WRITING:

A WRITING SAMPLE...
I’ve written a lot of articles and short stories. Below is an example of a piece of short fiction.

And there was a hollow buzzing. There was a buzzing that grew stronger…

Jonathan woke up and a heavy ray of orange sun smacked through the red curtained window of the very modest second floor “hotel” suite. He felt his wife Katie laying across his arm which was tingling and numb. It didn’t bother him. It had been so long since he had last lain with anyone that his pleasure was enormous. He had somehow gotten used to being without the warm reassurance of waking up with his wife laying beside him in the mornings, since he had spent a year on assignment in Hong Kong.

A sudden pang of worry struck his consciousness but was relieved as he looked over to the little cot where his bleary vision refocused upon the little lump that must be his daughter. It was all alright — things were great. Finally, his family, vacation.

When he awoke again Katie was in her negligee and futzing with the little plastic coffee machine. A few moments later she turned to look at him, sympathetically. He looked up at her through squinted eyes. He had been thinking about their reuniting for so long, that for a moment he felt that she might not still love him — together again after a year and they hadn’t yet slept together — but then he thought of his daughter and his self-assurance rebounded.

“Good morning,” He said.

She smiled at him.

“Good morning,” She said.

He lay there for a moment until he felt sure she wouldn’t be able to produce any coffee and then he arose. It was early and somehow his daughter was still sleeping but then she awoke and he turned on the television, automatically. Jonathan went over to his wife to put an arm around her waist but instead hesitated and only placed a hand, he felt somewhat awkwardly, on her lower back.

“It’s okay.” He said.

“No coffee.” She said.

“It’s okay.”

“No, I’ll go downstairs.”

Within moments she had on a white robe and was out of the door. His daughter was watching the television. It wasn’t in English.

“Honeybaby, it’s time to get ready.”

His daughter looked at him. She had a pout on.

***

When his wife returned she had two styrofoam cups of steaming black coffee. The door to the water closet was open and his daughter was in the bath he had drawn. The Wi-Fi seemed to be down.

“I think I need a new SIM card. I’m not getting service.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’re on vacation. Or at least I am, so you can pretend to be too.”

She handed him the coffee.

“Right, thanks.” He said.

She went back to futzing with the machine. He had almost forgot how much she was coffee-reliant. It annoyed him. He tried to load his emails. Eventually she managed to brew a pot and drank it while he was still busy with his first cup. He wasn’t sure what to say to her. They had had dinner the night before at what was considered one of the best restaurants in Asia and the presentation of the cuisine had taken up most of the conversation. Now that they were in the countryside he didn’t want to talk about work and yet he didn’t know what else to say. It was easy to talk on Facetime — mostly she just held up the baby and he joked around. Now they were here. He helped his daughter out of the bath with a towel while his wife got dressed. He watched her put on makeup.

“We’re going to the jungle,” He said.

“Yes,” She said. “To the ruins.”

“Yes,” He said. “Are you excited?”

“I’m excited to see you,” She said.

***

It was quite a drive and then a trek to the site but the ruins were beautiful. The broken and smiling stone guardians of the wat looked on as they shot Insta-stories of their daughter in every conceivable location. The day was blistering.

Their guide was thin, bubbly, and genuine. She wore a tan sun visor, a colorful striped polo shirt, and a canvas skirt that ended above her knees. Her shiny black hair hung just below her shoulders and she smiled with bright teeth.

“Is there anywhere we could get some coffee?” His wife asked.

The guide shook her head and frowned.

“No sorry. Not here.”

“Tea?” He suggested.

***

That night after they had put their daughter to bed, Jonathan sat down on the edge of their mattress and started to massage Katie’s feet, gradually working his hands up to her lower thighs.

“No.” She said.

He froze.

“No?” He whispered.

“I’m off the pill. We can’t afford for me to be out of the office again right now. Don’t we want to be able to afford to buy?”

“What if I get some condoms, downstairs?”

He was moving away from her, toward the door.

“Not tonight. Jon. I’ll have my period in a few days. We can wait. It’s better then.”

He looked at her and tried to conceal his hurt but could hardly make out her expression in the darkness of the room.

“Do you want to come out with me for a drink?” He said.

“You know I don’t drink.”

“I know, but for a seltzer?”

“Someone has to watch her. You go. It’s fine.”

“Okay, just for one, you know. Thanks.”

He slipped on his blue linen blazer and walked past the empty hotel bar. He went out to the street and suddenly realized somewhere deep within his psyche he was thinking about, actually hoping, to encounter their tour guide. He was looking for the tour guide and thinking about how maybe he and Katie had had their daughter too young. But he was thirty-seven now and his wife was thirty-six and he would probably never have a son. It was a difficult birth for them and Katie had said she didn’t want to go through it again. How could he blame her? He thought about the ancestry test he had sent in before Hong Kong. He had no brothers and it seemed he would be the last of his patriarchal line, after millenia, what had it all been for? His own father had instilled him with pride in his family name. Centuries of successful men and then him. He was successful too, but to what end? And somewhere in the back of his mind he had always imagined raising a son. There had always been the vision of a future-self fishing at the cabin, maybe retiring early to start a craft brewing company, someday leaving it to his sons to continue it on…

Now they had enough money for a downpayment on a decent apartment in the city or a house out of town. Katie alone made enough so that they didn’t really both need to work, and yet it didn’t seem conscionable to make his wife be the sole-earner, and anyway she defined herself by her career. But he also knew that on some level he would lose her respect if he quit. And then he couldn’t afford their Mercedes. It had been garaged for the year he had been overseas, he had almost forgotten its existence. And then what would he do with himself? After all, he liked advertising, it was what he always wanted to do. And he could travel, though traveling on business now made him feel so lonely. He imagined himself brewing with his daughter. He thought of her fishing, her pouting face.

There was no one out on the street. He kept walking down the road, looking for some sign of activity — a bar or even a cafe, anything. At least he could get some exercise, tire himself out so that he might be able to fall right asleep.

Now he was getting far from the hotel but finally he saw a light. He was no longer in the center of the town. The stark white light shone from a barn or some structure of the kind. It had no windows but he saw the light from the side-entrance. It was on a road with no other buildings except a few other nondescript warehouses, which lay behind fencing, further down the way. But he heard activity, possibly even music — and as he got closer — he couldn’t make out the words — though he could detect the din of distinctly modern music and American voices like his own. Finally, the expat bar, or at least a hostel where he could talk to someone, or at least look at someone, apart from his wife.

As Jonathan got close to the door he felt himself automatically creeping, tiptoeing quietly even. Preternaturally he felt as if he should for the moment proceed undetected.

It was immaculately strange, what he heard, for he was uncertain of which song it was precisely, and he knew that it could be a very old Britney Spears song, but he knew it wasn’t something that would be playing at any local establishment these days, even if the rest of the world tended to lag behind the West, it didn’t lag nearly to this degree. He paused. It was certainly from the late-90’s. And yet it could well be that this was the ironic choice of some self-deprecating karaoke-performer. That was possible. That calmed his nerves. It echoed strangely in the large building.

As he crossed the threshold of the door he saw that the lights inside were extraordinarily bright. The walls were all white and the ground was concrete. It looked like a well-maintained and modern slaughterhouse. Turning to his right he saw that through a doorway, two green and decaying gutted pig carcasses lay on a table and beside these was the figure of what appeared to be a naked man draped in entrails, with splotches of dried blood and excrement his only other covering. The man’s eyes were held open in a vice-contraption and his arms were bound by pink foam straps to the metal chair. There was a bucket of spilled brown water and a pile of wet towels strewn about the vomit-ridden floor. It was without a doubt a Britney Spears song. The naked man looked pleadingly into Jonathan’s eyes, though the hanging black intestines obscured much of his dirty face. The withered figure then shuddered in the chair and shook convulsively. Yes the man was certainly alive!

Jonathan ran for the door and then paused for a moment when a short pale brunette woman in a grey business suit, holding an aluminium briefcase in her arms, appeared at the end of the far corridor. She saw him, he knew. He started again. He was out of the door. He was running. The music stopped or he was too far to hear it. He was respirating heavily. He heard a commotion behind him. His brain told him not to go back toward the hotel, to heroically make certain that whoever was involved here would not follow him back to his wife and child. He left the paved road for a dark alley that was half mud and half stone. His loafers smacked the watery dirt and he felt a familiar pain in his knees and ankles but continued running all the same. Flashlights lit up from the street behind him. Voices echoed in pursuit. He launched himself into the jungle.

***

The next morning he awoke beneath a dense canopy. The light shone through in abbreviated rays. He could hear a running stream. He could hear the cawing of the macaque monkey. Wild birds screeched and cicadas sounded in alien chorus. And there was a hollow buzzing. There was a buzzing that grew stronger. His body ached. His clothes were dirty. He sat up. It sounded like a helicopter blade, and yet it was fainter. It was a bumble bee; it was a large insect; it was a persistent scream. Despite warm humidity his hair now stood on-end. His eyes tried quickly to process the thick vegetation around him. The buzzing whirl grew louder, it must be a swarm! And then he saw it: a large insect sped toward him — it moved faster than any bird he had ever seen!! Then it paused for a moment before him, ten feet away, its central camera swept across him, scanning his facial features against its social media database. He spun around and lunged over a stream as it shot toward him, and as he tripped in the muck, the machine burst into flames against a thick tree with a short cracking explosion like a heavy caliber bullet!

It fell to the ground. He turned back, and with relief, he saw that it was no longer functioning. Flame wrapped the location of impact and then dissipated. It was a micro-drone.

***

The buzzing however did not cease as he ran through the jungle. When he noticed the torn armhole, he threw off his wet blazer. He ran and ran and ran more and eventually it became evident that he was nearing a village.

As Jonathan saw that he now had cell service, missed text messages from his wife flooded his phone and it appeared that his app for his personal email inbox had dozens more unread messages than he recalled from the night before. Instinctively, his fingers checked his emails, temporarily avoiding his wife’s furious and panicked text messages. Dozens of emails appeared to have been sent to himself from his own address and dated to that morning. He opened one of them: slowly, large pixels loaded into smaller pixels became more defined pixels became hardcore child pornography. He felt his heart near-bursting. He hit the trash can button. Another email opened and again it seemed he had sent himself more and more horrific child pornography. There were dozens of emails. Some of them were somehow back-dated and still unread. More appeared as he deleted them. He gripped his chest and spun against the wall of a small wooden house. Still the buzzing did not cease.

He started again. As he was running he began to see people walking the streets. He tried to call his wife but the call failed. He typed a text message:

“I AM COMING I NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU NOW”

A red exclamation mark appeared instantly.

“HELP”

The messages failed to send.

The sun was directly overhead. He opened his map application and saw he was in a village miles away from the hotel. There looked to be more jungle between himself and his hotel. He had to find his wife and daughter. He set a pin. He had to take them and leave and get far away.

***

Now he was in the jungle again and he was running still. He did not know how he had energy. For a while the buzzing had stopped but now it was there again. He did not know for how long the buzzing had been there. It was above him. Jonathan stopped for a moment, barely able to breathe, and then leaning an arm against a tree, he lifted one of his feet from a loafer to peel off one of the socks from his soaking feet. He took off the other and then shoved his tired and bloated feet back into his muddy loafers. There seemed to be no end to the blistering on them. For some reason he shoved the wet socks into his pocket. Then he continued on, now more slowly, and he felt as if he were nearing the limits of his capacity. He checked his phone again, trying not to trip as he moved. It seemed that he was halfway back through the jungle — halfway to his hotel. There was no definition to the map, but he still had the pin, and it could only be a few more miles now. He was jogging, he couldn’t go any faster — the pain in his knees was sharp and grating. He was jogging and limping. He was midway through a clearing, and before he knew it he was up to his thighs in water — he was thinking of leeches when suddenly he saw what had been buzzing so loudly.

A large military-grade combat drone hovered above him. Jonathan saw his childhood friend biting his shoulder, he saw his college graduation, he saw the first time he had made love to his wife, he saw his daughter’s newborn face, he saw the missile speeding directly toward him. He could hear nothing. He was in the water. It shot up around him. Fire and debris. He looked up at the drone with squinted eyes, on his back in the swamp water. He turned to hold his breath and tried to swim as low to the ground as he could. When he came up for air, a chain of bullets smacked the water and sped toward him. Jonathan lifted his legs higher than he had ever lifted them as he sloshed speedily over the reeds.

He again reached the thick covering jungle foliage. He looked at his right hand. He then looked at his left hand — it was severed in half — none of his fingers remained — only the thumb. He nearly fainted and then pulled himself together. Now taking a sock from his pocket, he tried to fasten it as a kind of tourniquet to stop the bleeding. He continued running and shoved the bloody hand-stump into the side of his shirt and winced as he ran. The buzzing was louder. He did not want to turn and then he did and he saw a black shape jutting from side to side like an insect, sometimes dodging vines and branches, other times snapping through them. It was soaring death. He turned again toward his destination. A long limbed monkey with white fur and a black face stood before him in seeming terror. It screamed at him and he swung around it, dodging the ape like a wide receiver. It lashed out with a claw but missed and moments later he could hear as it was obliterated by high-caliber turret fire. He did not dare look back, he only ran, now down a slope, now with his hands before him awkwardly, then he saw a loafer fly out from under him and he tumbled into a shallow ravine and his head slammed into a rock.

***

He stood again, thinking of his daughter — and he ran for her. He saw his wife before him as he ran. His mind could conjure nothing else. She smiled at him and somehow she held him as he ran. As he ran he searched desperately with his single hand to find his phone in his pockets but it did not seem to be with him any longer. Yet the buzzing and the horrible crashing of trees remained. Every so often a bullet whizzed by him and tore a hole in a trunk or split the branch of a tree. Shards and splinters and clods of debris smacked him and he tried to cover himself with his arms as he ran. It seemed now to be playing with him, to be leading him, and yet his wife was also there now to direct him, to take him back to their hotel. She was smiling. Jonathan loved her, her blonde hair. He was never sure before but he knew now for the first time that she loved him, loved him completely and he felt a quiet peace welling up and overflowing from deep within himself.

***

His bloodsoaked feet smeared the pavement of the town as he arrived there that evening. He knew the drone was there too. It was a black speck in the sky. It never stopped looking at him.

He crept down dirty alleys covered with straw and lept over chicken coops and climbed a razor-tipped fence to escape a barking dog. He knew they would be coming for him. He couldn’t fathom how they were not waiting for him as he entered town. Every time he saw or heard an approaching villager he would turn another corner to escape them. He tried to randomize his movements as he scuttled toward the center of town, toward his hotel.

They must know his destination. They must have had the pinpoint from his phone. He realized finally that he would only be bounding into their trap, and nevertheless, he kept going. Katie was there, she would be waiting. He would kiss his daughter again. He would explain and everything would be alright. Katie would explain too. Everything would be okay when he saw her. He didn’t know or see anything, everyone would understand that there was a misunderstanding. He could finally feel the relentless throbbing pain from his blood-stump hand and he wasn’t sure that he could now bear it. Jonathan felt dizzy and he tried to continue picturing his wife’s face but it wasn’t there anymore. She seemed like a shadow and he could hear the trucks and bicycles and the yells from the vendors setting up in the marketplace. He was stumbling forward down an alley with a perpetual horrid grimace. He couldn’t feel his heart. He crawled into a dog kennel.

***

When he awoke it was pitch black but his heart leapt when he detected the beam of a flashlight scanning the room. Dogs were barking relentlessly around him and must have been for hours but he could only now hear them. A fair-skinned man wearing a dark suit and a spotted tie appeared before Jonathan, holding a large flashlight. The man looked surprised to see him but his expression turned to wrath as he swung the heavy metal flashlight. Jonathan lunged and took the blow in the shoulder instead of the head.

“Stop please!” He groaned.

The man swung the flashlight again and knocked him in the teeth. Jonathan slumped down. His mouth filled with blood. He let the blood fill his mouth. He remembered when he knocked a tooth out in kindergarten and how they had him hold the blood in his mouth without swallowing for what seemed like an hour. The man in the suit said something short into a radio receiver and then knelt to test his pulse.

At that moment, Jonathan spun his head toward the shocked man and spit a full cup of blood at the man’s face and then viciously shoved his fingers into the man’s eyes as the man squealed and squealed until he ceased to make noise. The howling dogs roared deafeningly.

He found the man’s phone and unlocked it with the lifeless corpse-thumb. The map application showed him where he was. A call was coming in. Jonathan dropped the phone and turned the man over and found a holstered snub-nosed revolver. He knew they would locate the body using the phone’s GPS very soon. He shoved the gun in his pocket and left the kennel.

***

Jonathan walked down a quiet street with his hands in his trouser pockets to conceal both his bloody hand and the pistol, yet the side of his shirt and left trouser leg were soaked red. He hoped the night would now mask his bloodstained clothes. He again tried to picture his wife’s face and saw only her dark countenance from the other night in the hotel room. She looked at him and said, “No.”

An old piece of news that his subconscious had long-buried now resurfaced. He remembered that a drone had once killed a citizen of the United States, somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It had exploded the man and his son. But they were terrorists — he was in advertising. Still, he found himself turning on his street, away from the hotel and back down the same route that had lead him to that terrible barn.

***

The barn was still open but now it was completely empty and the lights were out. There was no trace of anything having been there. He stumbled out onto the road in a faint stupor. He saw the drone again, hovering, now illuminated by the moon. He marched toward the warehouse complex further down the road. The drone started firing again. The bullets tore up the road behind him and then ripped a hole in the wall of the warehouse compound. Jonathan ducked through the wall and saw that several people were now watching him. One of them held out their arms toward him as if to fire. He pulled out his pistol and shot the woman. The others scattered. He couldn’t see her dead face. The darkness was nearly complete.

Two guards in body armor opened up with fully automatic rifle fire from around a warehouse corner. He ducked into a nearby door and slammed it behind him. A team of persons in green fatigues sat at or stood beside computer stations, surrounded by monitor screens. There was a joystick at each terminal. Jonathan unloaded his pistol on them and then sat down at a terminal. He was in control of the drone.

***

Jonathan had played many video games in his youth but had never touched them after attending university. Before that time he had been quite adept at them. He immediately knew how to operate the system and within moments the drone that had been hovering above the warehouse compound was under his control. Using both hands to operate the device he aimed the crosshairs on the screen over the two soldiers who were preparing to breach the door. He felt a large crash and heard the bang as he watched the two dark figures vanish once the smoke cleared on his monitor display. He felt a dying hand’s vice-grip fasten around his ankle but he felt it was of no consequence. On the screen he saw that other persons were running around the compound, evidently trying to make sense of the situation, and they fell pronate as he passed the blazing crosshairs over them until finally, all was still.

***

When he next awoke he saw that he had been strapped to a chair with bands of pink foam wrapped over him. He looked down at his left hand. It was properly wrapped in bandages and gauze. The lights were bright and two men in black BDUs entered the room and were followed by a short brunette in a grey business suit. Jonathan felt fully conscious now that he could not move. The men set down two water buckets and fresh towels. A steel briefcase clanged on the steel counter which would be easy to clean. His wife was there now beside him holding his shoulders. Or he felt it was his mother. Her countenance was frozen in benevolent serenity. It would be alright so long as she was there.