.

Martin laughed.

“You have to admit, there’s been no more successful story,” Emma said.

“Do you mind if I put on some music?” Martin asked, kneeling before the CD player.

“Whatever you’d like,” Emma said.

Jonathan offered refills and Emma joined him in the kitchen to serve. She dug him in the ribs with her elbow at the stove, feeling conspicuous with only the dining area and the music to shield them. She wanted Jonathan to embrace Martin, too, to know and love him as she did, though without the perspective of the good years, she knew how hard he found it.

“Please,” she whispered, “be gentle with him.”

 “I am trying. If only it wasn’t every Sunday.” 

“He looks up to you.”

“Little does he know.”

She smiled. “You didn’t know him then. He could have been just like you, a professor of English. He was so smart. And,” she gulped, “it breaks my heart that he thinks Harry Potter is something you’d like to talk about.”

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said. “The man is impossible to pin down. There are so many versions I have to take into account.”

“Sshh. We all have versions; don’t make it sound like he alone has changed.” 

Jonathan gave her a hug. “I promise I’ll do better.”

She served the salad followed by dinner. Emma forced herself to eat the hot food and Jonathan, perspiring, ate with little appetite. But Martin relished his meal, attacking each item individually - first his peas followed by carrots, potatoes, and finally chicken. She knew from childhood he ate in order of least preferred.

After lunch they sat in the living room with bowls of ice cream on their laps.

Jonathan, ashamed now of his callous attitude, rose gamely to the responsibility of getting to know Martin better.

“What do you like to read?” he said, as Martin shuffled through the CDs, scattered on the floor.

“Oh, I like most anything. You may find this strange,” he said, taking in Jonathan’s receptive smile, “but what I like most is reading maps.”

“Old maps?”

“I like new maps best.”

“Martin has mastered the whole of London while it’s all I can do to get to work and back,” Emma said, grateful for Jonathan’s about-face. She squeezed his hand.

“Not so,” Martin said. “But I can surely try.”

“It’s a noble aim. London, though I’ve lived here for a long while, is not easy to navigate,” Jonathan said.

Martin looked up and smiled. “Well, the important thing is I know how to get here.”

Emma and Jonathan exchanged glances.

“Martin, you know that nothing stays the same,” Emma said.

“Of course I do.”

In the face of his optimism, she found herself unable to go on.

“How would you feel if we were related, old chap?” Jonathan said, coming to the rescue.

Martin’s face suffused with the creep of a blush at the shock of this. For a long moment, he didn’t reply. “Well, that’d be fine,” he said at last. He scrambled to his feet, stuffing a couple of CDs into the rucksack he’d brought the flowers in. “You don’t mind if I borrow these, do you? I’ll bring them back next time.”

“Of course I don’t,” Emma said with a sigh.

She was proud of Martin’s independence, the way he worked a full-time job and lived in a flat from which he walked to work every day, living at the height of his capability - beyond her parents’ wildest dreams. Substituted by the Sunday ritual, the relationship she craved with her younger brother, though unfair, even foolish in its impossibility, didn’t stop her wishful thinking, the lunches not only filling Martin’s emptiness but attempting to fill hers. The past remained too close, reminding her not only of their loss but of their fleeting happiness. Martin once her closest friend, their love in some way unassailable, had vanished. Now that boy was gone and Martin had taken his place.

She walked him to the Sloane Square tube station.

“Is it true,” he said outside the entrance, “that you’re going to marry Jonathan?”

“Yes,” she said. “But it won’t change things between us. I’ll be married, that’s all.”

“When?” he said.

“We’re going to put the flat on the market first. We plan to list within the month. And once it’s sold and we’ve bought a house we’ll get married.”

He looked at her, trying to retain his composure. “He’s a good bloke.”

“He is, isn’t he?”

“He finds me a chore, I think, even though I try my hardest.”

“That’s just not true,” she said firmly. “You don’t know each other yet, that’s all.”

“If you say so.”

Martin, she thought, despite his limitations, could not be taken in that easily.

Though he made the trip weekly, he consulted the map, placing his finger on the first connection. Looking up he smiled wryly, as though making fun of himself.

“Bye, Emma.” His smile enigmatic, not that of a man who had suffered a traumatic brain injury, his normal appearance a trick life played on her. She hugged him with too much feeling and he pulled away impatiently. In an attempt to recover, she stooped to examine her hemline and smoothed her cotton dress.

“Well, bye then, Martin,” she said. “Same time next week?”

“Right-o,” he said briskly. He glanced at his watch, kissed her and then began his descent into the station, lifting his arm to wave without looking back.

author Therese A. Kraemer

A Touch Of Me

An extensive collection of poetry about all aspects of life complete with illustrations

"This Book of Poetry is a collection of poems that have a personal meaning to me the author. All the illustrations are my original art work". Thérèse A. Kraemer

author Therese A. Kraemer

In the Arms Of An Angel

Two lives hang in the balance,

Two women convicted of murder. Only One may survive.
Zandria Adams, living in the present, is executed for murdering her cheating husband.
She meets a handsome angel.
He informs her that she’s  been given a second chance,to return to earth to live again.
1856  Selma is being hanged for murdering her cheating husband.
To her horror Zandria awakens in the eighteen hundreds just as a rope around her neck tightens and the floor falls away from her feet..
The angel Seth is sent down to earth as a human with no memory that he’s an angel, to help save one of them.

Editors Note:
Many characters in this book have accents and or different speech patterns. The author has attempted to illustrate this phonically. These are not spelling errors.

author Lonnie Hicks

My Big Fat Book of Humor, Satire and Funny Stuff

This is an extremely funny book by an author who has over 72,000 followers on Twitter @lnnie. He makes you laugh, over and over again.

author LIPHAR

Liphar Magazine Issue 3

Liphar on Literature, Photography and Art
Still hanging in there campers? I hope so, because Liphar Magazine has been traversing with a mix of stimulating material in this energized issue.

Behind the Lens: Wojciech Toman with his view on HDR (High Dynamic Range) images, as opposed to "traditional" photography.
Joyce Dickens refers to her photography work as "Infused Artography" and considers herself a contemporary photographer/digital artist.

Art for Life: Carolyn Roper plunges us into the world of body painting, where this unfamiliar fantasy domain to most, is brought to reality.

Articles: Post Net Fiction, states literary fiction is seriously off the rails where the need to right again this once powerful and beautiful voice of real discovery and language.
Criterion of Beauty, challenges that art has no exact science of the beautiful and pleasurable; it just makes us more human with our own rational freedom.
Scrazzle, the new kid on the block, which seeks to invade Twitter territory by one upping what Twitter offers.

Thought Food: Advent of belief, where the real question is, why do you believe what you do?

Stories: A Game of Cards, where two ghosts sit at a square granite table and one says, "I am starting to think this ghost business isn’t all you made it out to be."
Maladjusted  A twisted tale
MOO, "To believe in dreams is a manifestation of insanity." Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Trains by the River, why did Hamlet trouble about ghosts after death, when life itself is haunted by ghosts is so much more terrible? Chekhov, Notebooks, 1892-1904

Wojciech Toman, a 27-year-old landscape and HDR (High Dynamic Range) photographer from Warsaw, Poland enlightens us in an interview. His stance on HDR is more of a realistic approach than ‘traditional’ photography, because it allows images to be created with a dynamic range that is closer to reality. Love or hate it!
Two of the most innovative and influential American photography masters of 20th century photography, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston inspired Joyce Dickens to pick up a camera. She refers to her work as "Infused Artography" and considers herself a contemporary photographer/digital artist.
With major industry awards, a double World Body Painting Champion and recognised as one of the best body artists in the world today, Carolyn Roper plunges us into the world of body painting. Where seeing is believing with her images in an interview, this unfamiliar domain to most, fantasy is brought to reality.

author Khaled Farag

The Flag of Inconvenience

"A thought provoking and powerful memoir taking a voyage through the oceans of the mind, to a destination yet undecided and undefined..."

author Therese A. Kraemer

Times Secret

Book three in the Time Travellers Series

The story details the life of a female android living a secret life as a human.
After her father’s death, Elayne discovers she’s a Cyborg and returns to the past to take the place of a
human dead girl. When the government discovers her missing, a tracker is sent in a time craft to bring her back.
The tracker, Katch, finds the beautiful android and falls in love with her. Twists, turns and intrigue keep them busy,
but they have plenty of time for love. The story continues in sequels, Time over Time, Timeless Love and Keeper of Her Heart.
Editors Note:
Many characters in this book have accents and or different speech patterns. The author has attempted to illustrate this phonically. These are not spelling errors.

author Therese A. Kraemer

Star Gazer

This story depicts the life of a modern girl changing the life of a headstrong Indian living in the 1800’s.
Essie Sherwood, living in the present, grows up loving hot-air ballooning and takes off on her first solo adventure. Caught in a whirlwind, she crash-lands on a cliff unhurt, but with a deflated balloon. Star Gazer, believing the balloon is a giant bird that will endanger his village has shot it down, but is confused to find a beautiful woman in the basket. Each believing the other an enemy, their first encounter is far from civil. After Star Gazer takes her to his village, his brother, the chief, orders him to take her to the nearest fort. Reluctantly, Star Gazer agrees knowing he has lost his heart to the white woman.
At the fort, Essie meets a scientist with a time traveling machine and the man agrees to take Essie back to her century. But, Star Gazer finds them and jumps onto the machine finding himself in the future. Soon they discover that the distant future has been changed and they have to return to the past, where their lives become more complicated

Book 1 - Blue Thunder

Book 2 - Love by Dawn

this is book 3 in the series