A Snail's Pace

By Rhae Camdyn

A gifted young man in a remote desert community runs afoul of bullies in the process of learning about young love in this tragic short story that crosses into such timely topics of bigotry, classism, and all the pressures facing today's teens everywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rhae Camdyn
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223064244

Rhae Camdyn

Rhae Camdyn is the pen name for a Mom of three daughters, a wrangler of four cats, a huge dog that thinks he's a lap dog, and the wife of a 'techie' for a tad over 30 years. As a fifth-generation Texan, she knows the history of her family, the lands they settled, and their impact on this State. Her kids were the impetus for writing down the stories wandering through her mind and now publishing them.

Book preview

A Snail’s Pace

Prologue

There are spaces and places within the universe that are always ripe for the strange, bizarre, and unanswered to gestate and burst forth. To the uninitiated, the dry rocky desert plains of far west Texas tends to breed little more than snakes, lizards, and scorpions. There are two-legged specimens of Homo Sapiens that may appear to be as regular as any other citizen of the continent, save for their need to balance the karmic ledgers without undue detection. In the rush to close the books and look the other way when a true atrocity is committed, one such example was mindlessly overlooked; the t’s were crossed, and i’s dotted in such a way that only the morbidly curious or accidental scholar may stumble upon the real answer in the dim and misty future.

Close your eyes and let your mind wander to the pale turquoise skies and windswept, rocky reaches in a corner of nowhere. The graceful spirals of ocotillo and fire barrel cacti punctuated a landscape made softer by the feathery fronds of mesquite and creosote bush. Northeasterly winds had carved shapes into the rocks and gravel of this parched land, antelope grazed the sparse grasses, and high overhead an occasional hawk would be spiraling along the zephyr currents looking for mice, snakes or anything that might resemble a meal. The few precious trees that grew in this alien vista were gnarled by wind and the harsh extremes of weather.

Part One

Perched in a crouched sprawl on a weathered basalt boulder, his entire body frozen in a breathless pause, a young boy focused his attention on a particular denizen of the desert that he’d been searching for without much success. Not that the horny toad knew or cared; this particular amphibian was stalking his lunch – a stink beetle. Under the boy’s thatch of sandy blonde hair, a drop of sweat was about to give the beetle a chance to escape as it rolled down t his freckled nose and fell onto the carapace of the insect. The sudden drop of liquid startled the beetle, which took flight, which startled the child and the horny toad, which decided to use its usual method of defense: shooting blood out of its eyes onto the nearly clean khaki shorts of a very disappointed would-be caretaker of a nearly captured horny toad.

Damned turd licker! exploded out of the mouth of the child, who then looked around to see if there was anyone within earshot who would report the language to his mother.

Odeon Melchizedek Fentner was the kind of scrawny, shock-haired little kid that everyone loved to