California, 1900

Owen swayed with the movement of the train, keeping his eyes fixed on the ladle of water in his hand. Using his free hand, he balanced himself seat by seat. Two more steps and he offered the ladle to his companion.

“A gift for my stubborn, adventurous wife.” His grin took any sting out of the words.

Annie accepted the water, cupping the bowl of the ladle in both hands before attempting to sip. It slipped down her scratchy throat, soothing and comforting.

Kansas, 1897

Annie puffed the stray hair from her eyes as she hoisted the basket of wet laundry through the door. The hot prairie wind helped and blew the stands back from her face. Her full skirt whipped around her legs as she lumbered toward the clotheslines not far from the sod house. The tall, dried prairie grass crunched as she plopped the heavy load onto the thirsty ground. As she shook out the skirt and secured it to the rope, the clean soapy smell caught on the breeze. For the first time in weeks she’d dared to squander the diminishing water supply on laundry. It would be worth it just to have something clean to wear. Each article snapped and danced in the wind. Despite the hardships, her favorite chore was hanging the laundry.

“Susan, is that chili you’re cooking?”

“Tony, you know I hate chili so why would I be cooking it?”

“Because you know I like it? I bought a jar of that new chili stuff yesterday. The one we saw advertised last week. It’s in the cupboard.”

Susan continued stirring the pot that was simmering on the hotplate. He knows I despised chili but he always insists on me cooking it. Ever since returning from our honeymoon, it’s always what he wanted. ‘Cook this’ or ‘Bake that’. It never ends. I’ll give him chili. She reached for the large decorative chili jar from the shelf and read the label.

"HOT CHILLI, use one tablespoon to each pound of chicken or beef."

With a wicked chuckle she removed the lid and upended the jar into the saucepan.

A Foreword from the Author

My passion to help teens with eating disorders began when I worked as a pastoral care worker in a local hospital. I visited many teenagers that had caused horrific pain to themselves, as well as to those who loved and cared for them.

Snaking up the mountain road was miserable, and not just because great droplets of rain were exploding on the windscreen before the wipers could whisk them away. Susan’s eyes were strained from weeping most of the night after her brother, Ron, phoned her. After picking up her friend Annie, just after 6am, they began the long drive.

“How could she get out?” Susan cried. She squeezed the steering wheel tighter. “How could they let this happen?”

By Jonathan Rayne

Part III. The Mark

… Great fanfare had accompanied the introduction of the MARKeting the Mark campaign. The idea of a mark that would number all humankind had been introduced by Satayne Lucifore at his annual World Corporate Summit in New Earth City. Though skepticism greeted the proposal, Lucifore knew that the road to a corporate executive’s mind was a Street named Wall.

It is requested that the reader engage in the popular childhood game of Let’s Pretend. Let’s pretend that the year is set in the distant future, or perhaps the not so distant future, and one of the most astonishing events in the annals of mankind has occurred just three years before.

Let us pretend. ...

New York, 1892

The gangplank wobbled as the weary passengers disembarked. Annie grasped the rope railing and prayed yet again her stomach would stop churning. The need to concentrate on staying on her feet overwhelmed her eagerness to catch a glimpse of the new world she entered. Jostled by bodies behind and bumping into those stopped in front of her wasn’t anything new. It had been her life for the past weeks. That and many other things she desperately needed to forget. Perhaps if she had known what life aboard ship would be like she would have not chosen to leave her homeland.

By Jonathan Rayne

Part V. The Lord’s Bargain

... In a faraway time and place of unimaginable bliss, where reward had followed acceptance, where the darkness of man’s most vile imaginations was conquered by the Light of Love, a father and his ten year old son rested on a cloud high above the sparkling New Jerusalem.

“Too breathtaking for words, isn’t it, Jimmy?”

By Jonathan Rayne

Part IV. Reunion

Throughout time, man has turned to sport to escape the ills of his fallen state. Those more jaded, perhaps, might cite warfare, the true sport of Kings. The ancient Greeks made do with their Olympics; the Romans, the bread and circuses of chariot races and gladiatorial combat. During the Middle Ages, nobleman and serf alike mingled at the jousting tournaments.

By Jonathan Rayne

Part II. Flower Child

… “M-m-man it’s c-c-cold in here” was the statement of the obvious from ArliRyan. Petite and in her early twenties, she could have been the girl-next-door but she was ragged, with filthy bell-bottomed jeans, a faded tie-dyed blouse and long unkempt dirty-blonde hair framed by a tattered psychedelic head band. The emaciated girl appeared a transported refugee from a long-ago Summer of Love and now she found herself deposited into the foul surroundings of a holding cell that would have made a medieval dungeon proud.

One of the most fascinating discoveries I made while travellng around the United States of America was the diversity of accents. Despite the fact that English is the primary language in both America and Australia, to understand each other was not always easy.

Our English grammar and vocabulary may be correct, but sometimes we need to learn how to speak the native language and use the accent correctly to be clearly understood. It’s like learning a foreign language.