I raised my hands up above my head as I stared down the business end of the .45.
Come on. Are you kidding me? I just wanted to make a deposit!
The hand that held it trembled and I looked up into the kid’s eyes, the only part of his face that showed through the black ski mask he wore.
What I saw there wasn’t what I would have expected to see in the eyes of an armed bank robber. Continue reading “Do You Believe?”
It was August when I started seeing them. At first it scared the living daylights out of me. I thought I was losing my mind. I told my friends about it. They thought so too. So I stopped telling them about it.
The first time I saw one was just after midnight, three weeks ago Friday.
I was in bed reading Tolkien on my Kindle when a movement in my periphery drew my attention.
I glanced to the right. My heart rammed into the walls of my chest and tingles shot through my body. There it was—or he—or she—I don’t know, but there it was, standing by my dresser. Continue reading “The Mysterious Ones”
“What do ya say? Should we give it a shot?” Andy asked.
Kris sighed and shrugged, “I don’t know.”
Andy stared at his son for several moments and nodded.
Nothing he did seemed to meet with approval from the sixteen-year-old. He’d thought finding a car for him would make him happy. Getting a clunker would be affordable and they could spend time together restoring it. However, it seemed even this idea was falling flat.
Kris cocked his head to the side as he looked at the beat-up old Camaro. Continue reading “Beautiful, In Its Time”
“It was June of 1941,” said Walter Cross, looking at his grandson through the steam rising from his coffee, “I hadn’t been in the army more than a few months when I was captured by the Nazis. They sent me to a POW labor camp. They worked us all day and didn’t feed us enough to keep a kitten alive. Half the men I came in with never came out.”
Matt looked intently at his grandfather.
World War II, Nazis, and labor camps were only things he’d ever read about or seen in movies. His grandfather had lived it.
“What was it like?” Matt asked. Continue reading “In the Presence of my Enemies”
(Winner of CFW Event #18)
Taking that first drink when he was seventeen. That was the first major mistake of his life. One drink had led to another and then… he was hooked.
Stopping by the side of the road to help Jenny Garman change a flat tire. That was one of the good choices he’d made. They’d known each other vaguely before then. Seen each other as they walked through the halls of Dearbrook High, but after he’d helped her that day it had spurred a friendship. He never really understood it, at least on her part. She must have seen something good in him. Maybe she saw what he could be. Continue reading “Ten Things”
(Second Place Finisher in CFW Event #15)
Rissa watched the stream trickle to nothing more than a thin thread of water meandering over the rocks. Then a little further down it disappeared altogether. As she walked on, she found herself entering a desert, stretching out endlessly in a sun-beaten, desiccated expanse of sand. Heat-lines rose up like a mirage in the distance where the sand met the sky. Continue reading “Like a River”
Buy Grace Like Rain from Amazon now for only $3.99
(Last chapter from the Kindle devotional ebook Grace Like Rain.”
Grace. It’s a word often used in the realm of Christianity, but do we really understand what it means? Do we realize the depth of it?
Amazing Grace
Grace is God’s infinite love, comfort, and forgiveness of His children. Grace is the blood flowing down from the pierced body on the cross and washing away our sins, cleansing us in its purity. Grace is God’s gift offered freely to all mankind—infinite, unimaginable, amazing.
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men,” Titus 2:11 Continue reading “Grace Like Rain”
(Winner of CFW Event #12)
Rylan stared at the endless expanse of Illtydian soldiers stretching out for miles across the rolling green hills of the Takuma Downs. Ominous gray thunderheads billowed in from the north, threatening a violent storm and blanketing the land in an eerie, dim blue light.
Rylan stood atop the hill to which his army had just retreated.
He could see the Illtydians reforming into lines, preparing for the next battle. Continue reading “The King’s Son”
Whitney L. Schwartz 