Real Life Choices A Collection of Stories

In the stories that make up Real Life Choices, the characters find themselves in unusual circumstances where they face psychological and/or moral challenges. Depending on the story, these unusual circumstances include criminal wrongdoings, sexist attitude, seemingly unreal video game characters, ghost sightings, afterlife figures and bizarre environments. Both characters and readers are left to make choices about the interpretations and conclusions of these events. The stories move from the simple to the absolutely bizarre to force the characters, different in every story, to make choices in these more and more difficult situations, while they are almost always left to their own devices. The stories can be classified as psychological/supernatural and philosophical fictions. The first story is very short. After an explosion in the building, a strange meeting takes place in an office with originally anticipated guests from the business community--or, so it appears. In the second story, a teenager runs away and is saved by an "angel". The third tale focuses on a mystery surrounding an emergency call a truck driver receives through his CB radio. It is followed by, “My Chosen Path”, which is about a female security guard who finds drug dealers at an abandoned warehouse on the property she guards at night. As things get complicated, she finds herself running for her life. In the story, entitled, “On the Road of Destiny,” a biker stops to offer a ride to a fellow motorcyclist left on the side of the road with a motorcycle that would not start. When he declines the help, the biker suddenly takes off, refusing to even stop at the next repair garage to let the mechanics know about the stranded motorcyclist. The next fictional account, called “Magical World,” follows a video-gamer, bored of everyday life, who finds himself in a battle with his game characters one night on the way home from work. The bizarre event spills over to the next day. The gamer struggles to find explanation for the mysterious events, taking place around him. In the long tale of “The Hermit’s Journal,” the protagonist is a psychology professor who isolates himself on a mountain at winter time, living without any human contact, in order to write a book. Even though he is aware of the fact that only one woman lives on the mountain across, he keeps seeing two women. The mystery behind the two women captures his attention while he is also dealing with the psychological effect of isolation on the day-to-day basis. In the final story, called “Lucidity”, the protagonist finds herself walking on Grey Street with a pressing need to complete three chores. With ever increasing bizarre events taking place, she finds the chores difficult to complete, until she figures out the cause of the bizarre happenings. Aware of the cause, she needs to make a choice about how to proceed given this knowledge. All stories represent real life situations in a sense that it is possible for virtually anybody to be faced with such challenges and difficulties in real life.