Fiction sargon press
J.B. In Charge
This is a story about my life when I was a small boy.
In some ways my life then has no resemblance at all to your lives as
children.
In other ways, nothing at all has changed.
When
I was a small boy, life everywhere was a bustle of nations of children.
There were clever children and stupid children, bossy children and bossed
about children, serious children and comic children, children with a
lot of money and children with no money at all.
All grownups lived in a strange country. Their country was so big and its rules so powerful and mysterious that we children just had to make up our own rules how to survive in it.
You now might like to ask me who I am. I am a man who has what grownups call many important responsibilities…
read more: J.B. In Charge
Tom Murphy
I am publishing this memoir as it may throw light for readers upon a past era. That era so vivid to Tom and myself is indeed now another country.
Readers
may be shocked at some of what they read. It has been a voyage for me
too into the inner character and youthful story of my beloved brother.
Tom was an ill man at the time of his writing of his memoir. I pray that readers make allowance for an old disillusioned man's bitterness at the present generation. After the war, Tom worked as a surveyor's chain man for the Ministry of Works until his retirement.
Social workers and commentators may find a professional interest in Tom's story. He exemplifies the cruel fate of citizens who are neither sub-intelligent nor of employable mental alertness. Tom was fortunate that post-war rehabilitation secured him life-long employment. The world today has even less time for the Tom Murphys than even during the depression. The news reports tell us every day of their private tragedies and the consequences…
read more: Tom Murphy
The Three Sons of Euphorion
A novel set in Attica, Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.
The
peasants of Gela were familiar with the stranger and his boy. As they
returned to their huts in the dusk from their hard tilled fields, he
would be often seen with his staff and boy making his trembling peregrination
up the bank of the river Gela. He was an old man in rags and long unkempt
beard.
They noted with the slight surprise given to strangers that his pate
was as bald and shiny as a river stone. Sometimes his boy would grip
his shoulder when he seemed like he might stumble. He was kind to the
boy and that too was noted by the Sicilian peasants.
read more: The Three Sons of Euphorion
Look Back At Regna
This story was written in 1990. It is set in 1975 in Auckland, New Zealand
On
a sultry Summer midday in an Auckland chemical warehouse, a head store
man sniffed the air and narrowed his Viking blue eyes at an intruding
dark eyed waspish spectre.
“Whaddiyawant! ! ! ?”
“I've come for a student job.”
“Pick up that bag from the trailer!”
The spectre smiled mysteriously and picked up the bag and waved it into the air.
“You'll do!”
roared the head
store man with a slight tone of waggishness.
“Start tomorrow at eight thirty!”
read more: Look Back At Regna
Presbyr John Spills The Beans
The
fetid stench of the tanners district of second-century AD Ephesos made
it out-of-bounds for all visitors, except for hurried business visits.
The races of all the Roman Empire rushed in, purchased their wares from
the shops and fled, holding their noses. The tanners, emaciated, oil
and heat-blackened, might condescend to glance at their customers with
vacuous hatred. No one could remember when generations of households
of tanners, their wives, children, and slaves did not exist in Ephesos.
They could be Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Egyptians. No one noticed or cared.
