FEBRUARY WITH ORANGES -- INSTEAD OF ICE

I can remember February in Michigan on the Upper Peninsula where you had to go due south for forty miles to hit the Canadian border. I can still see that frozen shore line of the great lake. I can also remember driving past the prison at Marquette. The huge, gray, inclined walls sucked the sun’s feeble heat from the air. A very cruel but not unusual punishment for its inhabitants.
I still recall looking out the window in upstate New York seeing the steam rise off of Lake Champlain when the air temperature dropped to twenty degrees and the lake was still a chilly sixty degrees.
Despite the fact that some say cold does not radiate, there were days on the flight line there when something made its way through my insulated boots and stole all the heat from my ankles down and left an ache behind.
One of my memories of February is hitting a patch of ice while driving, doing a one-eighty, and ending up in a ditch facing the way from which I had come.

Do I miss all that?
Take a look at my face and make a guess.

Blue Glory, Book One of Walter Golden's Seamount Series Available on all Ebook Readers

THE NEW AND EXCITING WORLD OF EBOOKS IS UPON US:

Blue Glory, a fiction, epic fantasy by Walter J Golden is now an Ebook and can be purchased for the Amazon KINDLE, Barnes & Noble NOOK, Smashwords STANZA, SONY, KOBO, all Apple devices, and many other Ebook readers.

You can download a sample of several chapters to help you decide if you wish to buy the book.

If you would like to read my award winning short story, A GLOBAL WARNING, please scroll to the end of this blog where you can start with chapter one, and read posts backwards.

You will find a few other Walter Golden posts along the way.

Please email me if you have any ebook or writing questions: walter.golden@att.net

Chapter 4 -- A GLOBAL WARNING final chapter -- First place winning Short Story

The sound woke Mehdi. No longer befuddled by my talents, he realized what had happened and wailed louder than the imam on the minaret. He grabbed KC's arm and pointed at me. “Get him back in the bottle.”
KC looked puzzled . . . almost sober.
Mehdi shook his arm and pointed at me. “That’s a genie. He’s evil. They’re all evil. They love to destroy things.”
KC heard the word evil, took a good, hard look at me and realized I resembled the pictures he had seen in Sunday school. Suddenly sober, he backed toward the door, all the while staring at my wings and claws, occasionally craning his neck trying to see if I had a tail hidden in my red pantaloons. “Okay, keep your shirt on, storekeeper,” he said. “I agree, it’s time to quit. I’ve one wish left. Genie,” he ordered, “fix the bottle and get inside.”
I smiled and flipped him the one finger salute that seems to have replaced the old heart, lips, and mind greeting. “Sorry,” I said. “No bottle, no wishes. Tough luck, but I don’t make the rules.”
I picked up a small piece of the bottle, no bigger than a finger nail. As long as even a sliver of glass was missing, the bottle and the spell couldn’t be fixed. It was against the rules for me to destroy even this small a piece, so I’d hide it. There was a rock at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that would do. Giving them another one finger salutation, I strode out the door.

The rest is history. No one found any weapons of mass destruction. Reputations were destroyed. A President was made to look foolish, a Secretary of Defense was left foaming at the mouth. Old friends became enemies and the powers of the world realigned.
Kinda nice, huh?
On the personal level, Bob was now a fumbling klutz. His commanding officer refused to trust him with anything that could explode. Mehdi, after his father disowned him and stopped paying his tuition, found a new career as a New York cab driver.
But KC was unfinished business; he had come out ahead, and we don’t let that happen. There are all sorts of rules against it, and all sorts of very, very unpleasant penalties for the genie stupid enough to let it happen.
I knew what I had to do, but I hadn’t decided whom to use. Should I report to Army Intelligence that a ranger sergeant had deposited a half million untraceable dollars in his account the day before the invasion? Or should I tell the IRS he hadn’t paid taxes on it?
As I sipped my beer and listened to KC talk, I made up my mind. It would be Army intelligence. I wouldn’t involve the IRS. After all, I’m a malicious spirit, not a truly evil one, even if the difference is sometimes hard to tell.
I stood up to go, flipped a penny onto the bar and changed it to gold as it arched through the air. KC would find it, realize I had been here, and maybe sweat a little. I‘d like to watch, but I’d be busy. Things were beginning to warm up.
So far my job at the National Weather Service has been a real ball. After all, weather is nothing but air, water, and fire, and I’ve played games with them for centuries. I’m still keeping the drought areas dry, and the sliding hillsides wet, but it isn’t much of a challenge. The snow is gone from Florida now, and the ice from Georgia, and it’s too soon for another blizzard. But it has been an outstanding year, one for the record books. Hurricane season is rapidly coming to an end, and it’s time to get ready for the tornadoes. I have some new tricks I want to try.
After that I think I’ll work with Wall Street. I could have a real effect there.
But first the tornadoes. Thinking of them, I strode out the door, whistling a song from The Wizard of OZ. I stopped a moment on the threshold, took a deep breath of freedom and smiled as another tray of glasses hit the floor.

A GLOBAL WARNING PART 3 (continued)

Sunday, January 2, 2011Part 3 A GLOBAL WARNING A waltergolden SHORT
Continued. . .
The front door crashed open and the hot desert wind blew straight in, tearing the rollihg smoke to tatters. Just before it disappeared, I materialized from the bottle, spread my leather wings until they brushed the ceiling, extended razor edged claws, bent down, and grinned at KC with teeth filed to sharp points.
Some of us just love to make an entrance.
And, we don't all look like Barbara Eden.
I put Mehdi to sleep, but left Bob alone. He was standing there, dazed. He would come in handy later.
"What the hell are you?" KC gasped, almost, but not quite, sobering up.
I bowed and made that Arabic heart-lips-and-mind salute they love so well in the movies. "I am your servant, Effendi. What are your wishes?"
He stared up at me, greed instantly replacing fear.
"I get three wishes, don't I?" he demanded, more than asked.
"Of course, Oh-Wise-Master." I knew what was coming next.
"I want half a million dollars. Not in gold, but in my bank account. And I want it untraceable.
To KC and Bob I hardly flickered, but it took a while. Still, time is the simplest of things. Over the last few decades I had paid a lot of attention to Hollywood, but not much to commerce, so I had some work to do. I studied the banking system and was amazed at how vulnerable it was. Not much better than the old guarded vaults and locked strong boxes. I filed that knowledge away for future reference. I was glad to see humans hadn't gotten smarter over the years. Next I manipulated the data, found the money, put it in KC's account, erased my tracks, crashed a few computers, just for the hell of it, and arrived back at the shop just as I left.
"It is done, Master," I said, all the while thinking KC was a piker. Usually my masters want millions, and they want it all in a large, hernia-producing gold pile.
KC licked his lips. Okay, now I need to live to spend it. He waved his arm north. "Go to Iraq; find all Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and get rid of them.?
That didn't take long.
I did the flicker bit anyway and arrived back at the shop as Bob was examining the bottle. He looked up as I materialized and said, "Hey KC, I hear our next stop's North Korea. Have SharpTooth get rid of their bombs and maybe we won't have to go."
Once, long ago, back when it had been known as the Hermit Kingdom, I had been to Korea. I had no desire to return. The mountains are steep and the weather is abominable--and that wasn't the only thing abominable. It's not the Himalayas, but if you look hard enough you can find Yetis there. Though why anyone would want to look hard enough to find them is beyond me. They are huge, stupid creatures, bigger than I am--and stronger--and they smell. They're also immune to my powers, but luckily for me, just the slightest bit slower. I had no desire to see if they had grown faster over the years.
It was time for my exit. I used one of my tricks and Bob's fingers and palms suddenly extruded a silicone liquid not normally found in humans--though I understand that now days it is sometimes discovered in the female of the species.
The long neck of the bottle went sliding through Bob's hands, hit the stone floor and broke into a thousand pieces with a lovely, bell-like sound that filled the shop and rang my long-awaited note of freedom.

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