NOVELLA
The Trial Of Summary James — Chapter Fourteen
A great African nation has risen in North America. But something is… wrong: Chapter 14 of 20 in the novella.
Check out the links at the end of this story under “Notes” for additional chapters.
Chapter Fourteen
Sonata Holmes lives in a comfortable Comanche-style ranch home. Four halls form a square building with a kitchen and living room jutting into its small open-air center.
Each corner of the home consists of a large hexagonal room that encroaches deeply into its adjoining hallway section, extending considerably outward from its natural corner.
She keeps a grill in the open-air square, where she also maintains a small patio garden.
She is sitting in the garden reading some news items on a newspaper roll-up, enjoying the salt air of a quiet gulf evening.
While she’s sipping a cup of English breakfast tea, she hears a buzz. She looks up to see a small black object hovering high overhead. As she stares at it, she reaches for her phone, but the drone buzzes downwards quickly before she can punch in any numbers.
“Don’t be alarmed,” says a voice from the drone. She doesn’t express any alarm at all, presumably because the voice belongs to Trace, who then follows up with, “I just wanted to make sure you are okay.”
“You’re back in business already?”
The voice from the drone says, “Stay safe,” as it spins away.
She stands up from her patio table, shaking her head, smiling a little at the antics of my nerdy, gruff friend.
She walks into her immaculately clean kitchen and prepares a small salad with artichoke and palm hearts, some romaine lettuce, radishes, a bit of lemon, and a cherry wine dressing infused with rosemary.
She carries that back to the patio, sitting down to eat while watching two cardinals argue over a perch on a tree in the center of her home square just as the day is ending with a surprisingly quick dark drop of eventide.
That’s when it happens. Five helmeted men burst into the square with military-grade automatic weapons. Not the kind of weapons you’d find in even the most remote rural part of the country.
The men are dressed in black top to bottom, as if they need to, even though they are obviously here to take out a civilian. Which they do, without as much as one word, without any kind of explanation, without any kind of concern with leaving behind evidence, or even cleaning up the mess.
They riddle Sonata Holmes with at least a hundred bullets, the vibrations of her body nearly dancing in concert with the fusillade moments longer than it should before it crumples to the ground in a nearly unrecognizable, catastrophic heap of riven flesh.
This is what I see.
End of Chapter Fourteen
You can purchase the full novella for 99 cents here:
Table of Contents (links will appear as additional chapters are published daily on Medium):
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20
NOTES
This short novella was unplanned. I wrote it under my legal name way back in 2021. Side note: The pen name Charles Bastille originated after the publisher of MagicLand convinced me my name would not be SEO-friendly — I’m no longer convinced that matters and haven’t decided yet if I should publish additional works under the Bastille pen name.
The novella takes place in an alternative North America that celebrates diversity, avoided genocide, and corrected the mistakes of slavery as a side-effect of a failed Revolutionary War. As such, although no human endeavor can avoid tragic error, it takes place on a much less dystopian continent than our current experience.
The world represented here is much larger than can be conveyed in such a short book. This world is more fully represented in a trilogy called Restive Souls, which begins in the late 18th century. It is still in final edits.
But the main character of this novella, Longman Jones, told me he wasn’t willing to wait for me to finish that novel. Maybe that is in part because he makes no appearance at all in the larger work.
But he is a restive soul, and he needed to get out of my head. So I took a couple weeks off from the main novel way back in 2021, and wrote this, in hopes he’d shut up. I never really promoted it, but I’m starting to now a bit.
If you enjoy this novella, please let your friends know that for 99 cents they can spend a couple hours with Longman in a more egalitarian world than what they may be used to. It will make him very happy if you do.
For updates on the Restive Souls series, visit https://medium.com/restive-souls. Or subscribe to my newsletter fiction here (takes you to a site off the Medium platform).
Consider this short novella a teaser for the broader work. And if enough people like it, I suspect Longman Jones will also make another appearance or three.
Thanks for reading!
This story was written by a human, not by AI or Grammarly GO (More Info).
Copyright © 2020–2023 Charles White
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by: Charles White; cover image licensed from Adobe Stock
Published in the United States of America
