Longshot Island: New Directions

By Daniel Scott White

Vol. 5 includes stories by John Matthew Fox, Jennifer Robinette, Rhianna Herd, Scott Archer Jones, Kyler Campbell and Jane Finch.

Here you are, on Longshot Island. Prepare to enter a magical place. Be ready to go in new directions. We're going to take you on a journey to somewhere you've never seen before, unlike anything else you've dreamed.

For me, it's been an exciting time working on the magazine. I've met many new authors and the magazine has grown rapidly. There have been great reviews and supporting blog posts. Onward, we've moved, come sun or high water. Are you ready for more?

In the next year, we want to expand the magazine into all things related to fiction writing, from science fiction to humor.

But at the core, we're going to keep you tuned into the same great fiction that we've always searched far and wide to find.

Welcome to New Directions. I think you're going to like it here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Scott White
• Release date: Jan 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781970134049

Daniel Scott White

Member of a band of Stray Tablets. Winner of more than fifty film festivals. I was born in the mountains but now live by the sea.

Book preview

Longshot Island

New Directions

EDITED BY

DANIEL SCOTT WHITE

LONGSHOT PRESS

Copyright

Published by Longshot Press

Longshot Island Vol. 5 Copyright © 2018

by Daniel Scott White

Longshot Island is an imprint

of Longshot Press.

longshotisland.com

longshotpress.com

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without the written permission of the publisher or the author.

ISBN 978-1-970134-04-9

Smashwords Ebook Edition

Compass

Overture

God’s Guerrilla

by John Matthew Fox

The Playground of Death

by Jennifer Robinette

The Coldest Day of the Year

by Rhianna Herd

Who She Wasn’t

by Scott Archer Jones

Everything That We’ve Buried

by Kyler Campbell

The Camel Boy

by Jane Finch

Your Turn

Acknowledgments

All stories used by permission of the authors.

Overture

Here you are, on Longshot Island. Prepare to enter a magical place. Be ready to go in new directions. We're going to take you on a journey to somewhere you've never seen before, unlike anything else you've dreamed.

For me, it's been an exciting time working on the magazine. I've met many new authors and the magazine has grown rapidly. There have been great reviews and supporting blog posts. Onward, we've moved, come sun or high water. Are you ready for more?

In the next year, we want to expand the magazine into all things related to fiction writing, from science fiction to humor.

But at the core, we're going to keep you tuned into the same great fiction that we've always searched far and wide to find.

Welcome to New Directions. I think you're going to like it here.

Daniel Scott White

Editor-in-Chief

God’s Guerrilla

John Matthew Fox

Once I decided to go visit my daughter Catherine and the grandkids in Portland, not even the Devil himself could have stopped me. Driving up without speaking engagements seemed a waste of my talent, so I placed a few calls. I told one pastor I was doing a steeplechase up the coast, a bit of wordplay I found uproarious, but his humor was off as old cheese. Randolf, he said, approaching my name like a wild animal, I think you frightened a few of our high schoolers last time. I held the phone like a barbell and said, Nothing wrong with a little fright!

So that apostate turned me down but I booked two others. My shtick dramatized stories from the holy battlefield. Closest I came to guns-and-bombs action was serving as a chaplain in the early years of the Vietnam war, but let me tell you, I’ve run the gauntlet: I’ve dealt the Word in eighteen languages, survived a poisonous snake bite, smuggled Bibles across hostile borders, outlasted three imprisonments (one solitary), and abetted two exorcisms. Technically I was retired, but there weren’t any laggards in the army of God, only those taking a resting spell. So I rested up and did my duty.

My daughter loved surprises, so I didn’t call beforehand. On Wednesday I put on the brown corduroy suit with thin wales and drove up Pacific Coast highway with all four windows down on Ehud, my battered Buick. Ehud had endured several assaults, including Halloween sabotages involving maple syrup and eggs because I gave out verses instead of candy for the pagan holiday, but it never stopped running.

Just after dusk, I arrived in Eureka and found my first church. The youth pastor sported cheeks with virginal fuzz, and said, Nice. In the flesh. God’s Guerrilla. I’d been dubbed that in the seventies, after kamikaze trips smuggling Bibles through the Iron Curtain. I should have been shot, poisoned, or betrayed more times than Caesar and Mandela combined, but a halo of safety hovered on my crown. You ready to have your world rocked? He nodded as though I were promising him streets of gold.

In the church, the kids sprinted around a circle with bowling pins and beanbags. Once the twenty-odd high schoolers were penned in the front rows, I related one of my earliest missionary adventures in Laos. We were floating down the Mekong. Mist garlanded the trees. Howler monkeys shrieked from the canopies. And then nothing. Not in the story nothing, but in my mind nothing. My mental slate had been squeegeed clean, even though I’d relayed this story thousands of times. The kids’ faces went through stages—at first they believed I’d taken a dramatic pause, then they rustled into inattentiveness, then they started to doubt me. Hell’s bells! I shifted to another story, then fumbled and failed to remember two. Since the message ended dreadfully short, I prayed for an eternity to