The Unexpected and Altogether Astonishing Sojourn of Milo Keene
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About this ebook
Welcome to Moningers Fall, Oregon, an unremarkable little town on the south coast where the most extraordinary things tend to happen. (And no, it's not spelled wrong; the Fall just happens to be a town with ambivalent feelings toward punctuation.) In this short story, we meet Natalie Tenacre and her new beau, Milo Keene. Milo, who is one of the extraordinary things that transpire in the Fall, discovers that sometimes you actually can get what you wish for.
Steven Parker
Steve Parker is a writer and itinerant engineer. You’ll find him living in the rainforest outside Hilo, Hawaii, with his wife, the brilliant Shawndra Holmberg; her sister, the equally brilliant writer Anne Avery; three dogs; two cats; and several imaginary friends, most apparently named Bob.
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The Unexpected and Altogether Astonishing Sojourn of Milo Keene - Steven Parker
The Unexpected and Altogether Astonishing
Sojourn of Milo Keene
A short story by
Steven L Parker
Copyright © 2014 Steven L Parker
Smashwords Edition, February 2014
Tace et Scribe Press
Hilo, Hawaii 96720
ISBN: 9781310134074
The Unexpected and Altogether Astonishing Sojourn of Milo Keene
Being the first of the tales from Moningers Fall
On a blustery September the 25th, at precisely 4:16 in the afternoon, Milo Keene materialized, entirely and all at once, just above the waterline at the unequivocal center of Two-Mile Beach. The beach ran in front of—and some eight feet lower than—the wide boardwalk which graced the seafront of Moningers (no apostrophe, please) Fall, Oregon and it was, I’m sorry to say, somewhat less than one mile long. Hans-Karl Moninger named the beach immediately before taking his fateful fall and a short time after having consumed the better part of a bottle of scotch whiskey. I think we can forgive him if his judgment was somewhat less than reliable.
The beach fronts Tea Party Cove, which is protected from the sea by Cape Quinn, a rocky tongue of land that extends down from the north on the far side of Singing River estuary. At the south end of the cove, Song Head sweeps gently out to sea, its steep cliffs capped with the elegantly slender shaft of Song Light.
At the north end of the beach itself stand four rock spires. The most southerly of these had, by the time of Milo’s appearance, become a familiar landmark for tourists vacationing along the south Oregon coast. Both Hans-Karl’s fall and his estimation of the beach’s length originated from the summit of said plinth which, at high tide, stands completely surrounded by water. Fortunately for Hans-Karl, the tide was out when he took his plunge, leaving the stone high and dry; in his condition, he might well have drowned.
The whiskey—the genesis of Hans-Karl’s role in our little tale—floated in on the earlier high tide, itself having been lost at sea one-hundred and thirty-seven days earlier. A certain Captain Elias Graham, master of the China clipper Witch’s Brew, was possessed of an unfortunate fondness for his primary cargo, laudanum. Late one moonless night, shortly after 2 bells and after having already indulged his cravings, Elias awakened his steward for a fresh bottle of Laphroaig and stepped out on the weather deck in search of a drinking partner in the person of his second mate, Duncan Halbert, who had the watch.
A sailor since boyhood and experienced master of large sailing vessels, Elias nonetheless managed to promptly fall overboard—bottle in hand—unnoticed by either Duncan or the other two sailors on middle watch that dark night.
Although Elias was never seen again, Hans-Karl discovered the bottle, washed up undamaged on the aforementioned and previously anonymous beach, just an hour or so before the naming and the falling. As an aside, I should mention that the manner of his ascent to the acme of the rock remains a mystery