‘Life’, by Stevie Turner – 18 short stories about significant life events

We have all at some point or other gone through a significant life event, be it a love affair or marriage, parenthood, divorce, bereavement, a life-threatening illness, or a change of job.  I decided earlier this year to write several short stories,  originally intending them to be about birth, marriage and death.  However, other important life event subjects came to mind, and I ended up with 18 stories which I put together in a collection entitled Life. 

Life was published last week as an e-book:  http://bookShow.me/B01F0WG2BS

Life will be free to download from June 18th – June 22nd 2016.

Here are the first few paragraphs of ‘For All Time’, one of the stories in the collection:

FOR ALL TIME

COPYRIGHT STEVIE TURNER 2016

Fog had started drifting in from across the valley as Jack Richards eased the bus into the yard and turned off the engine.  The late shifts didn’t sit well with his digestive system, and his stomach rumbled angrily.  He pushed open the little payment counter to the left of his seat and stood up, emitting a loud yawn.

            His last job for the night was to ensure that nobody had left any possessions on the bus.  Strong floodlights in the yard picked out row upon row of empty seats until he checked at the back.  There on the last row lay a small envelope, unsealed and partly spilling its contents onto the floor.  Jack picked up the envelope and peered inside, noticing two photographs of an obviously overweight Siamese cat with a yellow collar around its neck.  He reached down and picked up another two photos; one of the same cat, and another which he assumed was possibly the animal’s owner.

            He angled the photo of the owner under the glare of a security floodlight for a better view.  He did not remember seeing her on the bus at all or taking her fare.  The woman looked to be somewhere in her late thirties or early forties, quite pretty with dark Italian or Spanish-type features.  The corners of her mouth were upturned, and Jack found himself smiling back at her image.  He gathered all the photos together and placed them back in the envelope, intending to turn them in to the girls running the lost property office the next morning.

***

By the time his next shift came around, Jack had glanced at the woman’s picture several more times, and felt as though he knew her.  He had decided that he would prefer to hand the photos to her personally the very next time she stepped onto the bus, and so kept them near to him in the inside pocket of his work’s blazer and found himself looking at them quite often.  In no time he had fashioned a life for her in his head, telling himself that her name was Maria Hernandez and that she had been unlucky in love, thus the reason for possessing so many photos of cats.  He imagined her living alone and unloved in a small flat with just her cat for company; her flat situated just around the corner from his own. He knew that she would be so eternally grateful for the safe return of the pictures that she would invite him in for coffee and a piece of cake.  Jack, just as lonely, would accept her invitation with alacrity, reasoning that fate had brought them together and that only fate alone would know what might then transpire between the two of them.

            From that moment on he began to scrutinise the faces of every passenger who boarded his bus, but to his chagrin Maria did not reappear.  After two months had elapsed, Jack masked his disappointment, told himself not to be so stupid, and handed the photos in to the girls in the lost property office……

Find out what happens to Jack by downloading ‘Life’….it’s not what you think!