“David Kubicek deals with the most profound of emotions, betrayal in a small community, and does so wonderfully.” -  Lincoln Journal Star,1988, reviewing “Ball of Fire.”

The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories contains 14 tales ranging from the commonplace to the bizarre, including:

“Ball of Fire” – Jill Tanner’s UFO sighting makes her a laughingstock in this small farming community—until everyone starts having close encounters of the weird kind.

“What’s Wrong with Being A Nurse?” – Many children want to be police officers, firefighters, doctors, or nurses when they grow up. Why does Chris’s seven-year-old daughter Suzy want to be a human sacrifice?

“A Friend of the Family” – In a desolate future where doctors have been replaced by Healers who practice primitive treatments like bleeding, one medical man risks his freedom to help a member of a Healer’s family.

“The Moaning Rocks” - Is the old legend about death coming to town just a story? George Winterholm is about to find out.

Following each story is the author’s commentary on how it came to be written.

Available as an e-book from:   Amazon    Barnes & Noble   Smashwords

And as a paperback from:   Amazon      Barnes & Noble

EXCERPT

TWO COFFEES

He looked up, startled. He was a few years older than she, maybe thirty-one or thirty-two. He sat in a corner booth in the rear of the small café.

“What?” he asked.

The fingers of both his hands curved loosely around a half empty cup of coffee and met behind it. Across the table from him was another cup of coffee, a full cup.

“You looked…well…I’m alone, too, and…I wondered if you’d like some company.”

He glanced around as if not knowing what to do, as if searching for help.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Sure, okay.”

He moved awkwardly to get up, jostling the table and causing it to creak. But she had already slid in opposite him.

“I’m Jeanne.”

“Bill.”

“I work at Mason’s Department Store.”

“I sell insurance.”

An uncomfortable silence. Bill watched the waitress serving a young couple at a table near the door. They were the only other customers in the coffee shop.

“You can have the coffee,” Bill said.

“Thanks,” she said and took a sip to wet the inside of her mouth.

The coffee was very black, very strong. Already it was growing cold.

“I don’t often do this.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“I was brought up that way. A girl never approaches a guy, Mom always told me. Nice girls don’t, anyway.”

“Then why’d you come over?”

She shrugged, looked down at her cup, and continued demurely.

“I saw you alone. I was in with a girlfriend the other day…”

“I know. I remember you. It may not seem like I notice much sitting here staring at the table, but I do.”

“It was my first time here. We came in just to get out of the storm. She said you come in every afternoon and that…”

Her face burning, she stared hard at her hands on the tabletop. Something clanked in the kitchen. The air smelled faintly of hamburger.

“She told you I come in every day at this time, and the waitress brings me two coffees and gives me one and sets the other there where you’re sitting. She told you that I drink mine then exchange cups and drink the other.”

There was a cold knot in Jeanne’s stomach. She took a quick gulp of coffee.

“She told you I was crazy, didn’t she?”

“No. No, she didn’t.”

“Yes. People who sit by themselves in seedy cafés and pretend that they’re with someone are crazy. Isn’t that what she told you?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“All right, yes. That’s what she said.”

He settled back in his seat. It was a long time before he spoke.

“My wife died last year.”

“I’m sorry.”

She wanted to touch his hand but was afraid of what he might think.

“We came here often,” he said, a glazed, far-off look in his eyes.

He sighed tremulously and continued as if talking to himself.

“We’d tell each other what we did during the day, talk about our feelings. In the whole world, at that particular moment, no one else existed except us two.”

“You miss her, don’t you?” Jeanne said.

He nodded, his eyes moist.

“We met here. This place was very special. When I have two coffees now…It’s as if she’s not really gone. Y’know?”

Outside, it was snowing again. The bell over the door jangled, and a man came in stomping snow from his hiking boots. A cold breeze touched Jeanne, and she shivered.

“She had asthma,” he said. “One day when I was at work, she had a real bad spell, and there was no one to call for help.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that. You don’t know what it’s like to be alone again after being part of someone. While I was married, I cut myself off from other people. She was all I had then; her memory is all I have now.”

A burst of laughter from the young couple by the door. The man who had come in was eating a bowl of chili and reading a newspaper at the counter.

“I don’t need your sympathy,” he said, glaring at her. “Who asked you to come over and butt into my business?”

“I was in a bus station once,” she said softly, her voice faltering, her eyes studying the tabletop, the scarred wood and the cup and saucer with a little coffee sloshed into it. “And I had a strange thought. As I watched all those people scurrying around, getting onto buses and getting off of buses, browsing in the gift shop, buying tickets, exchanging pleasantries that were just politeness, that didn’t mean anything—I realized that I was like them, that I’d built this stone wall of ritual around me, that I acted in ways that I’d been told were ‘proper’ and ‘correct,’ in ways people expected me to act, and if I did something unexpected everyone would be terribly shocked. It was very lonely living inside a stone fortress, and I wanted to break out. Can you understand that?”

He sat staring at her.

“Is it wrong to reach out?” she asked.

He drew a shaky breath, ran fingers through his hair, straightened up in his seat, glanced away, then back at her. A weak smile trembled on his lips.

“They’ve got great chili here,” he said.

“That’s what my girlfriend says.”

While they were waiting for their chili, the waitress refilled their coffee cups. Outside, the snow had stopped, and the sun was struggling to come out again.

 *****

 “Two Coffees” is the result of a goal I’d set for myself—to write a short short story, complete in 1,000 words or fewer (this story is about 900). I wrote it for the challenge. This length is the most difficult length to write without resorting to a surprise, or “trick,” ending.

The idea came when a friend and I stopped in at Godfather’s Pizza. She pointed to a table not far from where we were sitting and told me about the guy she and some of her friends had seen sitting there a few nights before. The dude had ordered four glasses of beer, set one in front of himself and arranged the remaining three in front of the other seats. He then proceeded to hold a stimulating conversation with his three invisible buddies.

The story intrigued me, and over the succeeding weeks (maybe months) I mulled it over, trying to come up with a reason for his behavior which would make him seem a bit less crazy. Apparently, I succeeded because  the first place I sent it (a local publication for singles, called The Single Life) accepted it. The editor told me she was deeply moved by the story. A few years later I wanted to get “Two Coffees” a wider audience, so I sent it to Writers’ Journal, which also accepted it. That is a record for me. To this day “Two Coffees” remains my only story to be accepted by two publications on its first two submissions.