I have been an author for over 15 years, and I’ve noticed a significant change in today’s readership compared to the good old days. With busy schedules sometimes we have trouble finding the time to read. Curling up with a good book, moving through all the wonder and excitement of beautifully crafted descriptive language is something we long for, but work, and other obligations seem to get in the way. It is too daunting. There just isn't enough time in a day. Water cooler talk is mostly about movies and television, so keeping up with some shows to be entertained and stay socially informed also sucks away our time from reading. Dealing with this dilemma myself as an author and as a reader, I started to scour the internet to look for some kind of alternative. A bridge if you may, between television and the written word. Then I found a website that married the two, the type of water cooler talk I was looking for, wordisode.com. They publish serial stories. Short, snappy, episodic pieces that are easy to read, take about five minutes, and it is totally free to its users. I could read them in my email daily. Brilliant. I subscribed to their beta season and loved what I saw. That's why I signed up to their website as an author, uploaded my Wordisode submission to their webpage and decided to write for them. I have a ten episode season coming out in June. Feel free to check them out before, at wordisode.com.

By the way, here is my first episode, just to wet your appetite.

If Truth Be Told

Episode 1:

It’s dark; it’s so dark how could we have come to this? We were just two rabbis and a priest. You might think of it as that old joke. Two rabbis and a priest walk into a bar… but we didn’t walk into a bar. We walked into a nightmare. And now I have awoken, sitting in this pitch dark room, maybe for hours maybe for days, I have no concept of time in here, I can only hear movement outside a door that feels like it was made of iron.

“Professor Cain?” a male voice bellowed from an unknown source.

“Who’s there? I can’t see you, please, I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just trying to help, I was just seeking the truth, we all were.”

My voice was absorbed by the nothingness, an eerie silence stretched for an eternity. Then, as if my ears were playing tricks on me, the voice changed the sound of its timber, profoundly different, but yet recognizably the same.

“Let's start from the beginning Professor Cain. Where did you find the first scroll, and how did you become associated with Rabbi Judah and Father James?”

“Where are they?” I asked. “I will not answer any of your questions until I know they are alright.”

There was a chuckle for a split second. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to hear it, but my mind picked it up. And then another silence.

“They are both with you, beside you, in the same space.”

I was so confused, it was dark, pitch black, a deep black, I couldn’t see; my ears were sharp, but I couldn't hear anything other than that one voice. What kind of mind games were they playing? But at that very moment, I felt something. Someone had grabbed and taken hold of my right hand. It was a rough hand, like from a man accustomed to manual labor. I knew that Father James was originally a carpenter by trade before he took up the monastery, but I had never held his hand before. I quickly recalled the details of his physique in my head. A tall slender man with a goatee, but his most pronounced feature was of course his hands. They were large, calloused, and strong enough to bend a steel pipe, which he became famous for. The New York Times called him “The Man of Steel” when he risked his life to seal off a gas leak in a children's foster home, where so many had become unconscious and unable to get to safety.

“Father James is that you?”

There was no response, but the squeeze of my hand told me all I needed to know. If Father James is here, can I also assume that Rabbi Judah is beside me? I reached out with my left hand, and sure enough another hand was there. How in the hell are they orchestrating this? I was sure that nobody was there before. I squeezed the hand I had grabbed, just like Father James had squeezed mine. It was Rabbi Judah. I had held his hand before. He was a short delicate man with long slender fingers. I had prayed together with him many times, watched those fingers trace the bold block letters of our faith. We belonged to the same Jewish temple and our interest in the Kabbalah had joined us together in study. In fact, it was that study, and a chance discovery, that brought us to ultimately end up in this situation.

“Professor Cain. You have what you want. Demands are done. Now we need answers.”

* * * * *

The bell sounded just as I was finishing my final thought, one year ago today. I paced in my classroom at the University, looking into the faces of the next generation. Eyes wide, eager, hungry to discover a small sense of enlightenment enveloped in each breath that I expelled. They are so naive, to believe such a thing possible. “...and it is that very dichotomy that changed our understanding of the universe. A black hole may not be merely a space devoid of light and sound. We need to look at it as a connection to Branes theory, different dimensional planes that hold the marvels of existence. The black hole might be the gateway to these planes. Even if we found this to be true, the challenge is knowing how to access that space and time.”

A crash pulled my attention. Each student’s head whipped towards the classroom door as Rabbi Judah showed up unannounced. He was sweating, beyond excited, in fact, I remember him being almost euphoric…

“Professor Cain, I found it! It exists; this will change everything, all beliefs, all governments, and every human being on this planet. It will change the very fabric of mankind."