The Red Fire Engine - Softcover

Jayne Sr., Timothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1449045677 ISBN 13: 9781449045678

Verlag: AuthorHouse, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Death has come for an old man, and he is ready! No more could be asked of his weary mortal being. But Divine Providence decides otherwise and so in his last mortal days a small, lost girl is sent to him. She hands him more time on Earth. His heroic nature has no choice but to accept; and so death takes a seat in a red velvet chair, crosses his leg and patiently waits.

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THE RED FIRE ENGINE

By Timothy Jayne Sr.

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Timothy Jayne Sr.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-4567-8

Chapter One

The Old Man

The small girl's name was Sarah and she sat unobtrusively, very tiny, deep in the back seat of the large comfortable car her father was driving. The fallen leaves of the October evening blew across the road in dried, paralyzed shapes and confused patterns, like frightened mice with legs too small to see. The late evening sky was so deep a blue that the orange streak left by the setting sun mixed it into unnatural colors and patterns blotted by the slow moving clouds. It was a confused sky. Sarah, at the age of thirteen, did not understand why she felt lonely and confused about her thoughts. Perhaps it was the sudden move to Breeze Point - the newness of it all. One might have guessed the coming of womanhood. But it was not these, for this was Sarah's third school, and third town, and as to womanhood, it was way off in the future. The cause of the confusion and loneliness was a mental dimension that was not being nourished. Her body was nourished and her physical needs were well cared for. However her mother, father and teachers, who unlike Sarah did not have this mental dimension, had not the slightest idea how to enter into it, or bring her out of it, or even to bring nourishment to this special part of her mind. Her teachers were busy teaching the practical disciplines of Structure and Form to the normal children, and structure and form were Sarah's greatest source of confusion, a confusion for which she had no name. She had hardened a protective shield to guard her sanity against the blunt assaults of her peers, teachers and parents. The shield was an escape into her imagination. Sarah had finally learned to read in the fifth grade. From that moment on, she became a voracious reader; not fast, but steady. She read constantly, to the point of being forbidden from the library for one month, because the addiction consumed all her attention. Her teachers considered her reading habits impolite. It disrupted even their stubborn efforts to educate her. It was a time of too few teachers, and too many students. Standards relaxed to allow a free flow. Even if the students were not quite educated, they stumbled by while the administrators sighed and looked the other way. So Sarah had made it to the sixth grade. No one had looked out for her. It was too busy a world, too busy a time. Sarah's parents were thirty six years old, and they spoke of what they would do when they retired in twenty years. They could see clearly that the rest of their working days would be the usual monotonous performance of the same tasks. They would speak belligerently about their jobs but, when challenged, they were quick to defend the security, consistency of the paychecks, medical benefits and finally, the greatest goal of all, the retirement pension. The company provided housing, cared for them, and did a majority of their thinking for them. It even gave them a small country club for status. All the great textile company asked in return was that they stand and perform exactly the same task, every minute of every working day, for forty years. For this sacrifice the company fulfilled all their hopes and expectations. It gave them comfort, security, and status, but it did not give them imagination or spirit. In fact true imagination, even seeing such things as the incongruities in patterns of living, or intellectual nuances, (not to mention creativity,) belonged to areas of the mind that they had purposely blinded in order to have commonplace comfort in a world created from store-bought imagination.

Sarah's mind was yet an embryo of an enemy. An enemy to the sameness produced by a happy, unthinking, comfortable society. After all, in a free society, whose right was it to disturb a comfortable way of life? Sarah's mind was a virus to this world of complacency, but it was yet too small to be realized openly. It was just sensed by her teachers, who stamped on it as best they could when they were not powdering their noses. As the gradual reality that their daughter was not to be the center of proud attention, or lacked the popular charisma of the prom beauty, reached her parents Sarah slowly drifted into the back of her parent's mind. They never saw any reason to overcome their inertia, or mental indolence, to explore Sarah's mental facilities. To her parents Sarah had become something like a small, old family dog that made no effort to be noticed. They in turn responded with no attention, beyond regular feedings and lettings out. Sarah was simply there and that was all. Perhaps they would actually have been happier if she had merely been a pet. For after all, they did not see or realize, from the shallow exterior's survey, that there was an inner depth, in her, boiling with imagination, and it was being fed by the great storytellers of the past. She could imitate the ingenuity of the writer's methods for introducing characters. Using devices to hide some elements at the beginning of the story while withholding others, Sarah could allow the suspense to build, before the unexpected events unfolded. She was fascinated with new twists and turns of the plot. Sarah had a small circle of friends who delighted in her stories, especially the scary stories. Poe was her hero, Hamlet her prince, darting out of the madness of darkness with clear precise sanity only to hide in vague confusing shadows once again. Most of her friends had never heard of these authors and characters. Only her friends alone were awed by or even saw this great flame of creativeness, and Sarah would never dare to have shown anyone else for fear of chastisement. In the sixth grade, Sarah could not hold herself back. Her compositions began to disturb her teachers. If they had been clearly written, and directly and quickly readable, she might not have caused so much stir. But Sarah had developed her own punctuation and sentence structure, and at times her handwriting seemed gibberish. To the teachers, she was merely wrong and a sloppy, a fresh brat. Had her teachers taken the time they might have deciphered an interesting and complex study of characters that she had played carefully, with adroit accuracy from those around her.

The mental makeup of her characters often had sinister and murderous motives, cloaked within innocent exteriors. She thought of her characters as her puppets, in a world in which they would bow and scrape, or have gestures of bravado. At times she would pick up a thread of truth about her teacher, and work it into a play of characters. This ability charmed her small group of listeners. Yet to her teachers, this was not normal for a young girl. They conspired to watch gossip and warn the next year's teachers about her. Yet the amazing thing about Sarah's realistic fantasies was that they were not controlled by the subconscious desires of a young girl. She understood this, and her beautiful princes could be vain, with egotism that drove them into quite novel predicaments. Like a sculptor, Sarah fashioned her characters in the round, so that they were multi-faceted-both good and evil as well as complacent and revolutionary, and in that way realistic. She played heavily on tightly fitted contradictions taken from reality by studying carefully the people around her.

Sarah had almost given up writing, because of her inability to communicate in sentence structure form. At times, she wished she could simply write, without mixing up everything. A simple clich composition with cream puff clouds, and motherly mothers, and kind...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: AuthorHouse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1449045677
• ISBN 13: 9781449045678
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 492
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: KreGa Onlinehandel GmbH; 4950000000000; info@krega-onlinehandel.de; ; Birkenweg 31; Brakel; 33034; Deutschland