Owen Thomas – författare

That last, mad dash for freedom isn''t on a schedule; you either recognize opportunity when it climbs aboard the bus, or you don''t.  

The odd bend in Harlan Buck''s left leg turned out to be an odd blessing. It had caught him a lot of grief growing up in the hot summers and bitter winters of Summit County - a lot of funny looks from the girls who would have nothing else to do with him and a lot of beatings from the boys - but it had also kept him out of the war, so he figures maybe it had saved his life. While his contemporaries are off driving Adolf out of Europe, Harlan Buck is driving a bus along the dusty highways and byways of Summit County, shuttling passengers hither and yon, looking at them in the mirror and imagining details about their better lives. He has a burlap sack for all his belongings that he keeps up front and every last nickel to his name in the back, stuffed away inside the foam of a seat cushion next to a half-full bottle of whiskey. At night, long after the Summit County buses have stopped running and Harlan has turned in his key, he slips through an opening in the back fence of the bus lot, climbing back aboard the bus that is his home. He makes a bed out of the back bench and gazes out the window at the summer stars, burning cold through the hot night air. He drinks and reads his mystery novels and waits for sleep to take him. 

But sleep is increasingly a stranger for Harlan. The darkness that gathers around his makeshift home is now somehow heavier, potentized by feelings that a period of waiting has come to a sudden end. He can''t stop worrying about Christopher Dupree, working out at the prison on his birthday. And then there is the electricity of the events surrounding Mr. Gray and Mr. Black, two brutish passengers he doesn''t know from Adam but who, from the moment they had taken a back seat on the Number 6 bus, set the wheels of Harlan Buck''s life in motion, pushing him forward for destinations he can neither predict nor control. 

The Number 6 is a novella. While it is here available for purchase separately, The Number 6 is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled Signs of Passing.

The weather in Quinn''s life is about to change again; maybe this time he can stay out of prison.

Quinn Merriwether sells camera equipment in a shopping mall photography store. Not a great job, but better than what he could expect after spending eighteen months in The Alley for felony larceny. To be clear, Quinn had not stolen anything but a bottle of bourbon. He had never known about the bag full of cash; no one had. And as for the rest of it - the diamond ring and the gun - that had been Roddy P''s idea of a going-away party; a way to get rid of Quinn and curry favor with King Itch all in one fell swoop. 

It might have all turned out differently had the perky meteorologist on the local news known the difference between sun and sleet. But she hadn''t, and everything for Quinn had careened suddenly sideways, dumping him into a prison cell; the same prison his father, Clement, had once patrolled when Quinn was just a kid, back when his mom and sister were still alive. He and Clement had been spared the car accident, but it had changed everything anyway, tilting Quinn''s life like a greased slide stretching from his relatively normal adolescence, through a couple of dead-end jobs and right into an orange jumpsuit. 

So. Eighteen months to think about things. Eighteen months of listening to the weather girl, as Quinn has come to think of her, chirping down at him from a television screen bolted to the corner of the prison common area, secretly judging him for trusting her. Eighteen months to hate her for not knowing the difference between sun and sleet. 

Funny then, after his release, as Quinn is testing the camera equipment he has been miraculously entrusted to sell, watching the mall shoppers through the lens, when who but the weather girl strolls obliviously into the viewfinder. 

She doesn''t sense the change coming. Neither of them does. Weather is like that.

Precipitation Likely, Chance of Sun ("The Might and the Will") is a novella. While it is here available for purchase separately, it is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled Signs of Passing.

There is nothing honest about photography. Truth is but a trick of the light. A reckoning is coming to Sol Ridge Vineyards. And her name is Jac.

Conrad Kurtz manages the Sol Ridge Winery, a sprawling, dew-slickened vineyard nestled into the Santa Cruz mountains. Conrad is a businessman and a glorified caretaker of sorts, keeping the grapes growing and the wine flowing until his stepdaughter, Iris, lawfully inherits her late mother''s bequest and takes control, something for which the shy, nearly invisible Iris has no aptitude or interest. 

In the meantime, Conrad is king, ruling the land and his handful of subjects - Iris; his chief picker, Señor; Señor''s adorable school-aged daughter, Celia; a small seasonal Mexican workforce; three dogs; and four horses - with the iron-fisted authority and presumption of any monarch. He brooks no dissent, expecting obedience if not gratitude from anyone in his path. Just ask the dogs. Just ask Iris. 

Visits to Sol Ridge are by appointment only. Conrad carefully picks his visitors, who tend to be young and blonde. Jac, a photographer scouting locations for a coffee-table book on California vineyards, fits that bill perfectly. Her efforts to visit Sol Ridge for a photoshoot have been persistent but fruitless until Conrad finally gets a good look at her. After that, there really is little question for Conrad but to invite her up to the ridge and hope she spends the night. True, Conrad is perplexed and even a little unnerved by Jac''s dark glasses. She never takes them off, even as the rainclouds coalesce above the ridge and begin to release their burden. He tells himself that Jac is simply self-conscious of the wine stain birthmark, pooling like blood in the hollow just beneath her left eye. But this eccentricity is no deterrent. Conrad''s agenda for Jac is plain to everyone. Iris. Señor. Celia. Even to Jac. Conrad never stops long enough to consider whether Jac has an agenda of her own.

There is history in the soil. There is wisdom in the vine. The light is a wizard of misdirection. It has agendas of its own, casting shadows as it illuminates. Jac sprinkles water from a bottle over a cluster of grapes and takes a photo. Conrad thinks that counts as cheating. She tosses him a smile.

"There is nothing honest about photography."

Photophobia is a novella. While it is available for purchase separately, Photophobia is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled Signs of Passing.

Zoe has new job. Managing a superhero with random powers is hard enough. Decoding the secret structure of existence is going to be a real challenge.

Zoe Alexakis is starting a new job. Working in the movie business has always been a dream. She should feel lucky. She does feel lucky. She does. Really.

Working as an assistant to the script coordinator for a Hollywood production company may not be what she imagined (it is, in fact, a long way from what she had imagined) but she is at least in the front door, rubbing shoulders with actors and directors. Zoe''s first project is to guard against script discrepancies on a blockbuster movie production about a new superhero: Random Man. It is a difficult assignment, for Random Man is not your typical superhero: an insurance agent who, having accidentally grabbed the business end of a molecular randomizer, now finds himself with a collection of superpowers he can neither predict nor control. One minute he can fly, the next minute he cannot. Super strength, speed, vision, the works, all randomly available until, suddenly, they are not available. How then does one go about enforcing consistency in a script about a man who epitomizes inconsistency and unpredictability on a heroic scale? 

And yet, the Random Man script is the least of Zoe''s problems. Far more pressing is her need to decode the secret structure of existence. Her options include luck, destiny, self-determination, divinity and, yes, randomness, all battling it out for dominance on Zoe''s bus commute to and from the studio. Who''s to say, really, although there are plenty of datapoints in Zoe''s life with some persuasive influence, including her dead twin sister; a seemingly immortal cat named Lucky; Dr. Ayaan Patel, the Indian self-help guru bubbling advice through her earbuds; Charley, the stylish force-of-nature that is her mentor-employer; the Schrödinger''s box of Zoe''s Los Angeles apartment; the potbellied, potato-faced convenience store clerk selling lottery tickets; Paul, the actor cast in the role of Random Man who seems to have lost control of his eyebrows; and Dexter, the thief holding Zoe''s stolen luggage for the ransom of information about her day.

So, yes, Zoe feels lucky. But is she? That, actually, is the problem.

Random Man is a novella. While it is available for purchase separately, Random Man is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled This is the Dream.

A little envy, a little hopelessness, and all manner of things become possible. Things that should have stayed unthinkable.  Robbery is the least of them.

Times are as tough as they have ever been for Danny. The Baby Cloud crib factory in Tionesta Pennsylvania has closed, leaving him with a pink slip and no way to pay the mortgage. Worse, after eighteen months of trying to hold the marriage together, Danny''s wife, Janice, has finally left him to live with her sister. She''s taken their dog, Juni, and there is no sign of them ever coming back. 

The trouble started long before Danny lost his job. The trouble started with the neighbors, Matt and Amanda, comfortably ensconced in the large, expensive home tucked back into the trees at the top of the long driveway at the end of the cul-de-sac. Gorgeous, the pair of them - she, an artist and he, the owner of a furniture factory - a study in vital, unassuming sensuality wrapped in, for all appearances, a perfect relationship. The chemistry within the foursome had been satisfyingly close; supportive and intimate, fueled by innumerable dinner gatherings that Danny and Janis had taken to calling the Matt-and-Mandy Happy Hour. And then one evening, having decamped from dinner into the sueded, overstuffed cushions of Matt''s den, Danny had observed Matt lay his hand on Amanda''s naked ankle. Such a casual gesture. It should have meant nothing. But that''s when Danny had felt everything inside his chest slip a little. That''s when it all started to change.

Now Danny sits at a bar eating a burger on the brink of ruin, his life in shambles. Up on the corner television, George Clooney is sipping an espresso. Janice loved George Clooney. She loved George Clooney, apparently, more than she loved Danny. The comparison between the two men in that moment could not have been harsher, leaving Danny angry and amenable to especially bad ideas about the next few steps to take in his miserable life.  

Cue Ross, an old acquaintance of Danny''s who works as the manager of the Foley''s Got-It-All General Store up in Franklin, right near the US-62 almost to Oil City. Ross still has a job. He also has a made-to-order bad idea and impeccable timing.

Hating George Clooney is a novella. While it is available for purchase separately, Hating George Clooney is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled This is the Dream.

Cali Watts is struggling to come of age in a life saturated with indifference. Stealing almost worthless things isn''t helping. Neither is dreaming of the dead.

"Take me where you took her," I said. "That''s where I want to go."

Her parents named her Calico Watts, a name she hates as much as she does the rest of her life. Growing up a child of divorce in Weldon Spring, Missouri has left Cali numb, without identity or purpose, sapped of any ambition for the future and even for the one thing all teenagers crave: freedom.

Cali''s mother, Karen, is not lacking ambition, but it''s all toxic. An HR specialist during working hours, Karen devotes nearly every other waking hour to the level-climbing and recruit-mongering requirements of a beauty products pyramid scheme called Dream Life, carpet-bombing Cali''s existence with unhelpful aphorisms like If you can dream it, you can be it and Share the dream to live the dream.

Cali''s father, a municipal accountant by trade, has, post-divorce, found a way to devalue freedom by devolving into a pothead who pays more attention to his secret grow operation and his sex life than his withering career and his own children. Cali''s younger brother, Benji, has weathered the divorce in a cloud of obliviousness, spending his days in his room wearing a headset and gripping a controller, killing zombies and other threats to civilized society in shockingly realistic, first-person-shooter video games. 

Cali''s only school friend, Stacey, has discovered that her own physical attributes are good for some attention from others more worthy than Cali, including a couple of cool girls previously thought to be out of reach and, significantly, the Howell High School science teacher. 

Feeling for Cali, the act of caring about anything, has become a challenge. Stealing nearly worthless things from the Ninety-Nine Cent Store has not helped. Fear of failing out of school no longer holds the same current. Alienation and estrangement have become weather. 

Only two people have made enough of an impression on Cali to punch through the numbness that is slowing overtaking her existence. The first is Taylor Boss, easily the most attractive, well-liked student of Howell High. Taylor, whose popularity among the student body and the faculty had confined her to wholly unrelatable orbits, never had any relevance or interest to Cali.  At least, not until Taylor was found naked and shot to death in an old duck shack along the banks of the Mississippi. In death, Cali has found a strange and unsettling kinship with Taylor, encountering her night after night in bizarre, portentous dreams. 

The second person in Cali''s life who has managed to move the needle is Damien Alvarez, the Howell High safety officer who has a habit of catching Cali''s eye every time they pass each other in the crowded hall. It may or may not be flirting, Damien''s looks are too subtle to tell, but it is certainly attention. Damien sees her. That matters. It also matters that Damien was the last person to see Taylor Boss alive. 

This is the Dream is a novella. While it is available for purchase separately, This is the Dream is also included as the title novella in a larger work of short fiction of the same name - This is the Dream - by Owen Thomas.

Palm trees, flip-flops, and shameless regression. It''s going to be an interesting Christmas.

The Nelson family is spending Christmas in Hawaii, a dubious proposition for Peter and his twelve-year old sister, Katie.

Katie still believes in Santa Clause. Embarrassing, but true. Having finally come to grips with the tragic "extinction" of unicorns and the senseless exile of the Tooth Fairy, little Katie now clings to Santa with a tenacity so grim and so combative that her older brother and her parents can only exchange worried looks across the dinner table. Someone should talk to her about the real world.

But no one quite seems to have the courage.

The idea of running off to Hawaii just as Santa is loading up his sleigh is met with more than just a little resistance. After all, how is it reasonable to expect that the red-suited fat man will know to look for them in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? What will he think when he parks his reindeer atop their dark and empty home?

Peter, fifteen, has his own concerns, less about Santa than the sacrifice of holiday tradition. What about the snow and stringing the house with Christmas lights? What about the first-person-shooter zombie video games at the neighbors'' Christmas Eve party? More importantly, how can a Christmas away from home not have a devastating impact on the volume of Christmas-morning loot?

Not that the Nelson kids have any real say in the matter. The tickets have been purchased. The bags have been packed. Peter will have to console himself with the belief that his friend Cody is right: that the Islands are teeming with topless women. Katie, meanwhile, will just have to trust that Santa can adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Neither of them is prepared to understand why their father seems to have forgotten his true age, or why their mother is calling him a sex pony, or even why he pushed for the trip to Hawaii in the first place.

In the end, everyone is going to believe what he or she wants to believe about the world.

It''s going to be an interesting Christmas.

Island Santa is a novella. While it is here available for purchase separately, Island Santa is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled This is the Dream.