Showing results by author "Kealan Patrick Burke" in All Categories

At first glance, Phil Pendleton and his son Adam are just an ordinary father and son, no different from any other. What no one knows is that Phil is a prisoner, and that up until a few weeks ago and a chance encounter at a grocery store, he had never seen the child before in his life.

School is out and summer has begun. For 11 year old Timmy Quinn and his best friend Pete Marshall, the dreary town of Delaware, Ohio becomes a place of magic, hidden treasure and discovery. But on the day they encounter a strange young boy sitting on the bank of Myers Pond, a pond playground, rumor saying it may hide turtles the size of Buicks changes everything.

Midnight. Some call it the witching hour. Others call it the devil’s hour. Here in the graveyard, midnight is a very special time. It is a time when ghostly spirits are at their strongest, when the veil between our world and theirs is at its thinnest. Legend has it, that while most of the world is asleep, the lack of prayers allow the spirits to communicate under the cover of darkness, among the headstones, their whispers rustling in the leaves of the old oak trees. But if you’re here in the graveyard, you can tell yourself it’s just the wind....

Addiction starts like a sweet lullaby sung by a trusted loved one. It washes away the pains of the day and wraps you in the warmness of the womb where nothing hurts and every dream is possible. Yet soon enough, this warm state of bliss becomes a cold shiver, the ecstasy and dreams become nightmares, yet we can't stop listening to the lullaby. We crave to hear the siren song as it rips us apart.

After the death of the woman who raised him and the realization that the girl he loves will never love him back, young Mark Callahan decides it's time to leave the small harbor town of Miriam's Cove for good. All that remains is one last shift at The Windcrest Hotel, a seaside resort that has seen better days.

When they were kids, Gillian and John used to visit the local cemetery every Sunday after church. The main attraction was the lofty hill that separated the cemetery from the elementary school, and the act of tumbling down it like Jack and Jill was a ritualistic escape from the abuse they were suffering at their father's hands. It was an escape that lasted only until John's tragic death.

Welcome to Eddie's Tavern, the only functioning waterhole in a near-dead town. Among the people you'll meet tonight are: Tom, Milestone's haunted lawman, who walks in the shadow of death; Gracie, the barmaid, a wannabe actress, doomed to spend her hours tending bar in a purgatory of her father's making; Flo, the town seductress, who may or may not have murdered her husband; Cobb, a nudist awaiting an apology from the commune who cast him out.

The intoxication from a pint of vodka, the electric buzz from snorting cocaine, the warm embrace from shooting heroin - drinking and drugging provide the height of human experience. It's the promise of heaven on earth, but the hell that follows is a constant hunger, a cold emptiness. The craving to get high is a yearning as intense of any blood-thirsty monster. The stories inside feature the insidious nature of addiction told with compassion yet searing honesty.

Sixteen-year-old Kate Mansfield and her blind brother Neil live in a manor on the edge of the Brent Prior moors. It is a dreary place populated by the dispirited and the disillusioned, where the young nurture desperate dreams of escape. And Kate is no different. But her plans to run away to the city are crushed one very ordinary morning when the quiet in Brent Prior is shattered by an inexplicable act of violence. In the wake of the tragedy, Kate's beloved father is stricken by a strange illness, and she and her brother fall under the care of the manor's caretaker and maid.

Addiction is the perpetual epidemic, where swarms of human moths flutter to the flames of hell. Because that warm blanket of a heroin high, that joyful intoxication of a pint of vodka, that electric energy from a line of cocaine, over time leaves you with a cold loneliness and a bitter heart. Relationships destroyed, bodies deteriorate, loved ones lost, yet the craving continues for that which is killing us—living, as the title suggests, like an Orphan of Bliss.