A Prayer For Mother Earth
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A Prayer for Mother Earth is an allegorical parable about the Creator’s search for a Hero to save Earth from the Global Heating. It takes place in an alternate iteration of the recent past, the here and now, and the near future.
It is told in three Books:
Book One: Creator’s Hope (published here)
Book Two: Runyon Canyon (upcoming)
Book Three: Oblivion (should civilization survive long enough).
Each Book consists of a series of Tales; each Tale is broken down into chapters.
Free First Tale;
Then, to Keep Reading, Please Subscribe
The First Tale of Book One is offered free of charge. For the rest, you’ll have to Subscribe to Tales. The author seeks a modest price for each subsequent Tale or group of shorter Tales and hopes that you become interested enough to read on.
This Is Something Relatively New:
Online Serial Fiction
Apologies for the Rudimentary Images
Initially, some illustrations in this story are licensed stock photos and some are my AI-generated images. I have no formal training and little experience at creating images. Many of them do not fit perfectly, but they’re the best I could do for now on a budget only slightly greater than zero. I hope to eventually replace them with commissioned work from visual artists. I can’t afford to do so at present, and I humbly apologize for any jarring mismatches between story and illustration. – the author, who uses the name “Plug” as avatar and pseudonym.
Sample Passages from the First Book,
Creator’s Hope:
As the First Tale, "The Man Becoming A Tree," begins ...
It is late in the afternoon on a bright, sunny October day in Los Angeles.
A hot Santa Ana wind is building, pouring down over the Hollywood Hills onto the city with a faint but menacing whiff of wood smoke, pushing the brown smog layer west from the inland mountains out to the beaches.
These Santa Anas are more frequent now than they once were.
And so are the grand-scale arsons. Both are signs, in vastly different ways, but parts of the same larger equation, that the social contract is tearing apart as habitable space dwindles on the overheating Earth.
The Old Hag:
Each day, a bent, ancient, and wrinkled woman, not quite five feet tall, the sort of old person we don’t notice because we don’t want to, slowly crosses the lobby and sits in a certain chair. It appears that she watches passing traffic because she is old and alone and has nothing to do, and that the baseball bat in her hands is a pathetic sign of her frailty, as if for self-defense.
The first two assumptions are correct. She is indeed old, and for now, she is alone. However, “frail” is the farthest antonym from what she actually is, and she does have something to do:
It is her task to set in motion the saving of the Universe.
"The One" ... Or is he?
His hair is long, a light gray ingrained with bark-brown gnarls, unkempt and not quite limp, reaching down as if the hair itself were seeking ground to root in. He sits perfectly still, as if comatose, but with his eyes wide open.
These eyes, set deep in their sockets, are the saddest of eyes, as if they are staring, unblinking, directly at all the wounds of the world.
And indeed they are.
For this is a wizard who has lost both his faith and the belief – the illusion, self-anointed realists would say – that the world is a safe and sane place, where to love and be loved is possible.
Cormac Quinn, a boy afraid:
I was a frequent bed-wetter almost until age 11. Various cures were tried, including, of course, spankings, face-slappings, forcing me to sleep on sheets stinking of my own urine, and sending me to school without a bath, my skin reeking so of my own pee that I could barely stand to sit still in an unventilated room, and desks around me on all sides were kept vacant by teachers with mercy in their hearts for the olfactory sensibilities of others.
Then, one evening when I was 10 …
Séamus Quinn, Cormac's father:
As in many men who accumulated the traumas of war like unexploded ordnance in their psyches, his was finally detonated, leaving him a walking heap of emotional rubble. In his case, it was by a single sequence of events. He told only one tale from his time at war, a false narrative of these events, but it contained a hint, in much the same way every lie contains the truth it subverts. Here is his single war story:
In New York, just hours before his departure on the Queen Mary for the war …
The Orphan's Toothpick:
The slugger Sultan “the Orphan” Prince was so big that a radio announcer high up in the stands, in that ether from which baseball lore is Spoken, had remarked after the grand slam that the bat looked like a mere toothpick in his hands.
In the eighth inning of that final 1919 World Series game, now drunk, he swung wildly. The bat sailed from his hands, landed in the Flatbush Saints’ dugout, bounced a hundred feet up the tunnel to the home clubhouse, and stopped at the feet of Harry’s grandfather …
FleshCrave, a Demon
FleshCrave was a good seven feet tall and broad as a doorway, with brawny arms like my father’s, but exaggerated. Its fat lips were painted in my mother’s vividly red lipstick, thick and overdone in a mocking burlesque of her. It had huge orange teeth and fingernails longer than hers, claw-like and colored a brindle of orange and black.
And in its huge, wild eyes, with orange tendrils in the sclera, I saw its insatiable hunger for the flesh of a human child.