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Excerpt from TWISTED CONSEQUENCES

Irie Parker — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 05:16:00 GMT

Greta, his loyal Rottweiler, could get her 20-foot retractable leash stretched out to the maximum. Doing this stopped her Tyrannosaurus Rex shaped head around three feet from the sidewalk. A stranger seeing her for the first time would never guess Greta was a service dog donated to Tyson, the quadriplegic man working on the computer inside the house. Greta was smart enough to know that when Tyson was immersed in cyberspace she was off the clock. Every morning Tyson would struggle to open the sliding glass door, slip the leash around the Rottweiler's massive head, and release her into the grassy common area. He would typically watch from the window, making sure the dog did her business, and then he would give the command she knew to return. This routine was ingrained in her extensive training, to minimize the amount of time the ferocious looking black dog had to cause trouble when tethered.

"Today it's warm. I'll let you stay out longer so you can sit in the sun, but Greta, you better be nice," he said in a serious tone.

The business line rang and Tyson rolled into his custom teakwood workstation. It was his ultimate escape, since this was cyberspace, where the playing field was equal. He delicately tapped the speaker phone button with the back of his hand. "Hello."

"Oh, yeah, I got your number on my pager this morning and-" The woman's voice sounded confused. "Umm. Am I on a speaker phone?"

"Yes, you are." Tyson paused then cleared his throat. "I was calling because I looked at your web site again and was wondering if you'd be interested in doing a paid photo shoot. I have a client that likes your look and his pockets are deep. I was thinking maybe sometime next week."

He heard a car door slam shut, Greta barked twice. He could see her reflection in the computer monitor, and she also had the leash maxed out.

"Oh, you're that photographer?" She squealed.

He couldn't believe she took so long to remember him, "Yeah, yeah! Remember I met you at that ad agency last week?"

Someone knocked three times hard on the office window. Tyson threw his arm on the desk, using only weak shoulder muscles, but still couldn't get his head around to look, and said in a direct voice "Listen, Tracy. That's your name, right?"

"Yeah"

The knocking increased to four hard slams on the window this time.

"I'm having a small problem here."

"What?" Tracy raised her voice.

"Hey, I need to call you back." Tyson said.

"Whatever!" She babbled, and then hung up on him.

He gingerly touched the button again to end the call. Tyson put the palms of his paralyzed hands on his chair's tires and sluggishly spun around. The knocker was the man known by all the neighbors as "Busy Body". He was always nosing around the neighborhood, with his undercover police officer looking mustache and oversized sunglasses. He was not afraid to approach anyone he considered to be in the wrong.

"Are you handicapped and deaf, too?" He shouted at the closed window. "Shut your damn dog up!"

"What the hell. No! Get the hell away from my window, geek!" Tyson yelled back. In his peripheral line of sight, he spotted Greta, sitting in the sunshine near the backdoor, unaware of the escalating situation near the office.

Busy Body hit the window, "I said shut your damn dog up!"

"Who do you think you are a vigilante?"

"No, but I'll call the cops!"

Due to the paralysis in his inner costal chest muscles, Tyson was losing his breath. "Get the hell away from my window, you freak!"

"Open your door, you little handicapped bastard!" Busy Body demanded.

"All right, dude!" Tyson spun around, pointed his chair in the direction of the back door and pushed with all his strength.

In his younger years before his paralyzing car accident at age 21, Tyson had taken many punches from schoolyard bullies, and he was never afraid to fight. Now he didn't even have the neurological control to make a fist. All he could do was bump into things with his light weight wheelchair. Aware of his limitations, he also knew that this guy would probably die in jail for assaulting a disabled man.

Tyson slowly rolled into position to slide the glass door open, and he observed Greta still relaxing in the sunshine. He wiggled his paralyzed knuckles under the door latch and put his shoulder to work. Twisting in a way that gave his biceps a certain uncontrolled muscle twitch, he provided enough force to break the seal and start the door sliding on its lubricated track. Greta looked in his direction and then got blindsided by Busy Body from behind, bulldozing her over and kicking at her. Tyson laughed while he watched. "This guy really is crazy," he said to himself.

The muscular black creature jumped up and made her instinctual lunge at the attacker's midsection. Snapping her jaws like a great white shark, she ripped an enormous hole in Busy Body's button-down shirt. He turned and stumbled across the grassy common area, looked back at Tyson and then limped up the redwood stairs to his sunning deck.

"Good girl Greta! Come! Now!" The leash made its loud recoiling sound, and her 150-pound body was promptly through the door. "Now we're going to have some fun," Tyson said to his beast. "Greta, kennel!" She darted into the three-foot by three-foot cage in the corner of the kitchen.

Tyson grabbed the cordless phone with the hand adapter on it, set it on his lap and then leaned back while pushing forward, creating enough of a wheelie to get the front caster wheels over the sliding glass door's threshold. He rolled into view of Busy Body's elevated deck, and just as he suspected, the man was looking down at Tyson, as he was yelling into his phone. Tyson slipped his hand into the adapted phone's handset, pressed it to his head, but didn't dial. He began barking orders in his soft voice to the dial tone. He wanted Busy Body to think he was pulling together a posse of friends to finish off Greta's work. After about a half hour of this stare down, a jovial uniformed man appeared. He was grinning and shaking his head.

"Where's the Rott?"

Tyson pointed awkwardly with his limp fingers. "She's inside."

"You know it's illegal to tie a dog up in the common area." The animal control officer stated while opening his metal clip board case.

"Oh, it is?" Tyson tried to sound surprised.

"Yep, any animal outside must be on a leash, and that leash must be in the hand of the registered owner."

"How am I supposed to let my service dog out to relieve herself?" Tyson inquired while he flexed his normal functioning shoulders and biceps, enough to clearly demonstrate the paralysis in his wrists and fingers. Tyson looked for a reaction from the officer, while he noticed the man wore a hearing aid in his left ear.

"Well sir, that's not my problem, now is it? I'll need to see your driver's license!"

"Driver's license? Does it look like I can drive a damn car?" Tyson said enraged.

"Your Rottweiler's not registered with the city, and there have been some complaints concerning the animal's behavior. Any type of ID will do, sir."

Tyson held his tongue, stared down at his flaccid hands, and decided he couldn't pull the handicapped card on this guy. "All right, will you help me get my wallet?"

"Sure sir." The officer spoke like a computer speaking.

"My ID's in the backpack," Tyson rotated his chair one hundred eighty degrees, exposing the black pack strapped to the backrest. He pretended not to see Busy Body doing some lame little dance steps up on his deck.

"Ok, you're ready to go," the officer said as he handed him the citation.

Trying to sound sarcastic, Tyson said "Wow, thanks dude."

Heading back inside, Tyson yelled "Eighty dollars! I better get back to work." He gave Greta the command to exit her kennel and noticed the "new message" icon blinking in his office. Still fuming from getting the ticket, he propelled himself towards the office area. Tyson habitually spoke the words "retrieve email" and the inbox showed a new written message arrived while he was getting busted. When he saw it was from Michaela, his jaw dropped with excitement.

As far as Tyson was concerned, Michaela was his princess in need of rescue. They met through an on-line international dating service and had already corresponded three or four times. With all his stress temporarily purged, he began to read her message:

Thursday, November 11th, 1999

Tyson, I am glad you wrote me and thanks for the email. It is rather difficult for me to answer to you in time because my computer is out of order and I depend on one of my friends to send my emails. Tyson, thanks for attaching the drawing you made of that flower. It was beautiful and I really appreciate your work. As a matter of fact I admire you as a person because you have a strong character and willpower. Please allow me to give you some additional information about me. I am a student and I am attending the University of Foreign Languages. I speak English, Greek, a little bit French and Spanish, and of course, my native language, Romanian. I had some part/time jobs as a translator member of protocol stuff at different international forums and meetings.

I am cultured and I love to travel. I believe I am a strong person who understands the importance of being kind and tender. I consider I am very ambitious, eager to learn more and to improve what I know. Regarding my future plans I admit I am a little bit confused.

I imagine there is a huge difference between USA and Romania. Bucharest has a lot of old buildings and it is usually called "The Small Paris". It is a nice city but the most beautiful part of Romania is the country side. There, people are still practicing the old customs and it is incredible how simple their life is. Regarding the economic situation here, as you might know, everything is bad. There are a lot of people who hardly can live but on the other hand, the new generation, because of their technical knowledge, get easily a good paid job.

In Romania as in Russia are a lot of attractive girls but it is impossible to communicate with them because they are so narrow-minded. Most of them are going out with Turkish or Arabs men only to buy them a few clothes.

Tyson, I will stop here, but not before I ask you to tell me some more about your country. I know from my best friend, who was in New York this year that everything is magnificent there. She says if I did not see United States it is just like never saw anything.

When it was my birthday I was sad. I am disappointed because I am already 20 and I have not realized anything, yet. I would wish to do more things until now.

Write me soon and next time I will tell you about my family. I was about to forget. Please tell me about the treatments you follow. Many kisses for you,

Michaela Gogoasa

"I like this girl!" Tyson confirmed with a smile. "I'm going to meet her face to face if it's the last thing I ever do," he announced out loud.

Greta walked over and sat next to the wheelchair. She leisurely licked Tyson's lifeless left hand, bringing him back to his current surroundings.

"Good girl, Greta! What did I ever do to deserve such a good dog like you?" She looked up and seemed to have a smile on her snout. "Now I need to reply to Michaela's email. Go get on your dog bed!"

Tyson and Michaela exchanged emails throughout the next eleven months which set the tone of their relationship. Tyson mastered the use of his voice recognition software during the process of getting to know Michaela. He would put his headset on and spend hours speaking into the microphone. Later, he would go back to the keyboard to clarify the content and correct any errors.

Review of TWISTED CONSEQUENCES

Irie Parker — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:15:00 GMT

Irie Parker balances two worlds in his debut novel TWISTED CONSEQUENCES: a polished, credible email romance in Part One and a tenuous, somewhat shaky adventure in Part Two. This novel gives evidence of well-honed skills in manipulating a story about our current obsession with computer driven communication, while also demonstrating the author's need for polishing the 'off the computer' requirements for composing well-paced narrative. There is definitely talent here and the end product of this novel is a satisfying tale of the immediate gratification of email relationships pitted against the realities of traditional courtship.

Tyson is a C5 quadriplegic (the result of a severe neck injury in an auto accident ten years prior to the time of this story) who lives well with specially designed computer equipment and assistance devices monitored by hired nurses twice a day. His attitude is positive, his best friend is his guardian Rottweiler Greta, and his photography business thrives. His love interest is via the internet where he enjoys building a gradually trusting relationship with a beautiful Romanian student Michaela. As their open communication intensifies, each feels the need to visit each other in person and after a long series of attempts to travel either from Bucharest to Colorado or from Colorado to Bucharest, that consignation occurs: Tyson, with the help of his brother Jack and a bodyguard Rex fly to Romania. End of Part One. In Romania the realities of Tyson's cyber romance alter in ways that beg for further development in narration. Yes, Romania post Ceausescu is far different from Colorado and the elements of organized crime and the critical mass of interpersonal implosions result in a reunion far less satisfying than that expected. Tyson returns to his Colorado residence, wiser, but still with the tenuous hope that re-establishing email romantic correspondence with Michaela will be resurrected.

Where Parker is at his finest is his ability to tell a story primarily through the use of dated emails. Part of this success is an uncanny ability to create the persona of Michaela solely through his choices of vocabulary expressions that ring with an accent unmistakably Central European. He also is able to deftly describe the complexities of living life as a quadriplegic without resorting to even a moment a bathos. But where Parker needs to reexamine his ability to write well is in Part Two where the flow of the story line is rushed to the point of neglecting character development of Jack and Rex, and more important the motivation of the changes Tyson discovers in Michaela's real life character: we know more about Michaela from her language of email in Part One than we do of her role as an actual person in Part Two. For this reader, part of the problem with the narrative portion of the novel comes the author's repeated use of slang terms such as 'dude' and 'you the man' which may be meant to keep the story 'current', but which become too noticeable and tiresome.

But in the end TWISTED CONSEQUENCES is an absorbing tale and one that is easily read in a single sitting. In time Parker will be able to polish his considerable skills - and that is the advantage of getting a first novel out there before the public for response. The concept of the novel is far stronger than the 'pulp fiction' cover art would suggest - another area where embracing talent outside the author's own would appeal to the buying public more directly. Irie Parker deserves to be read and with his evident talent here, it seems assured his next novel will be stronger than this one. Grady Harp, August 08

A Cyberspace Love Story and Adventure

Irie Parker — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:13:00 GMT

I just published my first book TWISTED CONSEQUENCES, the main character is a C5 quad that thrives on adventure. Here's the description:

Tyson develops an online relationship with Michaela, a young woman, with whom he has not yet had a face to face encounter. She resides in Bucharest, Romania while he calls Colorado his home. Michaela is an attractive and open-minded young lady. Tyson is a "gutsy" young man in his early thirties, who has never been afraid to dream. Through many months of e-mail correspondence, they share the details of their lives. Relying on daily e-mail letters, the characters develop feelings for one another as they candidly communicate about themselves and their lives, and most importantly about their values and their feelings. Tyson, who is honest from the start, explains to Michaela that due to an unfortunate accident in his early twenties, he is a quadriplegic. He describes his physical limitations, but more importantly he shares his ability to hope, to dream, to create, and to imagine. Once they meet the roles of hunter and prey begin to slightly blur, and money and betrayal begin to contaminate their prose.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0615236278/ref=cm_plog_item_link