Two Tales: The Stone In The Stream & Conflicted Artifacts

By Phee Stringer

The Stone In The Strem is a story of a remarkable you woman and her strange way of seeing the world lead her on a bizarre journey into the building blocks of reality. Zoey might be mentally ill, or she might be able to see hidden truths. Conflicted Artifacts follows a man and his broken family into the unknown. An object of mysterious origin is found that has strange effects on those who come into contact with it, with terrifying results. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phee Stringer
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201830441

Phee Stringer

Phee Stringer tries to be an author and composer of strange fiction and music. He lives in Michigan with his wife, and an assortment of grown kids, reptiles, rodents, and dogs.

Book preview

The Stone In The Stream

PART I.

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The dirt is hot in the summer, but for only a moment if you are plunging your fingers into it. The dirt goes from hot and sunny quickly to the cold and dark just beneath the surface. This is where the objects that have been there for more than a day find themselves, waiting for fingers to find them. In the side of a dune by a pond, on a beach, beneath the stones in a backyard garden, in a forest, or in one’s own mind. Fear of the unknown is very much overstated when digging in the earth. It is an act of hope. Children never have an issue exploring, for even if the object excavated ends up being nothing more than a smooth stone or a slightly decayed stick, the very fact of the matter is that it was discovered by the child and given a life that perhaps it would never have had before the fleshy fingers went into the darkness to find it.

In this case an object was found that was unearthed slightly off of a path through a woods within an unimportant metro-park. The object was made of stone, polished and deep blue, roughly the size of a grape. The pair of dark brown eyes that observed its surface saw that it looked like it had been painted by tiny hands in small patterns of black, patterns that resembled a maze or perhaps writing. Zoey found it interesting enough to place in her pocket and continue on.

CHAPTER 1 Zoey

Zoey Bauman looked right at home being out of place. She had fishnet stockings on, black military boots, cut off grey shorts, a black tank top that showed her tribal shoulder tattoo to the world. She understood that by making the choice to appear a bit different she would be treated a bit different.

She would strike some as apathetic, although this was incorrect. She cared deeply about things, just in a way that would have been hard for another who did not know her well to detect. When she did go to parties she was not very social, either dancing feverishly or sometimes staring out the nearest window at the lights in the night.

Patrick liked her an awful lot, and he decided based on what he had read and movies he had seen, that he was in love with her. She gave no indication one way or another whether or not she minded or not if this conclusion was true. She found Patrick a very relaxing person who did not have the same strange expectations of her as the rest of what she knew of the world. He did not try too hard to talk to her when she was enjoying the lack of voices, and the amount of physical attention she gave him was more than enough for him to feel affection.

Let’s get out of here, she finally said to him in the dim light of the dorm room party.

Patrick knew her well enough to know that this did not mean that he was in store for something amorous, at least not right away. When Zoey said something like this it was because she was having an impulse to go somewhere, usually to wander or to explore. The part of him that remembered being a child understood this perfectly, and his lust could be kept in check for a long time and she was always worth indulging to get there, even if it meant overseeing a strange walk through the woods or an abandoned building. He knew that was how love worked: you let people be how they are, and they let you do what you want with them... eventually.

Patrick helped Zoey put her coat on as they left the party, and as was their normal pattern, he said his goodbyes on both of their behalf. Patrick caught a look from a male or two at the party who thought that sex was the reason for the departure. He never had corrected such an assumption and would not start tonight. Zoey noticed but paid no more than fading wisp of a thought to the scornful looks of several of the females at the party. Her beauty plus her fashion choices combined with her sense of keeping to herself screamed to those with self confidence issues that Zoey thought herself better than other creatures with mammary glands. Of course, the truth was that she simply didn’t look at the world in the terms they would understand.

***

In the night, Zoey preferred to explore structures that were man-made. There was an old bridge that was falling apart that Zoey was curious about. It was not in the middle of nowhere but nowhere near what anyone would think of somewhere. Tonight was the first night that the soul of true winter could be felt in the air. Zoey looked at the trees and the river where she had instructed Patrick to park his van, and she saw that the trees shuttered in the cold as the realization might have struck them that it would be eons before they produced anything green again. Trees made a silhouette against the stars as if clinging to the sky’s mercy for one more day of warmth with the few signs of vegetation that remained; the river also knew that the ice that was forming on its moon-reflecting surface was there to stay for what would seem like ages.

Patrick got the flashlights and handed one to Zoey. She smiled at him in ways that cut through the cold night for a moment, and then began to walk along the dilapidated bike path towards their destination. Patrick let her walk a few steps ahead of him, always amazed at her lack of discomfort with the elements. He thought to himself of the people that had watched them leave from the party, under the assumption that they were fucking in some warm place right now, and although that was most likely going to happen later, right now, at 1:30 am, he was following his lady on a path where the temperatures were well below freezing in the darkness.

The last of the insects were trying to sing here and there from unknown shadows as they reached the bridge. The beam of light from Zoey’s flashlight showed a circle of stone and graphite within its path. It was almost cavernous in its impression.

Wow, said Patrick with a slight echo lost in the gentle flow of the water. Pretty cool, huh?

Zoey looked back at him for a moment and then nodded. Patrick always got the impression that Zoey was looking for something specific on these outings, although she denied that when asked,  and he could never imagine what it could possibly be. It was part of the mystery of women he always told himself. To Patrick women fell into two general categories, those that were pretty, predictable and self absorbed, and Zoey. She was self absorbed as well, no question there, but she had a certain mystery that was combined with a kindness he always felt comfortable with.

Zoey was lost in her thoughts now as she usually was in this state of their adventures.

***

Zoey took off her gloves and touched one of the fallen stones. She felt its history through its cold surface. There was fire in its past as with all stone, and she felt deep within it there was an orange glow at its core that whispered of life. She felt the bridge in the stone, and its role within it, and she felt its history in the river, being smoothed and polished by the current. She felt it being molded by time and distance, its rise to the surface and its creation in the molten pallet of the earth. There it was again within. Somewhere in the stone’s odd history she felt the imprint of more, of many. She never was sure what this feeling was, but it was happening more and more. The more she searched for it the more she found it.

Zoey reached into her pocket and felt the smooth blue stone that she had found last summer.  Her eyes closed tight, and she felt the connection again.

Patrick sneezed loudly and snapped her out of whatever nameless place she had found within herself. She looked back and smiled at him warmly. He had escorted her yet again, and made her feel safe for her odd nameless ventures. He smiled back at Zoey, and there was no discomfort in his gesture.

***

The next morning after Patrick had his fill of physical pleasure from her, and she from him, he left for class and she returned into a deep sleep. She awoke from a sound at her front door, shivering from whatever dream had been interrupted by the sound of the mail coming through the slot.

Zoey lived in a house that had been divided into several apartments, hers being upstairs and having a living room and bedroom, a small bathroom and a small kitchen. They shoved the mail through the slot in her door at the bottom of the stairs that opened to the outside. She went down the stairs and picked up, her eyes passing over the envelopes making her feel responsible for a moment or two at least.

Bills, advertisements, something wanting her to vote. She set aside the bills in the pile of things that she would give to her mother for later. Zoey had flirted with the idea of being independent for a few months just after college, but it did not suit her, and she did not feel like fighting it. Her mother felt enough guilt about how her stepfather had treated her growing up so that Zoey would most likely never have to worry about self-sufficiency again.

She looked at the three fish in the tank, named Apollo, Wagner, and Hubble, respectively, as their all seeing eyes moved back and forth in the microcosm of her tank. The fish held much more memory than most people would give them credit for, their very existence holding the infinite sea within their movements. She could imagine a time when the world would have been simply waves and stars and everything that was beneath the surface continued on without the confines of human pain.

She closed her eyes and floated on her back in this sea of imagined memory, staring up at the infinite stars above, and feeling the infinite fathoms below. This was something that Zoey had done before, these little visits into herself and what she thought it might have been like eons before and sometimes after.

Something changed this time, something was different. She was enjoying the sensation of the waves licking her ears and the sides of her face when her eyes caught something in the sky above. She had often populated her mind’s eye with shooting stars, comets, and bands of cosmic beauty before, but there was something that was in her mind now that she had not remembered conjuring into her fantasy. Three of the brighter stars slightly off to what she imagined the south were oscillating in a perfect triangle. They looked every bit as peaceful as the rest of her self made vision, silently moving there as if they had always occupied that part of the night.

She slowly opened her eyes and found Apollo moving in his usual pattern while the other two were apparently resting behind the stone arch she had placed in the tank. It was not in Zoey’s nature to feel panic or to worry about things all that much. But her curiosity burned now with questions, and she had to admit to herself that it did contain a fair amount of concern. The last time her mind had begun to act beyond her will it nearly ended her life.

***

It had been when she was seventeen years old and her mother had been convinced to leave with her stepfather Andrew to go drinking yet again. That was the first time that Zoey remembered what it felt like to lose her mind; at least for a while. The details of that evening were strange, she had been found rocking in a corner sobbing to herself the next day when the paper boy had heard her and became curious enough to look in the window.

She had not blacked out, she had remembered everything that she had experienced that day. The problem was not what had happened, it was how she reacted to the normalcy of the world around her that made it so difficult. She had been eating cereal from a bowl, and she had just poured the milk, the cereal box tipped over and fell to the floor when she had tried to put it on the table, a small amount of the Chex scattering on the floor around her. Her eyes locked onto the mess and she did not move, instead just staring at the floor.

In her mind she felt the vibrations of the impact still echoing. She felt the air being displaced as the Chex spread out from the top of the box. She felt the connection then. It was like watching an explosion in slow motion, except each piece of debris was tied to every other piece, and as the milliseconds passed she felt even more, she saw the connection that the box had with the floor, how the spinning items of cereal were affecting the room, the light and shadow, and the house.

The moment passed and she got up, located the broom and dustpan and swept up the evidence of her accident. Her mind had felt like a still pool, and this incident had caused a small pebble to be thrown into the surface, making waves and ripples in all directions. She barely noticed the fact that she had finished cleaning and started eating.

The next moment she felt the connection was about five minutes after she had finished eating. She had stepped outside and the screen door’s spring had not been working properly as it slammed itself shut behind her. The sound was nothing new, and it did not startle Zoey in the least. She felt the impact of the door, she felt it affect everything around her, and more frighteningly everything that was not around her. The effect of the door she could feel in the nerves of the insects in the walls of the house, the grains of pollen in the air, the clouds above, stars that were unknowable: all were affected in some way by the door’s slamming, and Zoey had a sense of all of it at once.

The feeling had passed enough for her to compose herself and get back in the house. Even though time had passed, she still felt the resonance of the falling cereal box left echoing around everything she knew and reaching out into places she did not. The intensity was so great that she wanted to stop it by any means she could find, but fortunately it had been so overpowering that she had not had the means and presence of mind to harm herself.

For the remainder of the day, she felt the sensation again and again. It would swell like a tsunami on the horizon, and she felt the movements, emotions, thoughts, and sensations rush over her and into her with intensity that she could barely describe to her therapist the week after. She called it the connection because no other words could describe the overwhelming nature that had encompassed her that day. After about 48 hours of pure sleep, she awoke with the sense of mind that she carried now. The psychiatrists and therapist let her go shortly after calling it an isolated incident, but her mother had felt such an abomination of guilt that she had taken it upon herself to make Zoey her personal goal in life, and the rest of Zoey’s existence up until now had been a coasting of monetary support from her mother’s conscience and never entering the real world as it was defined by others. Zoey still took medication for the occasional drifting that consumed her day to day life, as she felt the connection in some way all the time now. Zoey had her collection of objects that she felt made the connection more of a pleasant and curious thing in her life instead of the unfiltered drowning feeling from that day.

***

One of the questions that people seemed to love to ask others was What do you do?  especially when meeting another for the first time. A woman at the store when she was buying milk asked Zoey this question. She had seen the woman before shopping for her needs, but this time she wanted to introduce herself to Zoey, promptly followed by the question.

I am a student, Zoey responded in her standard form.

The woman whose name Zoey had already forgotten nodded her head as if something made sense to her now.

***

Zoey felt like listening to music made her a better person. But not all music and how music affected her by no means seemed to be true for everyone. She saw some people listen to music without really listening, using it as sort of a dulling wash of their surroundings, a way not to engage but to disengage themselves. She imagined that the music was sort of like bland cotton candy, or stale potato chips they were eating.

***

Is there a difference between dreams and daydreams in any practical sense, she asked herself while cooking Ramen noodles on a rainy night. The thunder pounded outside, echoing throughout the late fall darkness. She closed her eyes and felt the sound permeate the entire world around her, every molecule shaking in harmony. The connection in a very low stress form.

She wondered if the thunder she heard now was the same thunder that her grandparents heard back in Maine, or her great grandparents in Russia before coming to North America.  Did the thunder sound the same to everyone in every place? In every time?

She thought back further to what her distant ancestors in the Urals must have heard echoing from the mountains in the storms. Back to her ancestors expanding from Europe or the Middle East, back into the human origins in Africa, the thunder heard by proto-humans -  was it as mighty? Was it felt in the heart of all things like it was to her? Back further now to shrews that eventually formed thumbs, to the reptiles that came from the darkness of the sea, did their primitive ears and senses feel it in a way that was at all similar to the way she did? She kept thinking back again and again to the flashes of lightning that the fish must have seen above, an unknown dimension to their aquatic universe, flashing on the surface. And then darkness once again. She kept thinking back into the sense deprived darkness and the timeless thunder, the wondrous magnificent void. Then she felt others hearing the thunder with her in the distant past that she felt in her mind, before all that should have been, listening with her within a place that was unknown to everyone save her. She felt  eyes upon her too, as if another was side by side in the storms of ancient prehistory.

Her eyes opened at the sensation as the virginal boiling water had all but evaporated. Her dinner never placed in the scalding liquid to be eaten. The sauce pan now ruined by the consistent fire from beneath. She looked at the clock. An hour had passed. She was relieved that her smoke alarm had not gone off.

***

CHAPTER 2: Somewhere Else

She has always had an active imagination. This was a phrase that Zoey heard quite often in her life, usually in an attempt to discard an observation that she had vocalized, or a way of looking at things. Another phrase she heard a lot was that she was very out of touch. Although both these phrases would normally cause a person to react defensively, Zoey never saw the point. After all, they were both true, but she never saw a negative side to either observation.

Madness was a term that always seemed to be burning somewhere in her emotions. She did not bother to wonder if she was mad, as that is a fool’s errand. Thinking about if you are mad or not is supposed to be proof that you are in fact not mad, but at that moment when you have decided that you are not mad because you asked yourself the question, you are by default: mad. Seeing things that aren’t there, Zoey knew, did not make you mad. It was seeing things that weren’t there, that you honestly believed were there, that others cannot.

It was something so simple that she almost missed it. She stopped mid-step on the sidewalk on the way home from a silent movie that the University had been playing earlier that day as part of their History Of Film festival. She froze, much to the frustration of the woman walking behind her who had to avoid colliding with Zoey.

There was a stone step missing from the walkway that ascended and then plateaued into one of the larger houses close to the campus downtown. There had been five steps, now there were four. This in and of itself was not odd, landscaping happens, things are removed, but the space that had once held the missing step was gone now as well. It was the second one from the top, no hole, no evidence of tools, no explanation at all. She scanned from side to side. The small hill that stairs ascended also appeared to be ever so slightly altered, a few inches, perhaps less lower than before. A person exited the house, a man with a suit talking on a cellphone. He quickly walked down the walkway and navigated the steps with ease, barely noticing Zoey staring at the seemingly uninteresting space. Some of the other pedestrians were now beginning to notice Zoey as her eyes moved to her shoes in concern.

Where is it? she asked out loud. Her eyes moved back to the steps, and the only thing she could think of as an answer which she also spoke out loud was somewhere else.

***

The sex that happened that night stood out in Patrick’s memory. Zoey was doing something that he rarely saw her do. She was having sex to take her mind off of something else and therefore she was being much more intense than usual. This, while making Patrick physically happy, as it would most males of the species, gave him the urge to also try to be sensitive to what might be on his girlfriend’s (or whatever category she might fit in) mind. About an hour after the sexual part of the evening was done, Patrick found it within himself to ask. Zoey, are you okay?

She smiled faintly, her mind clearly in other spaces. Yeah, Pat, I am... it’s just.... Her voice trailed off as it often did when he spoke with her. She refocused and continued. Have you ever just seen something that makes no logical sense at all? I mean, not like the usual people just... She trailed off again.

Patrick, in an attempt to follow what she was saying, nodded and replied, Well, yeah, of course babe. I mean the other day I was putting some gas in the tank and this dude who was in the parking lot just started looking at his wallet and screaming at this other dude, and then he looked at his wallet again and calmed down like nothing had happened, like he found what he was looking for and everything was all okay again. She held eye contact with him for a moment longer as if waiting. Anyway so yeah, no sense at all.... right? He had a certain pleading quality in his voice when he was hopelessly confused.

She looked slightly annoyed and sighed before she spoke. Not exactly what I meant, but okay. This was a dismissal of sorts that he knew, and he knew better than to press. He also knew that whatever it is she was trying to tell him, he had missed by miles.

***

She had seen this homeless man before, a label that fit only because he had no official address, she expected. He seemed to be at home wherever his guitar was, even if his guitar changed over time and was replaced with another. As long as he had one, he was home, she suspected. He did not look like a homeless man either. Homeless men were not supposed to be handsome like this man was. His dark skin and recently shaved head betrayed the stereotype, but his clothes were definitely worn.

She dropped a few dollars into his cup when she walked up while his expressive voice sang a very tasteful version of Limelight by the band Rush. He responded with a friendly and attractive wink that almost had a supernatural effect on people’s mouths that made them smile for about 5 minutes, despite what kind of day they were having. She and a few others stood and watched him complete the performance. Thank you, ladies. he said with a grin. Zoey was waiting for the words: and gentlemen to follow, but she then realized that the few strangers she stood with all happened to be female as well.

As she was walking away she heard one of the other audience members ask him Hey Jake, where are you staying these days?

Still camping out, he responded cheerfully. Can’t beat the stars and the quiet, and I hate what the TV tells me living in town.

Zoey knew what he meant, but she doubted the person he was speaking to did. The woman he was speaking to probably assumed that he meant the negativity of the media and current events. But in the way he had spoken ...what the TV tells me... Zoey recognized a fellow mind, opened either by choice or by force. She knew as several others such as this homeless man named Jake knew, that there was no such thing as a one way street, deed, or thought.  The TV, although perhaps passively, watched as much as it was watched.

***

You are fucking nuts, Terrance told her.

Yes, I know, she had replied. A common response to an angry boy that she had been with for a while.

I am serious, Zoey, you are like, crazy, schizo, I don’t know... He trailed off to her. Whether he was actually talking or not was no longer important to her. It just became filed in all of the other doctors and acquaintances that had said the same thing to her over the years. She knew that all of it was true, but what they never seemed to quite understand was how little their yelling it at her mattered any more.

***

Dreams were easy symbolism, a way for the mind to see extraordinary things that would terrify and cause delirium if viewed in a waking state. But in