Dream Shifters

By Janice Abel

If you are looking for security and safety on your next read, Dream Shifter stories are not for you. ? These eight stories combine the ordinary life with the extraordinary as characters step into an unknown world where life changing decisions must be made.

From Michael M. Pacheco, author of The Guadalupe Saints. "Dream Shifters is a collection of cleverly-plotted fantastical tales that will transport you to places only Abel can imagine."

The eight stories in this collection are "Time Rides the Tide," "Mirage," "Silver Stars on the Sea," "Beam Down Scotty," "The Secret Sealed with a Kiss," "The Porch," "The Metallic Bird," and "The Green Phone."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janice Abel
• Release date: May 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310427534

Janice Abel

Janice's first love in writing fiction is her fantasy short stories. Her passion for music, her experiences as an educator along with her roots in middle America are all reflected in her stories. Her fantasy stories step off the edge of reality, in situations any reader might find themselves, to unknown worlds where the choices are life challenging.Janice holds degrees in music and student college administration that have always included writing in a specialized field. Her fiction writing now has become front and center in her life living in Iowa with a gardener and an eight lb. yorkie.Her stories have appeal to adults and youth as well. She is author of Little White Christmas Horse, Little Horse Wears Antlers, Sweet Summer, Brass Notes Over Wolf Creek and more than 80 short stories for teens and adults. Dream Shifters is a selected collection of eight stories.Janice enjoys entertaining people with his words and stories. If you enjoy a good read, why not try one of her stories? You might just love it.

Book preview

Dream Shifters

By

Janice Abel

Cover Illustration by Laszlo Kugler

Copyright © 2012 by Janice Abel

Smashwords Edition

This short story collection is also available in print at most online retailers

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Smashwords edition ISPN- 9781310427534

Paperback edition 9781479356737

8 spun tales

Author note: These stories have been created as my imagination kicks in from real situations that begin with me. Asked so many times \ about how I develop my storylines, I have added an explanatory note before or after each story.

Time Rides the Tide

Beam Down Scotty

Silver Stars on the Sea

Mirage

The Secret: Sealed with a Kiss.

The Porch

The Metallic Bird

The Green Phone

About the Author and her work

Time Rides the Tide

I ride the waves of imagination. At least that’s what I thought until it actually happened. On this particular night, time slid in on the tide. It would be but a breath of the sun before I realized it.

Like a slow striptease I‘d made my annual escape from Wall Street clamor. Earlier in the day I’d closed the door on an office filled with ‘to do’ lists, and traded my crispy clothes and spiked heels for soft cottons and a beach bag and caught a late flight to Fort Myers. By the time I arrived at the West Wind on Sanibel Island at least from the skin out, I was feeling as free as the wind blowing through my frizzled brown hair. In a few hours I looked forward to the knots in my stomach letting go and as I caught the last slice of the fireball sinking below the deep blues of the sea, I could tell my lips and eyes were already losing their worry wrinkles.

This was the usual stream of events, the stream I could count on. But this time an additional someone was chewing at my insides. Robb Swinson to be specific. At first it seemed so natural, Robb coming to Sanibel with me. Robb had started out touching my business brain and now was touching my heart with his kisses like honey melting down my throat.So, a Sanibel trip with Robb, that would add up to romance big time. I could see it all floating in my head like a giant sailboat billowing in gold light. Torched red sunsets, red-hot midnights and mornings to follow that made you feel like you’d made heaven. And too, Robb would fit well on these Sanibel beaches. His smooth ways would fit right in with all the other guys sauntering up and down the beach swelling with ambition and smelling filthy rich.

But when Robb called and said, Hey Jen, honey, and spilled out, I've got a deal to seal here. Can you wait a day or two? my ‘no’ came out so clear and exact--a gut reaction. Relief was what I felt, not disappointment. Now confusion rattled inside my heart having reached Sanibel--alone.

Having stopped at Bailey’s Grocery on the way out to the resort, I had a good stash of bananas and apples and crammed milk and cold cuts into the economy fridge. Purging a suitcase just enough to retrieve a pair of shorts and a T-top, I began soaking in the sea air from my gulf view balcony.

Lingering, I sipped a martini, the olives swirling softly and my heart simmering. The sunset had sucked the sky to an immediate black, not the usual kaleidoscope of blues and reds waning to a starry night. The dark of the night had made the giant blue invisible no matter how hard I strained to see through the screen. I couldn’t get even a flicker of the white foam I knew was out there. But I could smell it and hear it and my mouth watered anticipating the next morning when I would wake to the sun beams calming song and I would stretch until all the knots from my deepest parts loosened like a melting pot of warm butter. I crawled between the starched sheets and drifted to sleep with the rhythm of the waves slapping the surf.

But the night wasn’t to be its usual. At around midnight, cataclysmic waves echoed into my second story and tumbled me like a ship caught at sea. The sea’s fireworks exploded and pounded sweat and fear into my dreams. Tangled in a web of sails I grabbed for a face. Robb’s face, a gooey glob, laughed hideously and then drifted away.

With the dawn I awoke twisted in the sheets and eyelids feeling as if they had held back all the night dreams to protect me from something. It was the ‘something’ that gave me pause. I shook my head and swung my feet from my entangled night. Toeing on my thongs I shuffled onto my balcony. The wind whispered through the screen as though there were stories of the night being told, but all I could hear were a few gulls lacing their songs against a sea that had finally tamed. The sun was barely pushing up from the sea, but the usual morning ships rocking on the horizon were there.

Pulling on my swimsuit and slipping on my favorite loosely fitted sundress, I relieved my hands of my many layers of rings and bracelets and lopped on a sterling shell necklace. Determined to free my pores from their anemic life, I slathered my pearly skin with a good helping of sunscreen and flung a towel over my shoulder. Doing a quick check of my beach bag, I reached for my cell phone. But my fingers touched its plastic soul only momentarily as I thought of Robb. Leave it. I grabbed my beach bag and tromped out.

In all my times at Sanibel I had never seen its beach so war torn. The sea had turned its inside out and spilled onto the shore. Giant gouges scalped the surf as far east and west as I could see. Broken pen shells with barnacled hulks lay scattered among all shades of whites, oranges, and browns along the water’s edge. The place smelled of death. Cemented in the sand like rows of gravestones, dead fish with their mouths gaping upward dotted the shore. The scoundrel seagulls had already picked out their eyes and now were somberly waddling through the carnage pickpocketing the dead and screaming mournful cries.

I stepped softly over a hollow-eyed bronze helmet left by a Florida crab. My scavenger eyes spied a shark’s eye shell half lost in drifting sand. I stepped over several wiggling Florida conches and skirted around a pan-sized jellyfish sliding toward the sea. The pink tip of a lacy murex caught the light. I almost crunched a banded tulip, as big as my fist! I snatched both without breaking my gaze from the mix of a beachcomber’s dream. What a great morning for shelling on Sanibel!

But it was also a great morning for picking up driftwood. Snarling sticks of all colors pierced into the surf and broken parts lay scattered in the seas treasures like a woman’s jewel box in disarray. Not too often had I seen the banks of Sanibel with such a variety of twisted twigs and knobby jointed limbs. With the driftwood project I had in mind, I aimed for a large pile of sea leftovers still floating at the shoreline.

As I came into closer range, I realized it was a man-made wreckage. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn came in a quick flashback of his raft run aground. Red sludge and seaweed adorned it like ribbons on a package. Stepping over a rack of barnacled timbers I retrieved two worn gray splinters both with encrusted clamshells. Fishing for more, my fingers clung on to a lacy matrix of red vine entangled around what looked like a makeshift oar.

Think interesting; think different, I thought to myself. My project had to be the best ever. It had to at least be one that would take the Saturday coffee group beyond gossip of who was going with who or who had split from whom.

My gaze deepened. What treasure might I find next? A weathered ashen limb, bony long fingers, torn nails, a twisted arm. A lump caught in my throat. My gaze turned to a hard stare. Floating gray hairs mixed with seaweed twisted gently around hollow eyes - leather skin stretched over . . . a skull! Connected to a body? Death screamed hot fire in my head. Air sucked from my chest. Breath caught my scream. Nothing came out. Curling over, doing a Hopi dance, someone had to notice! I gulped air and tried to yell again. This time a crackling shrill tore from my throat.

Hey, what’s wrong? A man with a coconut tan ,complexion ran to me and grabbed my shoulder. I mouthed words in his face, pointing. Still hanging on to me, he stretched his neck and gazed toward the pile of entangled wood. Jesus Christ, God help us! Putting his arm around my shoulder, Sit down, he ordered helping me slump gently to the surf. His footsteps plunged into the soft sand and in wild gallops he lunged up shore. Hey help- get help. Call 911.

A guy swung his cell phone from his waist to his ear and raced toward us. Oh, gees, he exclaimed seeing what I had discovered. My hearing began to fade in and out. My world was spinning clouds and sea up my throat. Save myself, my head said. Breath deep, relax.

Then suddenly a deluge of bystanders swarmed on to what had been a lonely beach. Even in my dementia I could feel their gawking on my face and then realizing the story must be somewhere else, they began to circle the entangled remains. Is it a real body? Yeah, looks like it, I heard their voices whisper.

Recovering my senses I managed to take a closer look. Still, I couldn’t look at his face, or I should say, where the face was supposed to be. But the legs were long, shriveled, very hairy and turned in directions they shouldn’t be. Knobby knees stuck from pants that clearly were not fashioned for today’s men. The cuffs at the bottom of billowing legs were tattered and rotted out where they had pulled against bone. I thought right away of the Pirates At Sea production playing at the local theatre.

As a siren began screaming, a four-wheeled golf cart with balloon tires bounced toward us. Two officers jumped out. One had knobby knees sticking from under his uniform shorts, a lot like the dead man’s but with much more color. He grabbed a notebook from his breast pocket and gazed at the crowd looking for interview volunteers. The other one I’d seen many times doing traffic control on Sanibel’s main strip. His hands gestured with great artistic flow. Thumbing left, right, he moved the crowd away from the body.

Rank odors were seeping from the disturbed wreckage. Bystanders grabbed their noses, and their faces wrinkled to gulping faces. Both officers squatted and stretched their gaze into the tangled remains. One turned up his nose as he snapped a mike to his mouth and called for an ambulance. No hurry, the guy’s dead, real dead.

Call the coroner, one said. They mumbled something nervously.

For the gravity of what had apparently occurred, the whole scene was brief and benign. An ambulance arrived without a grand entrance. The body remains were bagged and hauled away. The officer with the note pad asked me a few questions and took my address while the other one ran a yellow tape around the site. "Investigators