The Lioness

The Lioness, And More Creepy Strange Stories is a collection of five short fictional works. All five vary in subject matter and length, but one thing is for sure - they are all strange and a bit creepy!

There are five stories within The Lioness, And More Creepy Strange Stories. The Lioness is a story about Lenny and his wife Catherine. Lenny, as a small boy, experienced a couple of situations that had a traumatic effect on his life. Now that his wife is moving up in her career and her life is changing is Lenny capable of handling her new assertiveness and renewed self confidence or has these experiences from his past affecting his behavior? Reading The Stranger one wonders, is he a predator or a protector? Brother’s Keeper, Tom is fed up with his Brother Robert’s selfish antics and how he abuses their mother. Read how Tom methodically solves the problem. In Awry, Carolyn has returned home to entice Travis, who manages the many family properties, including a huge ranch, into marrying her. She has a plan and requests a cowboy sunset that will help her succeed, but even the best of plans sometimes go awry. The Eighth Month Day tells the story about an uneducated back-water young man who joined the Marine Corps and was sent to Vietnam. Now it is many years later and he is still having trouble adjusting, but he is lucky, in not only being alive, but also having a female friend who has faith and cares. She has enrolled him in a night class for seniors in creative writing at the junior college and hopes that this will help him learn how to control his anger. Do not read this story close to meal time.

My name is John Wesley Brown. I grew up on a small farm in rural Leon County outside of Tallahassee, Florida. I attended Florida State University. I dropped out of school and worked in heavy construction in Indiana to save enough money to take my very pregnant Jewish wife at the time to Israel to live on a kibbutz. Israel paid my wife’s way, but since I was a gentile, a goy to some, I had to pay my own way. I was the first and only redneck living in Israel. I taught the Kibbutzniks a thing or two about farming as well as other things. I lived a year on the kibbutz and had limited training on the Uzi. The safety factor in Israel was becoming questionable so I sent my wife and child back to the United States, but I stayed through the Six Day War. During that year in Israel I wrote novels and short stories in longhand, but upon returning to the U.S. I was unable to read my own handwriting. We divorced and I reentered Florida State University and took course work in photography, film, art history, and the humanities. I wrote some papers and even had some published. I graduated in 1971. But I kept getting nice ladies pregnant and had to give up writing and go into business to support me and all of them. After working in construction for a few years, I started the first tent and party business in Tallahassee in 1975. I sold it for a hunk of money in 2000 and prepared myself to go back to writing. But my love at that time shocked me with the news that while I was putting in all those long hours and paying off all the debts, she had developed another life and for sure didn’t want to be married to someone struggling to be a writer. Who can blame her? I got my third and final divorce in 2001 and said good-by to most of the money, but kept writing. I have been married three times and have three daughters and several grandchildren. As of this writing, (June 2013), I have epublished three novels and another collection of short stories in The Sanctuary and More Stories, by J. Wesley Brown. None of which are creepy.