“(Searching for) Prophet”
a short story
Gary Baker, June 2013
(intended for use as comic idea)
Frankie dropped his hands to his knees and heaved, rustling leaves of the park shrubs scratching at his face in the midday heat. It was as though his entire day had become nothing but sheer terror laced with an eerie ecstatic sense of woe.
Nothing made sense anymore. His whole life had been turned upside down in a matter of hours starting with that fateful wave revealing a woman floating face down more than a land-based mile out to sea.
“You really should learn to cope with such things,” the woman, no longer dead and cold as a gutted fish but actively telling him what to do like an undead mother with a staff wielded like Excalibur, dusted his back absently. Her hands were rough and forceful, he noticed, with the heir of a Templar knight lost in the twenty-first century.
But coping was something he definitely could not do.
Not moments ago he’d been just an average joe living his well-to-do lifestyle like any other decently-endowed professional surfer. The other day, even, he’d won his second gold medal this
