Frontier Road - Short Stories (written by humans)

The Left Side of the Bench (A Short Story)

Part One - Left Side of the Bench In the coastal town of Lincoln City, a horticulture engineer with a unique perspective on life finds unexpected connection with a mysterious, but familiar stranger. Excerpt: "Oh hey, how are you?" I responded. It was the girl. She was beautiful. I adjusted my headslightly to make eye contact with my good eye. "I think I know you," she said. The analytical mind of an engineer quickly deduced that thisgirl, whom I slightly recognized, but possibly never met, had left her group of friends and returned to me. There had to be a motivation.  "Stop overthinking," I scolded myself."Say something, you damned idiot. She asked you a question, and you're sitting here speechless."  "You know, you seem awfully familiar too. We must haveknown each other at some point in our lives. When do you think it was?" I replied with a question.  I ease into a sense of relief. This girl is way out of myleague, both in looks and style. The truth is, I don't stand a chance. Thank you, God. Now, I can just relax, be her friend for just a moment, and not worry about the complexities of romance. There's something about our human nature always pushing for romantic relationships, which ironically can work against them, especially when pushed too early.  Lately, I've found a certain contentment with the idea ofbeing a single man—not a bachelor or a party animal, just a human living solo. There's a wonderfully relaxing aspect to it that I've come to appreciate.   "Quit overthinking, you fool. You've only exchangedone sentence with this girl, and you're already reconsidering your entire future." I thought to myself, still waiting on her response.

The Beardless Jesus Postscript: The Face in Iznik

An archaeological team in Turkey had recently uncovered an ancient image beneath layers of plaster inside a church near Iznik. This image of Christ, portrayed as the Good Shepherd, was among the five oldest surviving depictions of Jesus as an adult ever found anywhere in the world. It dated from the early-to-mid third century AD and was the best-preserved early image of Jesus ever discovered. Because it had been sealed inside an exceptionally well-preserved, oxygen-depleted underground chamber, the fresco’s pigments remained almost exactly as they had been painted some eighteen hundred years earlier. The image was so complete that Christ’s facial features, the individual folds of his tunic, his hands, and the distinct outline of the ram across his shoulders remained clearly visible and sharp. The newly discovered painting gave historians a remarkably detailed glimpse into how some early Christians perceived Jesus. Short-cropped hair. Middle-class Roman clothing. And beardless. Professor Buck zoomed in on the fresco, this work that seemed to solidify a lifelong thesis. He smiled to himself. And that felt like enough.

Writing a Book in My Spare Time (a short story)

Excerpt: "My dreams however, kept me awake—Claire, William, the breakfast at the Caffè Florian. The conflict. She was nervous, but not refined, and not always on edge, just this morning. The man, the nameless man, or William now, but that doesn’t fit. That’s ok, we will use it anyway. William and Claire at the Caffe. And there was a child, there were children, but this child, their last to leave them, and now they were alone on this trip, alone on a trip for the first time in their lives, really. They had taken trips, vacations, second honeymoons, but there were always children at home, demands to come back to and to worry about. But is that a plot? Who are the characters? Dream on, brain and soul, find me answers, give me questions to ask. I know the story, it’s the details that I don’t know. The story is already in me. But can the story survive one setting? There is another man. He enters the picture soon, as the reader will see. A tall man, slender with a beer belly. A man in his 20s, the reader may presume, or pushing 30. A gentle man, but boy can he drink. And boy can he eat. He joins William and Claire for breakfast and orders immediately. A large bowl of clam chowder, an extra roll or two for the dipping, and a glass of Aperol spritz. That is all for the night."

On Being a Collector of Books (a short story)

Short Summary: I was sitting in my car thinking about hobbies and somehow ended up inside a bookstore pretending to be a serious collector. I bought Edward Newton’s The Amenities of Book Collecting for twenty bucks, convinced for a few minutes that I had discovered the secret world of bibliophiles. Newton’s book led me to Alexander Pope, which made me feel briefly intellectual, and then to the story of Harry Elkins Widener—the young millionaire book collector who died on the Titanic at twenty-seven. Widener treated collecting books like gold mining, digging through dusty piles to find hidden treasures. Inspired, I kept reading, turned a few more pages, and there it was, a treasure. But was it the only treasure I found? A handwritten note from Widener himself to Edward Newton, dated April 1912, just days before he boarded the Titanic. Excerpt from the story: I’m sitting in my car in the Walmart parking lot wondering if I should go inside. I know there are Pokémon cards in there, but I also know there are people. And not just normal people. These are the people who know exactly when the card vendor restocks the shelves. They walk straight to the aisle without looking up. They scowl if anyone is near them. They aren’t afraid to box out a child for the cards. To get a pack I’d have to compete with them. These middle-aged men. These monsters. These vultures. I stay in the Civic with the heater on and watch them come empty handed and leave with boxes of pokemon in their hands. I’m just thinking about what a petty life this is. I scroll. Humans are the most interesting things in the world. I just don’t enjoy being around them very much. I need a hobby. I do enjoy reading. I read a book, or maybe it was a movie that said, “Young man, go West.” Now people tell me, young man, get a better job, or young man get a wife, or young man find God, or Young man, get a hobby. I want to just say, Old Men, die.

Mission Impossible: Finding Noah’s Ark (a short story)

I was a young missionary when my companion persuaded me to abandon our assigned duties and join a strange expedition to Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. What followed was five months of faith, doubt, cameras, preachers, and men who desperately wanted to prove that scripture could be found buried in the ice. We found no ark, no beams, no planks—but before I left that mountain I stumbled upon something far stranger: the frozen body of a creature no man could properly name. Whether it was evidence of ancient myth, forgotten species, or simply the imagination of men too eager to believe, I cannot say. I can only tell you what I saw.