Sick Curiosity E-Book

Angel Rupert

• Herausgeber: Bentockiz
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The tangible belied the surreal, there was a physicality to their waking dream. What’s more, they had each other, wherever this dream took them, they were going together. He offered several recommendations for local souvenir shops and warnings about two places to definitely avoid.

Leseprobe

Title Page

Sick Curiosity

Without Consolation

Angel Rupert

Sick Curiosity / 10th of series: Without Consolation / By Angel Rupert

Published 2023 by Bentockiz

e-book Imprint: Uniochlors

e-book Registration: Stockholm, Sweden

e-book ISBN: 9789198847192

e-book editing: Athens, Greece

Cover Images created via AI art generators

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Introduction

Through books we come into contact with everything important that has happened in the past, analyzing also current events and putting our thoughts together to predict the future. The book is a window to the world, acquiring valuable knowledge and sparking our vivid imagination. It is a means of entertainment and is generally seen as a best friend, or as a slave that carries together all valuable information for us. The book is a friend who stays together without demands, a friend you call upon at every moment and abandon when you want.

It accompanies us in the hours of boredom and loneliness, while at the same time it entertains us. In general, a book does not ask anything from us, while it waits patiently on a dusty shelf to give us its information, to get us out of dead ends and to travel us to magical worlds.

This may be the travel mission of our books. Abstract narration, weird or unconscious thoughts difficult to be understood, but always genuine and full of life experiences, these are stories of life that can’t be overlooked easily.

This may be the start of something amazing.

Chapter One

Zach stood with the others and—though braced by his mom on one side and Justin on the other, the balance of his family strewn out in either direction along their pew, more family (grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins) and friends and church members to the front and behind, the sanctuary nearly full—he felt very much alone. He was not isolated by the moment or the occasion—the start of his Uncle Jacob’s funeral at Trinity Lutheran Church, the church he’d been raised in. Nor was he set apart by his scarce contact with all these familiar faces that had once been close—some dear, some life-shaping and defining—but seemed now virtual strangers, inhabitants of another time and space.

What isolated him was a certainty that God was speaking directly to him—not in the familiar cadence of their long-standing pastor (almost a second father) or the by-rote responses of the gathered assembly but in sounds in his head that almost became intelligible words but not quite, remained chords and tones and whispered harmonies that gradually merged into visions, there in his eyes though his eyes were open on the bright sanctuary, late autumn sun pressing through the stained glass, visions that like the sounds almost but not quite assumed recognizable shapes, remained blurred but no less compelling for their lack of definition, all the more insistent for that condition, the sights and sounds seeming to call him, summon him—to see, to hear, to understand.

But understand what? Death? His uncle—his mom’s eldest sibling, hale and hearty the last time he’d seen him—struck down at fifty-seven by some rare cancer nobody had ever heard of let alone knew how to treat? Understand time? Permanent loss? Grief? What was the message being delivered in this warm and lofty space that he’d watched emerge from this hilltop and grow into the world his sixth-grade year, a massive God-plant thrusting toward the sky like the inverted prow of a ship, cleaving the brittle country air and shouldering it to either side, east and west, till the plant was firmly rooted, the inverted prow sailing forth on its sea of sky, visible for miles, tens of miles across the countryside north, and in one last gesture of victory or folly thrust a lean white finger toward the heavens and capped it with a cross—a modest intersection of horizontal and vertical, miniscule in comparison to its supporting superstructure, requiring careful attention if viewed from the near valley, requiring imagination or trust or knowledge of its existence to be seen from farther away than that: what message here, in this sacred space, in the blurred sounds only he heard, the blurred sights only he saw?

The pastor sat. The congregation sat.

Michael, Jacob’s eldest child, made his way to the lectern, a single sheet of yellow lined paper quivering in his right hand. He set the paper down and grabbed the lectern’s edges with both hands, leaned hard against its support, his knuckles white, the skin on the back of his hands taut. He gazed downward for many seconds that seemed an eternity, sniffled a couple times, shook his head slowly from side to side as if in denial or blank refusal. Then he raised his eyes and fixed his stare on his grandparents, Jacob’s parents, seated stiff-backed and unmoving in the front pew. And Michael spoke without once breaking that riveted gaze.