Shorts - A Short Fiction Collection

By J.D. Phillippi

Welcome to the imagination of veteran storyteller J.D. Phillippi.  In this short fiction collection, you will find stories in a variety of genres.  Stories that will make you laugh, send a chill down your spine, or change the way you look at television forever.  From the common everyday to the darkest dreams "Shorts" will take you on a journey you'll remember for a long, long time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phlipside Creative
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536549157

J.D. Phillippi

Storytelling has been the lifelong passion for J.D. Phillippi.  Whether it was keeping his mind busy on long family vacation drives or performing in person or on the radio, it's always about the story.   "I believe that all human communication is storytelling.  Too often we forget that we should always be trying to tell a story.  A novel, a movie or a quarterly financial report, they are all stories.  The information you are trying to share will be retained infinitely better if you remember to tell the story." Those stories have been written down for years, but always stored away.  At the urging of his family, Phillippi began to work on those stories with publishing in mind.  In July of 2016 his first book was published, "Shorts - A Collection of Short Fiction".  These sixteen stories covered the wide range of his storytelling passion. He lives in the Richmond, VA area with his wife, grown daughter, and two weird cats.  You can find more about him, plus links to some other writing projects at www.JDPhillippi.com You can email him at [e-mail]

Book preview

Dedicated to

My parents, Jack and Debby, who taught me to believe in myself,

My wife Donna, who believes in me even when I don’t,

and

My daughter Rachel, who told me to stop talking about it and do it.

Table of Contents

The Senior

Jamestown Story - The Aliens Have Landed

The Plow

The Children Knew

The Snow

Snow Monks and Feather Bushes

6:15 A.M.

Born of the Stars

The Sniper Dream

The Not So Bad LeRoy Brown

A Moment Like This

The Commission

Good Bye Simon

OK, So I Lied (Foreword)

Fear

Yearbook Review

Diet

Foreword

This is a collection that has taken a lifetime to create. I have told stories all my life. As a quiet, introverted kid I told them to myself to fight off boredom. As I grew older, I discovered I had the ability to tell stories in a way that drew people in. I studied theater in college and put that ability to work. For a variety of reasons, I turned to the radio industry after I left school and put together an almost twenty-year career. I made my living through my ability to tell stories. After the radio career ended, I answered a call to work with teenagers in the Episcopal church. Now I had some great stories to tell!

I fell in love with short stories in high school. I read a lot from childhood on. But it was almost exclusively novels. In my tenth grade English class Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado was an assigned reading. In 2,495 words, Poe blew my mind. The subtle humor, the hint of madness, the slow realization of the narrator's intent. I finished the story and stared at the page. I never knew that storytelling could be like this.

My college freshman English class exposed me to more short fiction. I have never looked back. I still love novels. I'm working on one as I finish this project, but short fiction holds a very special place for me.

You will note that I have not called this a collection of short stories. I'm trying to avoid the inevitable squawking from the purists that the vast majority of the stories in this volume do not make it to short story length. As I look at them I am reminded of the story about Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was uncommonly tall for his generation, and often had people make mocking comments about his height. One man looked at the lanky form of the sixteenth President and inquired just how long a man's legs needed to be. Lincoln is said to have responded Long enough to reach the ground. These stories end when they have finished telling their story. This often means that they do not resolve all the issues of the story. I leave you the room to contemplate what may happen. I believe that resolution isn't necessary to the storytelling.

The oldest story here is the last one. I wrote it in the summer that followed my graduation from high school. It's included here, in almost its original form, because it was the first story I wrote that evoked the response in the reader I was hoping for. The newest story is just a couple years old. I have mixed them up in what I hope is an interesting arrangement.

There is no single genre here. These are the stories that required my attention over several decades. I hope that you will be pleased and even surprised by what comes next.

Finally, a word about afterwords. Some of my favorite collections of stories included sections from the author or authors talking about the stories and their creation. I don't want to influence how you read the stories so I stick to afterwords.

You see, each of these stories comes with a story.

––––––––

Peace,

JD Phillippi

June 2016

The Day the Aliens Landed

––––––––

In the end, it was nothing at all like in the movies.

The space ship from another planet didn't choose New York or London or Moscow. Bolts of energy didn't vaporize landmarks or disintegrate tanks. There were no little green men or big silver robots or musical exchanges of ideas.

It didn't even look right. It was squat, ugly and not quite a cube. The exterior was a dull gray, though it seemed to shift color depending on the angle of the sun or the point of view. It descended straight down, the experts later decided. There was universal agreement that such an approach was illogical and inexplicable, but they couldn't deny what the records showed. It came straight down from space to its resting place with no deviation or correction. The world turned beneath it, and it kept descending until it landed. All the pilots consulted were in agreement that it had been a impressive piece of flying.

That ultimate destination turned out to be the top of the municipal building in a small city in southwestern New York. The glory days for Jamestown had come and gone many years before as a center for furniture manufacture. Now at the beginning of the 21st Century it was trying to decide if there was a second act in its history or not. The space ship landing at Tracy Plaza settled