David N. Alderman's Blog

“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others’ choices make us.”

Richie Norton

It started with the divorce. And it seems to have continued
with unintentional acts of procrastination, haggardness, and dismal outlook.

Continuing my revelations about how divorce has affected me and what the future (God’s plan) holds for me, I came to another realization this last week. I realize I have succumbed to the very worst obstacle to walking out my destiny – my weakness of being unintentional.

As if a prophecy had years ago been uttered about how my
life would turn out, I’ve allowed fate – life – to determine what has become of
my life the last couple of years.

When my wife left the marriage, it felt as if a clock within me stopped, and I fell useless, sorrowful, and deterred from the great plans God had for me. For us. And for the last couple years since that incident, I’ve crawled across the floor, weak and ineffectual, trying to make it another day, to another minuscule goal, to keep my head barely afloat amidst bills, car issues, and other of life’s causalities.  

But the problem hasn’t been the problems. It’s been my lack
of intention.

When planning, when striving toward what I know I’m supposed
to do – with my writing, the publishing company, my life in general – I’ve
allowed circumstances, consequences, and emotions to craft the finished form of
those things, instead of being intentional and making certain these goals,
these dreams, turned out the way I wanted them to.

Divorce felt like defeat. The worst defeat one can experience, I would venture to bet. For me, it wasn’t just my wife leaving the marriage. It was the dream – the promise – that we were both holding to God for being shattered across the floor, dashed into millions of fragments.

And I looked at that incident as the end of the dream. The end of God’s promise to me. And so, with the end of the dream came the end of my motivation, the end of my momentum. At the very peak of when the publishing company was beginning to grow, when my writing was starting to rise from the ashes, when I was coming to the realization of a great many things in my own life, divorce cut out my legs from under me and sent me to a pit of despair and inaction.

It’s taken weeks, months – heck, even years, to bring me to my senses about a very simple, yet powerful, fact: God’s promise doesn’t change because someone walks away from it. God’s promise cannot be broken. God’s plans for us are too great for us to do anything to thwart them.

I’ve been trying to pick these pieces up off the floor – cutting my fingers in the process, trying to put back that which is impossible to restore myself. When all the time, on the counter to my left, has been the same promise, restored, tailor-made for me.

God is good. And He is so good that He wouldn’t allow
something as destructive as divorce to finish me – or His promises – off.

And it’s through this process of learning who I am in Christ
– a conqueror who is loved by the Almighty – that I realize that for the last
couple years, I’ve been duped into thinking there is nothing I could do to move
forward, that life just had to happen to me.

But now I know. I know that instead of crawling on the
floor, all I have to do is stand up and walk. Instead of feeling sorry for
myself, all I have to do is look to God’s perfect plan in all things – the good
and the bad. Instead of getting frustrated when my plans fall apart because
life happens, all I have to do is take the reins and say, “Not today!”

I can steer the ship, instead of allowing the waves to carry me where they will. I can be intentional about each and every day. I can say no. I can say yes. I can carve out time to finish the projects, I can form the structure that was once destroyed but is now restored. I can take control of my procrastination, my nonchalant attitude, and I can march forward with the determination that I started this journey with.

With the intention that I started this journey with.

For Part 1 of Tinson’s Door, check out The Friday Muse from a couple weeks ago!

Curiosity had always
scratched at his insides, luring him into the fields of science, technology,
and astronomy.

The Black Door, however,
was something completely different. It was something that fell between the
shelves of Tinson’s chosen fields of research. The Black Door was something
supernatural, something alien. Something bizarre.

When he made the decision – that split-second decision to cross the threshold of the Black Door – he wasn’t really thinking straight. He knew the risks involved. He knew the great statistics. He knew the dangers. But he threw all of that to the wind to walk through the opened door. For science.

Nobody had ever been reported having gone through a Black Door and then coming back. Nobody. Tinson always wondered if people actually came back, but maybe without their memory intact. Or maybe they came back as different people, possessed by some otherworldly creature sent here to spy on mankind. With how little anyone knew of Black Doors, the possibilities were endless. That simple fact was what kept Tinson interested. Intrigued. Devoted. Even somewhat obsessed.

A white room. It was what
had been waiting for Tinson on the other side of his Black Door. A white,
square room, void of furniture, doodads, color. White walls. White ceiling.
White floor.

He wriggled his mustache and turned back in the vain hope that the Black Door was still there, open, waiting for him to cross back over to his home. It was not there. Just another white wall. Dismayed, he scanned the room in the hopes of finding another door, a window, or even a secret passageway that would lead him out of here.

Nothing.

He wriggled his mustache again. There was a scent in this room, familiar but unusual. Burnt popcorn…and strawberries? Natural light filled the room, casting shadows in different corners of the room, though Tinson could not tell where the light came from as there was no source for it in the room itself.

He released a long,
winded breath and then sat down in the middle of the room, cross-legged. He
slowed his breathing, settled his nerves. Did his best not to panic.

Though nobody had ever reported having returned from a visit to whatever was on the other side of any of the Black Doors, there were many reports detailing what people saw on the other side of the doors when opened. Creatures. Worlds. Chaos. Peace. Nightmares. Dreams.

Tinson reached into his
jacket pocket and pulled out a set of dice. He rolled them on the floor,
watching as the red cubes tumbled along the white tile and stopped on six and
three. He picked them up and rolled them again. Five and seven. He knew it was
a gamble, walking through the door. But it was one he knew he had to take. It was
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he couldn’t pass it up because of fear of
the unknown.

He rolled again, this
time getting snake eyes. He chuckled nervously.

Something caught his eye
to the right of where he sat. He turned his head that way, but saw nothing but
white wall. Something grabbed his attention to his left. He turned and saw
nothing. A heavy weight pressed against the atmosphere in the room, pushing
down on his spirit, smashing despair into his spirit.

I’m trapped, he thought. I’ll
die here, and nobody will know.

He looked up after rolling the dice again and saw bulges moving through the white wall in front of him.

Tinson glanced at the dice and saw that they had landed on…blank sides? He scrambled to his feet and watched the bulging item move along the wall, cut across the corner, and move to the next wall. It finally stopped in the center of that wall and then disappeared.

“What are you? Who are
you?”

“Creatures,” a cackling
voice muttered.

Tinson examined each wall but could see no sign of life in the room with him. “Creatures?”

“Creatures,” the voice
echoed. “Creatures. Demons.”

A light chill traveled down Tinson’s spine, an icy sensation that brought fear to his bones and fog to his mind. Where am I? What am I doing here? Demons?

The bulge reappeared in
the wall, but this time it started to punch its way through the surface, a
massive fist – quite easily the size of Tinson’s head – pounding violently
against the surface of the wall, attempting to break through the paint to enter
the world in which Tinson had mistakenly stepped into.

Tinson could do nothing
but watch, as there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He closed his eyes and
wished he would awaken on the couch in the study room, the Black Door still
closed, his body still safe in his own reality.

The question came to his mind: Was this another world or another reality? Was there even any way to tell if you were really in another reality without at least some of the landmarks or anchors from your own day-to-day life to prove some kind of change? He felt the panic creeping up again, filling his arms, his stomach, his neck, but he took a few deep breaths and steadied himself. If this is a dream, I’ll awaken soon. Probably when something breaks through these walls.

Tinson opened his eyes
just as the fist broke through the wall and two hands slid out of the opening.
Black sludge spilled off the hands and arms, and poured through the opening the
fist had made. Tinson’s own curiosity begged him to examine the sludge, to get
closer and see what this new, alien liquid was. But he knew better.

The arms stretched across
the room, the hands grabbed the dice, and then the arms retracted into the
wall. Black sludge continued to spill out of the opening, coating the white
floor, marring the immaculate purity of the tile.

Tinson scowled. Those
dice had been given to him on his sixth birthday. The last birthday present his
father would ever give him. “Hey! Those are mine.”

A voice chuckled through the walls. It was not a jovial chuckle, but more of a creature – maybe a dog – wheezing with its own version of laughter. “You are creature.”

Tinson threw his hands
up. “That’s me. Creature.”

“Yes. Creature.”

Tinson pulled at the ends of his mustache. “And you are?”

“Demon…demons.”

Tinson ran his hand
through his hair. It came out sticky – a side effect of using too much dime
store hair gel. “Demons?”

“Yes. Demons. And you are
creature.”

“What kind of demons?”

“The good kind.”

“I wasn’t aware there was
such a thing.” Tinson couldn’t help but notice the black sludge still pouring
through the opening in the wall. It had coated a quarter of the white tile in
deep black. His mind leaped to a flash of what the room would look like
completely flooded in that stuff. He shook the thought from his head and
squared his jaw.

“There are good demons.
Demons who help.”

Tinson glanced around the
room, noticing no other bulges or movements in the walls. “Help with what?”

“Science.”

Tinson’s ears perked up. “Science?
What do demons know of science?”

The voice chuckled again,
though this time it was jovial and childlike in nature. Tinson wasn’t sure if
that made the laugh any better.

“We know of the doors.
All of the doors. We can…control them.”

Tinson moved toward one
of the walls, excitement pulsing through his veins. “You can control the Black
Doors?”

“Some of them.”

“How?”

The entity didn’t answer.
Instead, the black sludge on the floor began to flow back into the hole in the wall,
like a bubbling stream moving backwards up the mountain. Tinson watched,
mesmerized, as all of the sludge returned to the wall, then formed the shape of
an open doorway made completely out of the dark material.

“Come through. Become
ours. And we will become yours.”

Tinson’s mouth opened to ask more questions, but he couldn’t seem to get the words out. Why in the world would he even consider giving himself over to this…this creature? He knew nothing about it. He knew nothing about where he even was. What type of demon would offer him control over the Black Doors? Though even having control over one door would give him all he needed to fulfill his research. To better mankind.

The doorway stood there,
a standing rectangle of black, shifting ooze.

“Come through. We will
return you to your world. We will give you control over doors. We will give you
powers you cannot fathom.”

Tinson wriggled his mustache. For science, he told himself as he walked toward the wall.

It’s Thursday night, and I’m at home. I just put my son to bed, and my plan was to write another Friday Muse piece for tomorrow, but I decided to wax non-fiction this evening and muse a bit about life. In fact, I decided I’ll switch back and forth each week between a normal post and a Friday Muse piece until I can get back into a good writing rhythm with the blog.

Tonight though, now that my son is down in bed, and the cat has stopped scratching up the couch, I’m able to dwell a bit on the week. It’s been a crazy week so far: I got into a car accident on Sunday. I officially started a new position at work on Monday. And I was able to take my son to Organ Stop Pizza for the first time on Tuesday as part of a school event.

It’s been a full week. Not bad. Full.

Even in this fullness though, I know I need to kick some things into gear. I know I’m behind on projects, and I know that I have a lot on my to-do list. Things I’m capable of, but haven’t felt ‘motivation’ to do. You know the feeling? You feel too tired or melancholy to do these things, but you know if you just started them, you would find the momentum to keep going. To actually finish them.

What we don’t always realize is that that momentum will eventually build into passion.

And that passion will build into success.

I’ve spoken quite a bit in this blog – as of late – about my divorce, about how the event took a lot out of me and left me passionless in regards to my life goals. It was an ‘event’ for me, because I simply didn’t think it would ever happen. And when it did, it caught me so off-guard, I had no defense against it.

But that happens in life, doesn’t it? Things happen that throw us off guard, off track. They distract us, they hinder us, they confuse us, they derail us.

They steal our fire, our passion, and leave us wondering where we went wrong, where the cart fell off the tracks.

Now I want to talk about how that passion that I lost is finally coming back. I want to discuss how that little spark that was left alive in me after the divorce has been trying – as hard as it possibly can – to fan into a flame again regardless of how badly a multitude of things have doused it in the past: tragedy, distractions, lack-of-interest. Depression.

A few weeks ago, I came across some church notes I took back in 2012. The man preaching that Sunday was Travis Clark, the same man my (now ex) wife and I followed to San Francisco years later to help plant a church, Canvas. San Francisco ended up changing my life – and is still having lasting effects on me to this day – but that’s a story for another time.

Anyway, in these church notes, Travis Clark was speaking about the enemy of our soul and his strategy to come against us. One particular note in the multitude of scribbled notes caught my eye. It read: “If the enemy can’t take your faith, he will attempt to take your passion.”

That one note has stuck out to me over the course of the last few weeks, because it explains – plain as day – the strategy the enemy has been using on me to keep me from moving forward.

I used to have such a passion to write. Such a passion to speak of my faith to others both in person and in online forums. Passion to toil at building a company. Passion to stay up late in the night and rise early in the morning to build the future God was leading me into. Passion to pursue the impossible.

And the divorce drained me of that passion.

If the enemy can’t take your faith, he will attempt to take your passion.

Travis Clark

The enemy never would have been able to take my faith. Not after what I saw God do to get us into San Francisco and keep us there for two years. Not after what I saw God do to provide for our family for 9 years when we had a $300-$600 deficit every month. Not after what I’ve seen God do in my life and the lives around me over the course of the 40 years I’ve been on this earth.

No, he wasn’t going to be able to take my faith. Even the divorce couldn’t really put a dent in that.

So instead, he took my passion. He took the fuel to my fire, the very thing that kept me going toward those impossible goals.

I reckon it’s time to take that passion back.

It’s time to write again.

It’s time to build again.

It’s time to stretch again.

It’s time to believe God for the impossible again.

It’s time to pick myself up out of the dust, brush myself off, and chase after the things I left on the floor when my passion was stolen from me.

Have you lost your passion? Have you let depression and complacency rule your spirit? Have you let the enemy take all that is dear to you without a proper fight? Then it’s time that you too rise from the ashes. It’s time that you too remember why you started down this road. No journey ever began in a vacuum. It began with passion toward something. Toward a vision. Toward a future.

It’s time to fan that spark into a flame again, and remember who you truly are.

The easiest way to do that?

Just do it.

Sit down and write.

Pick up a hammer and start nailing.

Get up off the couch and start walking.

One step at a time.

One breath at a time.

Eventually, those steps and those breathes will build into momentum, and that momentum will build into passion.

And that passion will accomplish the impossible.

Tinson felt a strange mix of loneliness and contemplative freedom being in the common study room this late after everyone else had already retired for the evening, even though on most nights, the scientists and scholars who came to this place usually stayed late into the night and early into the morning to drink in the knowledge and research available in the mid-sized study hall.

It was Sunday night. By now – the tenth hour by what Tinson estimated – the occupants of the study hall were home, relaxing with family, turning in for the night, or studying in the comfort of their own dwellings.

Tinson though wasn’t ready to go home quite yet. Besides, he had nothing to go home to besides a neurotic cat and a fish tank full of over-breeding guppies.

The lights flickered off again, and this prompted Tinson to lift himself off the couch and stumble through the darkness to the nearest wall to reset the breaker. This was the fourth time he had had to do this today. The mechanical actions taken to reset the lights had become second nature to him by now, and he did them as if he were a piece of clockwork, never minding the utter blackness that was left once the lights went out. He wasn’t entirely sure why the lights went off, though he suspected it was the power that the Black Door drew. His colleagues – mostly the other scientists and scholars who joined him in his studies – told him that was a ridiculous theory because the door was wired into the city’s grid, using the same power that the skyscrapers in the center of the city drank from. How, they proposed, could a single door draw more power than a collection of skyscrapers?

Tinson knew better. He knew the door was powerful. He knew it drew enormous amounts of power at seemingly random times. That was about all he knew though.

Black Doors were a mystery to everyone. They were a strange phenomena, appearing randomly, sometimes in place of ordinary doors, sometimes in the middle of nothing and nowhere. Opening one was like playing roulette with a hand grenade. One door could open to pure darkness. Another could open to a far-off planet. And sometimes, Black Doors had been known to open to monstrous – and very deadly – creatures.

Tinson took a sip of his now-cold coffee, wiggling his mustache as he drank the bitter fluid, recalling a news article he pulled from the digital archives some weeks back. Apparently, a Black Door had been opened, and a slaughter occurred shortly after. A creature – half man, half octopus? – came through to Anaisha and went into a killing frenzy. A group of mercenaries killed it, but something else had slipped through with the creature: a disease. One they had yet to find a cure for.

He set his coffee cup on the surface of the glass coffee
table and perused the notes on his laptop. The Black Door Knowledge Collective
– as they called themselves – had formed five years ago with the intent of
studying the Black Doors, to hopefully gain an understanding of the strange
otherworldly creations.

The funny thing was, they weren’t otherworldly creations. Not entirely, anyway. They had been created using material from Legion vessels, glossy black alien material that gave off strange signals that somehow connected the lines between this reality and others. The Doors, though, had been created in a place that was now rubble – The Princeton. Or, as Tinson liked to call it, the Tower of Babel.

Each member of the Collective had their own various aspects of the Doors to research. Tinson was tasked with finding out what exactly caused a door to give entry, what the strange symbols etched around the door frames meant, and to record how many Black Door sightings had been recorded thus far across Anaisha.

Tinson looked up at the Black Door in the middle of the room and cursed its existence. Neither he nor any of his colleagues had been able to open the door. Each turn of the silver handle did nothing. The door had appeared here some years ago, in the middle of empty space, which is why the Collective decided to make this their place of study. But even then, after all this time, Tinson was no closer to figuring out why the doors opened for some, but not for others. Were the doors sentient, and decided whom to open for? Was there a trick to turning the handle or pushing on the doorway? Or were the symbols etched around the door frame a key in understanding what would cause the door to open?

The second piece of research was something Tinson was also making very little headway on. Nobody could interpret the symbols etched into the door frames. The symbols didn’t match any of the symbols in Anaisha’s main database. At one point, last year, Tinson thought he had broken the code and deciphered one of the symbols – a strange swirl with dots in the middle – when he had gone east to research a Black Door sighting in a shopping mall. But the next door he researched after that debunked his theory, and he found himself right back at the drawing board.

The third piece of research was a bit more concrete and dare-he-say easier to make headway with. With all of the information available to him, Tinson was able to estimate there had been a rough total of 1,567 Black Door sightings over the course of the last five years. When he originally came up with the number, he gawked, as did his colleagues. He ran the numbers three more times and came up with the same figure. What worried him was that the number had increased three fold in the last year and a half. And, the number did not account for people actually stepping into the doorways. Nobody who traveled through a Black Door ever came back to report about its existence. Nobody.

Tinson took another sip of bitter coffee, wishing he had put more sugar in. The room was cold, and he mentally scolded himself for not bringing his jacket today. It still lay across the back of his dining room chair in his apartment, probably getting torn to shreds by the cat.

“Damn you,” he said to the door.

The lights flickered and went out. Tinson slammed his fist on the glass table and stood to his feet, stumbling again to the breaker box. Once the lights were back on, he walked over to the door, examining the glossy surface and the strange etchings carved around the door frame. He grabbed the silver doorknob and tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Why?” he asked the door. “Why won’t you open? You’re so eager to share your secrets to others. So eager to allow others to enter our world. What’s behind your surface? A creature? Another reality? What of those who have crossed your threshold?” He took his hand off the knob and shoved both of his hands into the pockets of his khakis. He let his fingers fish around in his piles of pocket change and hard candy, his mind racing with caffeine and frustration. He finally turned away from the door and sat himself on the couch. He took another sip of coffee. The bitter taste made him realize he hadn’t had dinner yet.

“Fine,” he said to the door. “Fine. I’m going to go eat. You
sit there and do what you always do – nothing. I’ll be back. Maybe some fried
rice and steamed noodles will do me some good. If you want some, just say so.”

Tinson stared at the door, as if waiting for it to respond.

“No? Okay. See you soon.” He stood up from the couch and turned to leave when he heard a squeak from the center of the room. He turned toward the Black Door to find it ajar, an ice-cold breeze pouring into the room. He wiggled his mustache, his nerves frayed, his mind racing. He approached the door, cautiously peering through the crack. He could see nothing but bits of colored light against a black backdrop.

He reached out and grabbed the knob, pushing the door in so
it was open all the way. Nothing but blackness and shards of beautiful greens,
blues and reds. He turned toward his laptop, eager to record his findings. But
then he realized – this could be his only chance. His only chance to properly
research a Black Door.

He had done enough study on the Doors to know a few things. One, the doors vanished after they were closed. Two, the doors did not stay open long. The power to keep a door open far exceeded the power it took to power it while closed. And third, the doors would never reappear in the same place twice.

Tinson scrambled to the coffee table and grabbed his notepad and pen, scribbling out a quick note for his colleagues. Then he approached the door again, his eyes wide, his body cold from the air sweeping into the study hall. The lights flickered. Tinson leaped into the doorway, and the Black Door slammed shut behind him.

You may kill a fire. And everything you know falls to dust and ash. Yet the remarkable treasure in this seemingly hopeless pile, is hidden deep within. The burning embers incarnate the perpetual desire to go from spark to flame.

Akilnathan Logeswaran

I went to an impromptu writing meeting tonight. Nothing went right. The mall closed when I arrived, and my friend and I had to walk around the building to get to the Starbucks on the other side. Mind you, it’s still Summer in Arizona, meaning it’s still in the 90s. We reach the Starbucks to find that it closes in 20 minutes.

So, we grab iced coffee and sit outside, ignoring the heat as the warm evening closes in.

My goal tonight was to work on a list of upcoming posts I want to do in the near future. You know, resurrect this blog? Much like I’ve had to resurrect much of my life since the divorce. Sometimes, life buries us in ashes. We must rise above these, rise above the wounds, and carry on. It’s been a hard lesson for me to learn, but one I think I’ve finally learned nonetheless.

I opened this site to see when I last posted a Friday Muse – my once-weekly writing shorts – and was both surprised and disappointed to find I haven’t written anything new here since June of 2017. The only other two posts since then were in regards to my divorce, which ironically enough is why I haven’t written.

I was disappointed, yes, but moreso sad. Since I was eleven, writing has been my passion. My muse has always been my comfort in dark times. Yet, as I sat here staring at the June 2017 date, I realized I had betrayed my best friend.

My divorce has been painful, yes, and writing was there to comfort me, but I wouldn’t let it. I pushed it away like I did a great many other things in my life. I realized tonight that it’s time I change that.

I’ll have a new Friday Muse piece for everyone this Friday. And expect weekly posts from me from this point on. It’s time to come out of those ashes and recover the better part of me that has been buried underneath the ash.

When things fall apart, the broken pieces allow all sorts of things to enter, and one of them is the presence of God. – Shauna Niequist

Denial. It’s a poison that many of us like to carry around with us, and it is something that can kill our dreams, those around us, even ourselves if we’re not careful.

Unfortunately, denial is the poison I sipped upon for months after my divorce. I thought I was okay. I thought it wasn’t affecting me very much. And that’s the beauty of denial – it’s able to seep down into the deepest roots of our being, blind us to the truth, and destroy us from the inside out.

When my wife left me back in September of 2017, my first reaction was defensive. I had to protect our marriage. I had to protect the 12 years that we had fought hard to build together, the dreams we had been working on. I had to protect my son. I fought a valiant battle that eventually ended like any book that doesn’t have a happy ending ends.

My next reaction was to run. I ran from the pain, I ran from the reality of the situation. I ran from myself. I ran from everything. Even God, in some respects.

The problem is, I’m not really in shape. I mean, I’m slender, but my lungs don’t like me running. They hate it when I try to jot down the three stories of stairs from my apartment, or hurry across a parking lot to get to the car in the rain. So God had an easy time catching me. And when He did, He did what He usually does – He held me, comforted me. He reminded me that He’s there – always has been, and had no intention of ever leaving my side. I’ve never felt closer to Him since having to lean on him through this long and bitterly cold season.

And then, after He comforted me and restored me, He dragged me in the other direction to face reality.

What God showed me was something that I had hoped wasn’t true. In fact, I denied the fact that it was. But the reality was, I was broken. And all my pieces were where I left them – at the foot of my divorce.

When I finally opened my eyes and saw what God was trying to show me, I saw a multitude of shattered pieces. Pieces of my heart, pieces of my dreams, pieces of my life that had been fractured by the act of divorce.

And it was then that I encountered my third reaction – grief. Pain. Loss.

When you have a vision of what you believe your future will look like – a house, a successful writing/publishing career, a quarter dozen kids running around, a wonderful wife who loves and supports no matter what – and that vision is shattered, it’s enough to nearly kill you. Your entire – my entire – perception of what I thought life would have in store for me was destroyed, and since then, I’ve had to create a ‘new normal’. I’ve had to rebuild my life from scratch, nearly from the ground up, and learn to move forward, one step at a time, only without my wife walking beside me.

In the last few months – per the recommendation of a very good friend – I’ve been attending DivorceCare, a class and support group that helps anyone and everyone deal with divorce. Attending the class has helped me face the harsh realities I didn’t want to face a year ago. It’s helped me pick up the shattered pieces that once made up me, and put them back where they belong. It’s helped me prioritize my life, get back into the swing of projects, and regain hope for the future.

And I’m happy to say I’m finally coming back to me. Each day is hard, each day is another step forward through challenging heartache, but each one of those steps is another step into healing.

There’s three facets that I’m rebuilding, three areas of my life I’m pouring into with everything I’ve got:

My relationship with God has grown so much stronger through this trial. There was never really a point where I turned completely away from God – because I certainly didn’t blame Him for the divorce – but there were aspects of my life I ignored him (conveniently) so I could better push my own agenda without having to be told ‘No’.

And like any good father, God corrected me. Comforted me. And then set me on the right path. And as I’ve fallen back in line with what God has called me to, I realize that He’s only ever had my best interest in mind. As much as I’d love to claim I know best, I absolutely do not. God does. And listening to Him, pivoting myself back to Him, has made all the difference in this season.

I never ignored my son in the beginning of all of this. But I thought my mere presence was enough to comfort him through this trying time, and I was wrong.

I’ve had some people tell me that kids are resilient, that they aren’t really affected by divorce as much as we claim they are.

You’re wrong if you believe that. They hurt, on a greater scale then we do sometimes. I mean, I myself am a product of multiple divorces, and I still carry the scars of those with me everywhere I go.

I’ve realized that being there physically is not the same as being there, completely, for my son. I’ve learned to give him advice when he’s lost on what to do, to hold him when he’s sad, to stand up for him when he’s crushed, to pick him up when he falls, and to love him with every ounce of my being.

My purpose can be a great many things – my God-calling, my son, the work I do, the people I pour into. But what I mean by purpose in this sense is what I should be working on toward building a better future for myself, my son, and everyone involved.

MY WRITING

I’ve neglected my writing for a good year now. Right before the divorce, I was reaching a point of breakthrough with a novel that I had been working on for 12 years. Then the divorce hit, and everything collapsed, burying my writing underneath it.

No more.

I’ve been writing consistently every morning for the past couple weeks now. I’m making great headway on the book, and it feels good – healing, even – to be writing again.

And this time, nothing is going to sidetrack me.

THE CROSSOVER ALLIANCE

God is good in all He does. And God did good by assembling a team together to help perform some of the company functions of The Crossover Alliance before the divorce. Right before, actually, making it possible for the company to keep running even when I was busy battling demons I never thought I’d have to face.

With those struggles came an extreme amount of guilt on my part. Guilt at putting the company to the side so I could deal with the divorce, so I could be there for my son, so I could try to learn how to function again. But God has done so much to erase my guilt, to remind me that He cares for the company, but He cares more about my well-being and me getting myself back together to run the company.

It’s taken a year, but I believe things are getting back on track with the small niche publishing company that was started nearly 4 years ago, and I’m thrilled to be jumping back into the fray with some awesome projects this year.

RED DRAFT EDITING

One of the many downfalls of the divorce was the fact that I had to go back to a 9-5 job to make ends meet while waiting for the writing and publishing to pay the bills. And it’s been rough getting back into the workplace, after having been absent from it for the last 9 years.

I can’t stand it. I really, truly, cannot stand working for someone else. But this is where God has me, and I have had to work very hard to accept that this is where God has me.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a large number of people mention to me over the last year that I should start freelance editing. I mean, I’ve been writing/editing/publishing for years now. I blew everyone off, thinking it was a ridiculous notion for me to edit freelance, especially with everything else going on.

But God wouldn’t let me say no forever. So, I’ve started a freelance editing business:

Red Draft Editing – www.reddraftediting.com

My hope is to bring on enough projects to pay the bills, then be able to work from home again, gain the flexibility I need in my schedule for running the publishing company properly, and eventually run the publishing company and write full time again.

And so, I continued to rebuilding my life, one shattered piece at a time…

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles. – Harry Emerson Fosdick

Life can be tough. Tougher than tough sometimes, and it’s during those times that we are made aware of who we are, what we believe, and why we’re here.

Most of you have probably been wondering where I’ve been for the past seven months. As my blog went silent, my writing dried up, and my presence on social media became nil, I slowly sunk into the shadows, busy fighting through a personal hell I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

I was going through divorce.

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Seven months ago, my wife left our apartment, and the path toward divorce began. The reasons surrounding this aren’t all that relevant, aside from the fact that the divorce was not mutual. I fought hard to save it, but in the end, it was a valiant but in-vain attempt because both parties didn’t mutually want to work on things.

Nonetheless, the process of my wife separating from me, my son being split between the two of us, and me having to go back to a 9-5 job to pay my bills has been a life change for me. A whole set of them, actually. I usually have a hard time adjusting to one major change, let alone a half dozen of them.

There are some people who take joy in divorce. But I don’t. Never have and never will. It’s been the most heart-wrenching experience I’ve ever had to go through. Not just for me, but for my son as well. Watching him have to cope with having two homes, a split family, and the confusion surrounding all of this has broken my heart into more pieces than I care to count.

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It took long, painful months to get the whole divorce process over and done. Long, painful months of being in limbo, on the fence, in purgatory, where you can’t move on because you’re still technically married, but you can’t go back to the marriage because your partner has checked out completely. I’m not a gray-area kind of guy when it comes to this stuff – you’re either all in or all out. And having to be all in to something that only I was all in to was maddeningly frustrating.

I had a friend ask me one day, if my wife were to come back, completely regretful of her actions, would I take her back.

And I answered no. I had reached a point of no return.

Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand the covenant that marriage is, of God’s law regarding marriage, and what a marriage/divorce does to children. But I had received peace from God that it was time to move on, and peace that I had done everything I possibly could to save the marriage.

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I sat in a divorce hearing, agreed on all of the terms, and officialized the severing of our marriage vows.

These last couple weeks, I’ve felt like I’ve stepped out of the darkness, out of the long, dark tunnel I’ve been traveling through the last few months, and into sunlight. Warm sunlight, the beams of which are revealing who I am, what I believe, and why I’m here.

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During the last few years of our marriage, a lot of ‘life’ things happened. We moved to San Francisco to start a church plant. Two years later, we moved back to Arizona from San Francisco when the church plant didn’t work out for us. Shortly after, my grandfather killed himself. It was a kerfluffle of emotional devastation for me, some of which took me until now to recover from.

In all of that, I lost part of myself. My love for writing fell through the cracks. My motivation to live life to the fullest fell by the wayside. I fell into depression, and my anxiety nearly choked the life out of me.

During all of this, I believe – now looking back on it, that my wife and I were drifting apart. The spark went out. That wasn’t enough to stop our marriage, but it did contribute to the issues I was already dealing with.

I started to find my love of writing again shortly before the announcement of divorce, and was actually working on the third novel in my Expired Reality series – a manuscript that has been in hiatus for over eleven years now. But once the divorce came to light, I shoved my writing back into the shadows and felt those same shadows consume part of me as well.

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There was a point during the divorce process that I took on identities that were not mine. I believed I had been a horrible husband, an even worse father, and an all-around failure at life. I felt – and was convinced by some of those close to us – that the divorce was my fault. It took those closest to me, and God Himself, to slap me around a bit and remind me of what was actually going on around me.

I was a great husband. I may not have been perfect, but I certainly tried my hardest.

I was and am a terrific father. My son is the apple of my eye, and I couldn’t imagine my life without him.

I’m not a failure at anything. Just because there were rough patches in our marriage, the fact that I stayed in the marriage is why I never failed at the marriage.

It’s funny when you go through things in life and everyone – EVERYONE – has an opinion on how you should be feeling, how you should be processing, and what you should be doing during the tough spots.

This has never been more prevalent for me until I went through my divorce.

Regardless of the goodness of intentions, I received wayward counsel more than once during my fight for our marriage. I was told many times that the issues surrounding the divorce were all my fault – completely, and very few people – save for a few good friends – actually confronted my wife on the issue of divorce. At one point, I was even told that I should close up The Crossover Alliance (my publishing company) to save the marriage, even though the very existence of The Crossover Alliance had nothing to do with the why of the divorce.

It got to the point where I had to break through the mist and use discernment to determine what was Godly counsel and what was pure nonsense. It wasn’t enough to adopt all of the counsel buzzing around me, I had to figure out what it was that I believed and what convictions I held to and let those guide me.

I’ve been saved since I was six years old. I’m now thirty-eight, and I’ve been around the block of life enough to be able to discern what God’s will for my life is. I’ve refined my discernment to the point where I don’t need to second guess God on every little thing that I feel. Do I sometimes mix my emotions in with my Godly discernment? Sure do. But for the most part, I’m able to sift my emotions from the core of what God is telling me. And there was a very clear point during this process where I clearly heard and felt from God that I had the OK to move forward with my life, without my wife. She had already divorced me in her heart – which in my opinion is more severe than simply divorcing someone on paperwork – and I was given permission to move on.

I don’t discount what the Bible says about anything. And I know there are certain situations where divorce isn’t really the end for couples, but for me, going to divorce court and signing the decree was simply a technical action that put to rest what had already been established months earlier – that my wife wanted nothing to do with me or this marriage and had decided to break the covenant.

When it was clear that there was no salvaging the marriage, I started packing up stuff around the apartment, I started embracing the very changes that had suddenly rocked my life, and I moved forward in a new freedom that only God could give me, regardless of the opinions of those around me.

Through this whole process, I had to rediscover who I am, not just as a human, but who I am in God, and more importantly, why I’m here.

Before the divorce, my focus was clearer. I knew I was running The Crossover Alliance publishing company, I was writing my books, and I was raising my son. During the divorce, I had no idea what I was doing. My vision became clouded, and the shadows pulled me down into a new darkness I had never experienced before.

But now that I’m back in the sunlight, I’ve realized who I am, what I believe, and why I’m here.

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I’m here to change the world.

I’m here to guide a publishing company to change the face of Christian publishing forever. I’m here to write stories that engage readers, showcase my faith, but don’t politicize the Christian faith. I’m here to raise a young boy in to a young man who will himself change the world.

I’m back, and it feels good being out of the darkness. Feels good to feel the sunshine on my face. Feels good to have my focus clear once again.

Divorce has been the toughest thing I’ve ever been through in this life. But it certainly isn’t the end for me. God – as He always has done – is pulling the good out of every single situation, and He’s rebuilding my life into one that will continue to glorify Him.

Out of all of this, my son and I will be stronger, my writing will be deeper, and my spirit will be fuller.

I’m back, and the future has never looked brighter.

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The frosted glass allowed the morning’s luminescence to bleed into the castle, filling the hallway with bright white light that flowed gracefully across the white marble flooring, the brownish-gray walls, and the ivory doors of the servants’ quarters. The scent of bacon and potatoes filled the wide corridor, signaling breakfast, but the silence that permeated the thick tile and even thicker walls gave the illusion it was still night when everyone slumbered and hid from the darkness within the darkness.

Irasta walked barefoot across the tiles, the undersides of her feet chilled by the lingering cold that seized the fortress each night. She momentarily missed the comfort of her own bed, but it was an ache that quickly dissolved with the thoughts of Renold and their twilight encounter.

“Your highness.”

Startled, Irasta broke from her musings and turned to the young servant girl. Trana’s dirtied apron and tussled brown hair told Irasta the young girl had been cooking, as she was one of the ten chefs who inhabited the Fortress of Para. Trana was always recognizable by her tussled hair, as the other nine chefs had cut their hair short to avoid dropping hair follicles in the castle’s food.

Trana dropped to her knees and touched her forehead to the floor. Her long hair spread across the tile like a puddle of brown liquid. “Your highness.”

“Get up, Trana. I thought I made it clear I don’t want the staff bowing like that.”

Trana scrambled to her feet. Her wide blue eyes sparkled in the morning light, and it gave her a youth that Irasta missed about herself. “Sorry, your highness. Sorry. I just wanted to tell you that we’re out of veil beets.”

Irasta nodded. “Very well. Have Goron pull more from storehouse number three.” The food shortage would claim the kingdom soon enough. Just another crisis Irasta was struggling to salve.

Trana nodded, curtseyed – even though she wore white pants marred by orange and yellow stains, and started toward the stairwell.

“Trana?”

The girl turned. “Yes?”

“How did you know to find me here, in the servants’ quarters?”

The girl’s slight hesitation betrayed her deception. “I saw you come up the stairwell when I was searching the pantries.”

Irasta took a few steps toward the girl. She wondered if Trana would notice that she was barefoot, although the long white gown she wore more than covered up her legs and feet. When she was within a few feet from Trana, Irasta stared into the girl’s eyes with a blazing glare that could have melted iron. “Where are the other cooks?”

Trana’s confused expression – the way she knitted her eyebrows together as if they were meant to be one, long row of hair – did nothing to trick Irasta. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, your highness.”

Irasta, her chest beating out of mere frustration with the girl’s lies, took hold of Trana’s arm. The girl’s flesh was tender, delicate. Easily destroyed if it came to it. “Tell me where the other chefs are.”

Trana’s eyes widened, and her lips pressed together, attempting to restrain a secret that did not want to be restrained, as if her very voice was Pandora’s Box attempting to wreak havoc upon mortals.

“If you don’t,” Irasta said, “I’ll have you tried for treason.”

“It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

Irasta grit her teeth. “With what?”

“The coup.”

Irasta released the girl’s arm and then turned toward the window, crossing her arms. The sun hid behind a cluster of clouds, leaving a dreary darkness in its absence. “Where are they now?”

Silence fell between them like a thick cloud of dust, permeating each crack and crevice in the castle. Irasta thought to have the girl arrested, but she was uncertain how many were involved in this coup. Of course, she knew a coup had been forming – for months, since the start of the pestilence. A vile disease had taken over the land beyond the castle walls, pinning the citizens of Para.

Finding information on the disease had been incredibly difficult, as every scout that was sent to investigate the land and vegetation succumbed to a horrifying and very painful death that involved spitting out one’s insides.

The storehouses, of course, had been full when the pestilence began, but they were nearly 3/4 empty now. And the denizens of Para were very aware of their impending doom.

“They don’t trust you, your highness.”

Irasta let out a long breath and nodded. “I know.” She watched the forest of trees to the west dance in unison with the strong winds moving through the land.

“Ever since King Victor’s death…They blame you, you know?”

Irasta turned to the girl and nodded. “I know.”

“They’re in the fourth storehouse. They have weapons. I don’t know how many of them there are, but-“

The Princess raised her hand. “Enough. Enough. The plague is bad enough. The peoples’ hatred for me for a death I did not cause only makes things impossible.”

“What about the queen?”

Irasta shook her head. “Near death. I doubt she has more than a few days. But if the people attack-“

Trana stepped toward Irasta, her eyes shifting from blue to gray in the cloudy haze. “Do you think Queen Para could speak to the people? Do you think she could convince them to drop their grievances and assumptions, and work at finding a solution to the plague?”

Irasta narrowed her eyes on the girl. “No. She is in hiding. And that is where she will stay until this is all over, or until she has breathed her last breath.”

“I see.” Trana stood, staring at Irasta for minutes, wringing her hands, shuffling her feet, before speaking again. “What about you? Do you think it might be wise – even of the royal duty – to speak to the coup?”

“I think not.”

“They would listen to you, your highness. Your words have stopped wars before. They have set men free. Your speech is probably your greatest asset, second – of course – to your unmatched beauty. If they heard you speak, their hearts might quiet. They might be unified in thought and deed. We could find a way through the plague.”

Irasta heard a door open down the hall. She knew who it was, of course, but Trana did not, and the sound startled her and caused her to step back from the Princess and look around anxiously.

Renold, dressed in his white button-down shirt and white pants – the same uniform warn by all servants of the Kingdom of Para – moved down the hallway toward the two females.

Trana’s eyes arched, and she looked cautiously at Irasta. “Shouldn’t he be with the other servants, in the east wing of the study? They’re supposed to be preparing for the morning worship.”

Renold slipped quickly behind Trana and slid the ancient dagger into her back, quietly, succinctly. Trana’s eyes widened as Renold helped her to her knees.

Irasta knelt before the young woman, lifting her white gown to give her the slack needed to bend down into such a position. “You put on quite a ruse, Trana. But I’m no fool.”

Trana’s breath sputtered as she leaned sideways against the cold tile. “I-”

“Don’t speak,” Irasta said as Renold retracted his blade. He wiped it down with a muddled cloth retrieved from his pants pocket, and then he slid the weapon into the inconspicuous sheath on the back of his belt. “I’ve known about your deception for some time. I know you were sent here to lure me back to the storehouse, where you would kill me. Kill the queen. Take over Para.”

Trana’s eyes flickered, and her breath caught in her throat as her spirit left her.

Irasta stood and sighed. “Put her body in one of the servant rooms. We’ll bury her properly once this is all over.”

Renold nodded and lifted the girl in both arms. Blood dripped from the wound in her back, creating a puddle on the otherwise immaculate white tile. It disgusted Irasta that such a mar would stain the kingdom, but blood would have to be spilt if this revolt – and this plague – were to be undone.

“What of the messenger?” Irasta asked.

Renold stopped along his way to the nearest room and turned toward the princess. His rugged, bearded face did well to hide any emotions his expressions would give away had he been clean-shaven as was usually required of the servants. “He returned early this morning with news.”

“And?”

“The plague was caused by the Machines, to the east.”

“The Machines.”

“We can leave within the hour.”

“The filters are done, then?”

Renold nodded. “Yes. They will keep the plague from us for a bit, at least long enough to cross out of the kingdom.”

Irasta nodded. “Get the others. We leave within the hour, due east. Before we leave, I want everyone in the fourth storehouse killed. Without prejudice.”

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Blood soaked the carpet, surrounding Rune like a blossoming rose. What he thought would have been the killing blow by Hastings simply put him in a state of misery he had never experienced before. His skull ached as if it were being tightened in a vice, and the rest of his broken form cried out in echoes of pain that mimicked the agonizing cries of a banshee.

He didn’t have to guess that his wounds might be fatal by this point. And even if they weren’t, he knew Hastings would finish the job once he was finished cleaning up his wounded face. But the fact that Rune might be at the end of his days did little to convince him to give up just yet.

Not until she was safe.

Footsteps echoed across the foyer tile. When Hastings reached the living room carpet and knelt, the overwhelming scent of musk cologne filled Rune’s nostrils to near suffocation. “We were family, you and I,” Hastings grumbled.

Rune tried using his good arm – his right arm – to push himself up, but Hastings simply pressed his foot against Rune’s back, pinning into the carpet so hard it was as if he wanted Rune to fall through the floor to the gruesome basement below.

The basement where she was being held as prisoner and slave. Hidden from those who loved her, from those who had been searching for her for days, weeks, months – for what felt like forever. And yet, she was right under everyone’s noses the whole time. Hidden in plain sight – sort of.

“As a guest,” Hastings said, “you shouldn’t snoop. That’s a law of common decency and a rule of common courtesy. This is my house. My home. My sanctuary. And the last thing I want people to do in my sanctuary is to go through things that they have no business going through. It turns you from family to thief. And I abhor thieves.”

“She’s just…” The act of speaking left Rune’s throat parched and raw. He squeezed his eyes shut as a wave of pain shot through his ribs. When it passed, he took as deep a breath as he could and tried to speak again. “She’s just a girl.”

“Mmhmm. Just a girl. So-” He grabbed a tuft of Rune’s hair and lifted his head so he could see Hastings’ face. The long wound running diagonal across the man’s left eye and nose still bled somewhat. The knife had been too dull to kill, apparently. “Why did you insist on trying to take her?”

Rune spit blood. The spittle hit the carpet and spread through the fibers. Hastings grimaced as if Rune had a strange disease he was infecting the home with. “She’s not yours.” He released his grip on Rune’s hair, and Rune’s head plopped down in the thick carpet.

Hastings stood and then traveled across the living room to the small bar against the north wall. Rune heard the clinking of Hastings’ glass decanter as he poured a shot glass of whiskey. Rune squinted through the space underneath the oak coffee table and watched the turbulent weather outside the sliding glass door. The patio furniture was being strewn about by the wild tempest as dark storm clouds filled the sky, and violent wind caused havoc and mayhem.

Out there, out in the storm, was freedom. A freedom Rune knew he might never see again. But it was a freedom he had to win for the girl. His gaze wandered to the couch just a few inches from him…

“You’re an interesting breed, Mr. Rune. You and I were partners on how many ‘missions’? We toppled governments, assassinated would-be megalomaniacs, and even stole from the rich to give to the poor and lazy. We lived it up. We saved the world. All under our own banner. Not the government’s. Not the peoples’. Our own.

“But now, all of a sudden, seemingly out of left field, you have a bleeding heart? Give me a break. I stood there while you shot Abdula in the face. We both lit the fires that burned down Synop. And you held my head while I nearly drifted off to death in the desert of Gera.

“Brothers! We. Were. Brothers! You and I.” Hastings’ soft footsteps made their way across the carpet back to Rune. He knelt again, but all Rune could see of him was the shot glass suspended by the man’s thick fingers. “Since I do consider you family, I’ll give you a choice. I can make your next few days an absolute living hell – after which I’ll kill you. Or, you can forget about the girl and move on with your life. We don’t have to do anymore missions together, but we can agree to disagree…like gentlemen. Civilized gentlemen who understand one another.”

Rune closed his eyes, but all he could see, all he could feel through the carpeted floor, through the basement below him, was the young girl, beaten and bruised, sexually abused. He couldn’t erase her from his mind. Her bright, green eyes glowed in the darkness of his mind, and her frail, fragile figure appeared in shadows that pleaded with him to help.

Rune had been there for her birth. He had been there for her Kindergarten graduation. He had been there for her first school dance. And, even if it was his last act, he would be here for her now…

“What’ll it be, Rune? You either die here, or you live out there.”

Rune shut his eyes and took another deep, painful breath.

“Did you hear me, friend? Did you hear my proposal? You’re lucky I’m even giving you a choice. Your kind – the kind that interfere in family affairs – are the kind I’ve been hunting and killing for years. But you’ve earned points with me because you saved my life more than a few times. A few feathers in your cap are going to get you out of this scrape, but it’s the last Hail Mary you’ll get from me. Take it. I’ll patch your wounds, and I’ll send you on your way.”

Rune opened his eyes and slowly lifted himself to a sitting position. The act alone scattered pain in every area of his body. Bones were broken, flesh was cut, and all of it screamed at him to stop moving, to lay on the floor and give up the fight. He looked up at Hastings who was sitting in the black recliner, sipping his whiskey. The room was unlit and dim, save for the clouded sunlight outside and a brief flash of lightning every three minutes. But he could still make out the copies of Armor and Ammo stacked on the coffee table, a subscription that Rune had gifted to Hastings last year.

Hastings set his glass on the coffee table and stood to his feet. “What’ll it be?”

Rune used the couch for leverage to lift himself to a standing position. At first, he wobbled a bit, and the dizziness that passed through his skull nearly knocked him out cold. But he soon gained his footing and established a position facing Hastings, only the coffee table between the two men.

Hastings raised an eyebrow, the cut across his face shifting in the dim light. “You can stand? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You are a patriot, and patriots always rise.”

“They do.”

Hastings started around the coffee table, hands clasped behind his back. “I know you think you have a connection to the girl. But you don’t. Not really. She has no relation to you. She has no real connection to you.  Forget about her. Live your life. Go buy an island somewhere, have a hundred supermodels delivered there, and live out your days in peace.”

Rune raised the pistol he had slid underneath the couch during his fight with Hastings. “That’s not a life for me.”

Hastings raised his arms halfway in a lazy gesture of mock surrender. A knowing grin crept across his face, and the lack of surprise made him seem almost stone-like. “This isn’t worth it. You do anything to me – anything – and they’ll be on you. All of them. You know that. I know that. You’re not examining all the angles, Rune. They all lead to your end.”

“I know.” Rune fired the gun three times. Each shot hit its mark as deep red stains blossomed through Hastings’ white dress shirt. He blinked twice and then collapsed upon the coffee table as it crashed to the floor.

Rune wasted no time heading down to the basement, though it took him longer than desired with his injured leg and his dizzy spells. He entered the hot and humid space, the stained walls and hollow rooms lending a suffocating sense of isolation. He hobbled to the room at the end, blew the lock to pieces with the pistol, and found Marissa on the floor in the corner, startled by Rune’s intrusion.

Rune stood for a moment, awestruck by her familiar presence. Though her face and arms were caked in brown filth, and her hair was chopped at uneven slants, and her clothes were tattered and torn, he still recognized the young girl he had helped raise over the years.

“Where’s my dad?” she asked, her voice calm and strong.

Rune rubbed his short beard and motioned towards the hallway. “We need to leave.”

She stood to her feet, but refused to move from her corner. “Where is he, Rune? Where is my father?” Her emerald eyes sparkled with tears.

Rune shrugged. “Dead. There was no other way.”

She stood, staring at him for what felt like an eternity. Then a slight grin cracked across the corner of her mouth, and she nodded before finally leaving the room. “Good.”

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The receptionist at the front desk wore a long white lab coat, but Brittany doubted she was a doctor. Or a nurse. Or in any way related to the medical field. She carried a bit of weight in her stomach and cheeks, and she smelled like wildflower-scented soap. Her scent was much like that of Brittany’s grandmother, and it made Brittany want to throw up.

Just show me where to sign.

The clipboard rose over the counter like a starship and landed in front of Brittany’s trembling hands. She noticed her black nail polish had chipped on several fingers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had painted them. She also realized she hadn’t yet taken off Dorian’s commitment ring. The thin strand of twine had frayed at various points, and it made her skin itch. But for some reason, it was too much work to slide the ring off her finger and lock it away in a keepsake box.

The receptionist waited a moment until she had Brittany’s direct eye contact, and then she pointed to the clipboard, her voice barely a whisper. “Sign at the bottom.”

“Right,” Brittany mumbled. She picked up the attached pen – a black Bic pitted with teeth marks – and searched the single sheet of paper for the signature line. “Just one page?” she asked. Her voice seemed shrill, whiny.

Just sign the fucking document, she scolded herself.

When the receptionist didn’t reply to her question, Brittany looked up to find the portly woman staring at her with eyes full of something bordering sorrow and sympathy.

“Is it just this one form?” Brittany repeated. “Aren’t there more forms I need to fill out?”

The receptionist slowly shook her head. “No. Just the one.”

“Weird,” Brittany mumbled. Her eyes scanned the document, which was nothing more than a release of her rights to the clinic, and her permission for them to perform the procedure and do what they desired with the unwanted fetus.

She tapped the point of the pen to the signature line.

The clipboard was swiftly taken from her.

Brittany jerked her head up and saw the receptionist with her unsigned document. “I just have to make sure this is the only form,” the woman said.

“Well, let me sign that one and I-“

The receptionist waved her away as if she were an annoying gnat. “No, no. See,” she said, pointing to the top corner of the form. “See, this is last year’s release form. Let me get the most current one.”

Brittany huffed as the woman trudged off to a back room.

Brittany turned and looked out on the waiting room. Three young girls occupied the small area, each sitting in one of the uncomfortable blue plastic chairs, each reading a magazine or chewing on their nails or texting on their phone.

None of them looked visibly pregnant.

Why would they, you idiot? If the baby was that big, they wouldn’t be getting rid of it.

Of course, she replied to herself. Of course. What would Dorian think of me now? Would he approve of me killing this thing inside of me? This…this reminder?

Dorian isn’t here. Don’t worry about what Dorian would do or say or think. He’s at fault for this, and now he’s dead.

But his faith…

His faith is what got him killed.

The door to the hallway opened, and a tall, slender man in a white lab coat entered the waiting room. He went immediately to Brittany. His eyes, she noticed, were entrenched in dark shadows, and his lips formed a thin line, thin like a razor.

He extended a bony hand. She took it and shook gently, afraid she might shatter his fragile form. He pulled his hand away and shoved both into the pockets of his lab coat. “You are here to reclaim your life?”

Brittany nodded, absently rubbing the twine ring wrapped around her finger like a noose. Dorian’s death was senseless. Pointless. She wanted her relationship with him to mean the same.

He smiled. “Come with me, young one. We’ll make sure to take good care of you.”

Brittany nodded, following him through the doorway. The scent of alcohol hit her smack in the face. The smell reminded her of the times she visited her mother in the hospital, when she was fighting cancer. A battle she had lost.

The walls of the hallway were decorated with ugly paintings of flowers. Pink and yellow and grotesque brown. The carpet was covered in stains, most of them dark blotches that resembled something Brittany didn’t want to think about. She passed rooms with closed doors, and she could hear muffled screams and sobs from the other side.

The man stopped at the end of the hallway and extended his spindly arm, motioning for her to step into the room to his left. “This way, sweet one.”

She stood at the doorway of the dark room, something in her chest warring with her mind. The only sound she could hear was her heartbeat.

A cold touch pressed into her shoulder and prompted her to cross the threshold. She step/stumbled into the room. The light went on, revealing the interior of the small room. A chair took up the middle of the space. Instruments surrounded the dark throne, dingy and tainted in rust. Or blood. The scent of alcohol had fled, and in its place lingered the scent of copper.

Brittany turned toward the door, but the door was shut, and the slender man in the white lab coat stood before her, his long arms hanging from his side like lengths of meat in a deli. “Do not fear,” the man said. “You take a seat, you close your eyes. Then, you can go on living your life without a care in the world.” He laughed. “Well, that’s not entirely true. The concerns you will face will be the ones normal teenage girls will undoubtedly need to suffer: boyfriends, acne, periods.”

Brittany’s ears picked up on a slithering sound at the end of the word ‘periods’. Her stomach ached.

He pointed to the chair behind her. “Take a seat.”

Brittany closed her eyes, took a deep breath.

Get in the chair.

She shook her head. I can’t.

Get in that chair. It’s the only way you can move on. To be free.

She heard a clanging sound and opened her eyes to find the doctor examining the rusted instruments. “We will be gentle, my darling girl.”

She glanced at the closed door. She hadn’t signed any papers. She hadn’t given anyone any of her rights. She took three steps to the doorknob and turned it. It wouldn’t budge.

“Where are you going?” the doctor asked. “Come sit. I promise to be kind.”

Brittany tried the handle again. Again, it refused to budge. “I’m ready to go,” she managed to say through shaky breaths.

“We’re not done.”

“I am.”

She heard footsteps. The man’s shadow loomed over her, but she was too afraid to turn around. His hands came down atop her shoulders, and for a moment, she felt as if he might push her into the ground, toward the center of the planet. “We’re not done.”

Her breath came out like air from a slashed tire. He pulled her into the room, and she could do nothing to stop him. His essence seemed to numb her body, to paralyze her senses. She couldn’t smell blood or alcohol anymore. The lighting in the room dimmed, and she thought she fell blind, but realized her eyelids were simply too heavy to open.

He placed her in the chair. She knew that much by the angle in which he bent her. The sound of the clanging instruments echoed through the room, and she suddenly felt warm tears running down her cheeks.

She wished Dorian were here.

He is.

Warm air slithered into her ear. “This may hurt a bit. Just a bit.”

“I…”

“Shhhh.”

“I don’t want to do this.”

“Now, now, young one. Of course you do. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life raising this – thing – that is currently inside of you? It is a remnant of something that no longer exists. It harbors your horrible memories, and it will do nothing but cause you pain the rest of your life.”

But her memories weren’t horrible. Dorian may have died, but did that mean every trace of him needed to die as well?

“Please, stop,” she whispered through trembling lips, her eyes fighting to open, to provide her release from this darkness.

“No. You’re not thinking right. Let your mind go at ease, and let me do what I do best.”

“Stop.” She felt something rise in her throat. Thinking it was bile, she opened her mouth wide, but nothing came out. “Stop!” she screamed. “Stop it!”

A force pressed her against the chair, pinning her into the dark throne. “You will be silent!” the old man shouted, but his voice had grown deeper.

Brittany fought to open her eyes, fought to move her hands, but the pressure was too great. Too powerful.

Dorian. He was dead. His sweet, precious face was gone. The car accident. The youth trip. He believed in his faith, in His God, and where had it gotten him? Because of her, he had broken his vows of celibacy. Because of her, she had new life springing forth inside of her, life he would not be around to help her raise.

She felt her hands go to her abdomen.

Life.

“Help me, Lord.” The words left her lips through a meek voice. She felt the pressure against her struggling body increase, but she fought back with every fiber of her being, remembering the faith she and Dorian had shared before that one fateful night of conception. “Help me, Lord!” The words came out stronger, louder. She wasn’t sure she would be saved. They had sinned, her and Dorian. They had broken a promise, not only to each other, but to God.

“Silence that tongue, or it will be the next thing we take from you.”

“Lord!” she screamed, her heart reaching out for rescue.

Light broke through her vision. She struggled to open her eyes, one lid at a time, as if they had been coated in thick honey that was suddenly thinning out. The room came into view. The doctor was on the floor at the base of the chair, choking. His dark eyes rolled up into his head, and the whites left behind were bloodshot and vile as they looked upon her.

The receptionist stood over the doctor, her arm extended toward him, fist clenched.

How is she doing that?

Moments later, the doctor stopped moving. His face blank, he lay on the floor, lifeless. A great weight left the room, as if an insidious evil had just been purged.

The receptionist opened her fist and let out a long breath. Brittany slid out of the chair, stumbling forward as the receptionist caught her. “It’s okay, honey.”

“Who-“

“No questions. Not yet. We need to get out of here first.”

Brittany nodded.

They entered the hallway and took it toward the waiting room. Brittany stumbled into the walls as the receptionist tried to steer her. They reached the door to the waiting room, and the receptionist opened it. The three females who had been reading magazines, texting, and biting their nails, were gone. All that remained were ugly brown plastic chairs.

Brittany’s heart ached for those girls.

She found her balance and rushed side-by-side with the receptionist out the front doors. The weather outside was cold and dreary. Storm clouds filled the sky, suffocating the sunlight she had basked in before entering the clinic.

The receptionist led her to a beat up blue Toyota Corolla, unlocked the passenger door, and slid Brittany into the front seat. The receptionist took to the driver’s side and turned the key in the ignition, but the car wouldn’t start.

Brittany felt her heart hammering in her chest. “What just happened? What happened?!”

The receptionist turned the key again, but the engine refused to turn over.

Brittany looked out the window, at the clinic. The building’s brown paint was chipping off, and the sign, which read “Life Purge Abortion Clinic”, tilted at a hazardous angle. When she arrived, the building was blue, and the sign was straight and had read “Helping Hands Prenatal Clinic”.

White lab coats filled the entryway of the building as a crowd of doctors and clinic personnel filed out of the building. One of the doctors pointed toward the Toyota Corolla, and the others started marching in the direction of the vehicle.

The receptionist closed her eyes, whispered something incoherent, and then turned the key again. The car started. “Time to leave,” she said as she pulled forward and drove them out to the main street.

“Who are you?” Brittany asked as she clicked her seat belt.

“A friend. Yes, a friend.”

“I don’t know you. Why did you…save me, back there?”

The woman kept her focus on the road as they drove away from the clinic.

“Please. Who are you? Why did you save me? Who was that doctor? What were they-“

“You know what they were doing to you.”

Brittany glanced down at her abdomen. “They were trying to take…”

The woman nodded. “Don’t worry. You’re safe now.”

“Who are you?”

The woman cleared her throat, adjusted the rear-view mirror, and then let out a short breath. “Sharon. Dorian’s mother.”

“You’re not Dorian’s mother.”

“I’m Dorian’s…I’m his birth mother.”