Created on 27th September 2022

Updated on 6th October 2022

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A book of short stories by Jim Byrne

Wounded hearts wandering hopelessly…

Five short stories about love, sex, passion and parting

Introduction

If you like short stories, you’ll love my new collection of five short stories about love, sex, passion and parting.

It has taken me years of reading, writing and questing for love to arrive at this point where I can “blow your mind” with my dramatic storytelling. And mostly I do this for their therapeutic effect; though I also love the idea that you will be well entertained by these stories.

But first: Let me tell you a story.

I’d been living inside of some very de-powering stories for nineteen years before I was woken up by reading Catch 22, by Joseph Heller.

Most of the stories in my head, up to that point, had come from Celtic mythology or Catholic mysticism; or from the “common sense” of largely uneducated parents; apart from those I had read in a book called Hazard and Heroism, which promoted heroic idealism and macho self-sacrifice. And I’d also read about Robin Hood, and the Lone Ranger, each of which is just more of the heroic idealism of men as servants of historical needs.

The core story of Catch 22, about the difficult posting of Yossarian to a US bomber squadron in Italy, during the Second World War, woke me up to something; but I wasn’t clear what that ‘something’ was.  Perhaps it was simply that it was okay to live from ordinary, flawed humanity. That I did not have to become a towering hero. That I could figure out who I was “meant to be”, and then to live according to that model.

And that is how it is with stories. We live inside of stories we got from our parents and teachers, right at the start of our lives. And we use those stories, outside of our awareness, as our map of the world. Many of those stories are helpful or benign; but many are false and misleading, and they cause us to crash into all kinds of invisible walls, as we struggle to find or create a viable road through this very difficult world.

The second story that woke me up was Dostoyevsky’s story of The Idiot. This time it was clearer what I was learning. I was in a painful, failing marriage, and I was just like Prince Myshkin, a suffering soul trying to find the Right Path through a complicated world.

I also benefitted from reading Ken Kesey’s story titled One Few Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, right at the end of my first marriage; and it did help me to understand abusive power dynamics in a way that had escaped my attention up to that point.

Over many years, I have read a broad range of short story collections; each of which added a little more clarity to my felt understanding of what it is to be a human in an imperfect world.  These included, Dubliners by James Joyce; Selected Short Stories, by Guy de Maupassant; Welcome to the Monkey House, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; Complete Short Stories, by Graham Greene; and many others.

But it took years to find a path with heart; to find a way to heal from my childhood wounds; and to learn how to relate healthily to women. I am still trying to learn how to relate at all to men!

Now I want to pass on some of my learning, indirectly, to you. I want to tell you five stories. I have no idea which aspects of your current stock of stories will be destabilized or restructured as a result of reading my five stories.  But I do know this:  You will not be the same person at the end of this book as you were at the beginning.

We are story-tellers in a sea of stories, and here come five big waves which will hopefully wash you overboard, and onwards towards more enjoyable shores.

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The first story, entitled A Woman in Transit, begins like this:

“Nothing moves on the silent, moonlit platform, where no train is due till morn. Nothing, that is, apart from the young woman in the cocktail dress and patently ludicrous stiletto heeled party shoes. Red shoes; blue dress; blonde hair; and her bare arms. Biting September coldness shudders through her goose-pimpled skin. Autumn has arrived early.

The only other body on the platform is motionless: lying face down on the stone slabs. A small red stream is still running from the back of his head, glinting gold-like in the bright moonlight.

A little while ago he was full of cocky bravado; proudly announcing that, although his wife could not be got rid of right now, he would, given time, find a way out of his pointless marriage.

But the young woman in blue and red was not easily mollified.

“I’m five months pregnant, Michael”, she shouts. “Five months gone.”

She turns suddenly and takes two steps away from him. Then she turns back and raises her voice even more, to cross the gap between them:”

…End of extract.

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To see this book online, at an Amazon outlet near you, please click one of the following links. (There may be a couple of days’ delay at some outlets)

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The second story is called The End of the Affair, and it begins like this:

“Daniel did not notice any pain in his heart as the 747 lifted off the runway at Don Mueang International Airport, in Bangkok. This was mostly down to Bart’s foresight, in laying on a bottle of wine, two tranquillizers and a hash, opium and grass joint.

That was a lot of mind-altering stuff to have with a 7.00am breakfast of traditional Thai food, prepared by Natcha, who was Bart and Juliet’s maid.

Of course, the bottle of wine was shared between Bart, Juliet and Daniel. The tranquillizers, two each, were mind numbing and sleep inducing. And the joint filled his head with cotton wool, and silly images of Disney cartoons.

He was leaving Juliet, and he knew at some level that he would miss her like an arm dragged off from the socket by a combine harvester.

And he was leaving her, his lover, in the presence of her husband. No private space for a heartfelt farewell. No personal space for loving words to be spoken. Just the pretence that these were just friends, who would be parted from each other for a little while.

But right now, in his lonely plane seat, he was comfortably numb. Fortunately, he had a whole row of three seats to himself, so nobody could witness his miserable face and slumped body language.

Bart, of course, knew about the affair, and that it was effectively over; and so he had tried very hard to manage the three-way emotional mess with clinical detachment, while they had their final meal together. (“What would the prisoner like for his final meal?”)”

…End of extract.

To see this book online, at an Amazon outlet near you, please click one of the following links. (There may be a couple of days’ delay in appearing on some Amazon outlets).

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The third story – titled Blue Boy Karma – begins like this:

“Vasha Popov screwed his little face up, like a well-squeezed dishcloth. He stared into the big, mottled mirror, looking for the echo of his facial contortions. And there it was. This was him. This blue face, with the sad calf eyes and the downturned mouth. And there in the apparent ugliness of his blue face was the evidence, it seemed, of why Mamu did not let him touch her, or speak to her, or get close to her.

His blue hair did not help, regimented as it was by Mamu’s daily brushing with her harsh scrubbing brush, with which she would whack him if he did not stand still while she vigorously brushed out the tangles.

When he relaxed his little blue face, it did not seem quite so ugly, but the dark blue hair and the mid-blue skin were an unbecoming combination.

Vasha had not always been blue. At birth he was as pink and shiny as a well-oiled piglet. The more Mamu abused him, or neglected him, or seemed to abandon him, the bluer he became; and she didn’t notice the small, incremental changes!”

…End of extract.

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To see this book online, at an Amazon outlet near you, please click one of the following links. (There may be a couple of days’ delay in appearing on some Amazon outlets).

Amazon.com, US+		Amazon UK + Ireland
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The fourth story, The Battle of Crumble-Baan, starts like this:

“Long, long ago, about 64 generations back – in the season of the Crow – about two full moons before the Festival of Aine (the Moon Goddess) – Doneal McFlynn was walking on the hillside outside the village of Crumble-Baan.  He was wearing a plain green kilt and a sheepskin vest.  His long grey hair was tied in a knot on top of his long, slender head; and his feet were bare.

Evening was closing in, and darkness was descending fast.

Looking down on the village, he could just see the outline of the three concentric circles of round houses in which the entire population lived their communal life.

Though the light was poor, he could still make out the modest campfire of the two boys who were keeping the Night Watch on the opposite hillside.  Suddenly, without warning, a great flare of flame arose in his field of vision, right next to the boys’ campfire.  In his entire lifetime he had never seen this vision, though he had spent decades expecting to see it one day.  The alarm signal.  Invaders have been spotted approaching us.

As quickly as he could, Doneal made his way down to the village, where the men and boys had congregated in the open space at the centre of the inner circle of roundhouses.  They had a huge assortment of wooden clubs, wooden shields, whips, big stones and slingshots, a few axes, and bronze bars with which to beat their opponents.

The two watching boys had arrived sweating and shouting.  They had seen the signal from the next village, at the top of the valley.  So the enemy must be coming from the sea, as they had always expected they would.”

…End of extract.

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To see this book online, at an Amazon outlet near you, please click one of the following links. (There may be a couple of days’ delay in appearing on some Amazon outlets).

Amazon.com, US+		Amazon UK + Ireland
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The fifth and final story is this: Lovesick in Blackpool.

This is the story of a young man’s first sex-love relationship. And it begins like this:

“It would be years before I realized just how much I was carrying the wounds of childhood at the core of my self-identity. At that time, I had not read anything about childhood abuse and its negative impact:

‘A child who is the victim of parental abuse will normally take something of the evil of the abuser into him/her-self, thereby developing a damaged personal identity. The sense of normalized victimhood becomes a part of the person’s adult identity, and leaves them open to renewed abuse by others’.

Paddy-Brennan-ji, The Roots of all Suffering…

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I carried my wounds to England, and back to Ireland.  Then to Blackpool, with my corrupt little brother, Tandy, in tow.  My mother had begged me to take him away ….”

…End of extract.

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I hope you enjoy these five stories, and that they change your life for the better!

Best wishes,

Jim Byrne, Hebden Bridge, September 27th 2022

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To see this book online, at an Amazon outlet near you, please click one of the following links. (There may be a couple of days’ delay in appearing on some Amazon outlets).

Amazon.com, US+		Amazon UK + Ireland
Amazon Spain		Amazon Italy
Amazon Germany		Amazon Netherlands
Amazon Japan		Amazon Brazil
Amazon Canada		Amazon Mexico
Amazon Australia		Amazon India
Buying from Singapore		Flycrates

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