I’ve loved hearing feedback from friends, family, and strangers over the past few years of their experience reading my first book, Animalis! It is encouraging and I am excited to finish the series. In the mean time, I’ve taken the opportunity to collaborate with an excellent voice artist, John Hanks, to create the Audio book for Animalis, and commissioned an all new book cover from Chaz Walgamott, and book trailer by Digital Gravy!

You can check out the audiobook on Audible, and start a free trial if you’re new!

Animalis – Audible

 

My wife turns out to be a wonderful writer, so we are working on a children’s book together! Here is a sneak peek. Read the rough draft: Preston, Boy Engineer- Star Snatcher

 

 

I wanted to post a short story I’m working on to get some more eyes on it! Please comment with thoughts and suggestions! The concept struck a cord in me, do you feel it too?

Update: audio for easy listening is here

https://soundcloud.com/john-peter-jones/moved

Moved

I wanted to believe what I was seeing, but how could I? It was impossible. My own vain attempts had proven it to me; telekinesis wasn’t real.

Yet here I was, watching this new girl, Kali, roll a plastic cup across a desk. The cup wobbled, then tipped into an osculating rotation for three turns, then stopped. Kali held her slender hands on

either side of the cup.

“What a load,” Brett huffed. “She’s blowing on it through her nose. See, you can’t pull it back toward yourself, can you.”

Brett, Kali, and I were alone in the classroom. We were supposed to be working on our biology project, sprouting seeds, but then TK had happened. I was still fighting within myself to believe it.

“Alright, so you can pull it. That just means you’ve got a string. Move something bigger. Like …” Brett slapped a biology book down. “Like this book.”

I had been about to suggest we get back to the assignment, but I set the packet of seeds behind myself again to watch.

Kali glanced at the two of us, then placed her hands on either side of the book. After a slow inhale, and an even slower exhale, she squinted her eyes and concentrated.

I found myself holding my own breath and wishing in my mind, move, move, move. But it couldn’t be true. There was no such thing as telekinesis. You couldn’t make a sprout grow bigger and greener with thoughts, and you couldn’t move a book. The book sat motionless on the desk.

“I—” Kali started.

“You can do it,” I said.

Kali glanced at me with a hopeful expression. I nodded encouragingly. I wasn’t sure I believed
it or not, but I had felt something when she was concentrating on the book. It was warm, and hopeful. It was the feeling of Christmas magic. I wanted to believe. I wanted to be surprised.

We both looked at Brett, who shook his head. “Come on. Put your money where your mouth is. There’s no way we’re putting ‘thinking positive thoughts’ for a hypothesis, and there’s no way you can move that book. Liar,” he added.

“Telekinesis is real,” Kali said. She and I focused on the book once again. Her hands began to sway gently with the rhythm of the tide. I found myself tipping left and right, caught in the motion. She exhaled again.

Move, I wished.

The book was askew near the edge of the desk. A whale on the cover happily flopped onto its back with a frozen shower of ocean water. The shadow trapped beneath the book began to blur. Or was that just my eyes?

I leaned closer to stop my eyes from unfocussing. The book squeaked.

Kali glanced at me with a smile. I nearly yelled. I was scared and excited all at once.

It squeaked again! This time the book slid two inches.

We both looked at Brett for confirmation.

He stood with his mouth slacked. He scowled, licked his lips, and closed his mouth. Then he opened his mouth again to bite his lip. “Well,” he said, looking up at Kali. “That’s weird.”

She smiled. Her pale blue eyes locked on mine for a moment and I could feel electricity. Telekinesis. Moving books and cups without touching them. This was way more exciting than sprouting peas. The feeling of hope continued to kindle inside me. The world was suddenly exciting and new again. Maybe people didn’t know quite as much about the world as was made to be believed.

Slap. “Maybe your string is stronger than I thought,” Brett said.

We looked back at the desk, now stacked with five heavy biology books.

“How much can you move with TK?” I asked.

Kali shrugged. “Anything, I think. I mean, none of it’s real anyway, right? We’re all just energy. Thoughts are energy. The books are energy. Mountains are energy. I think we can move anything.”

“Energy,” I said. I thought about it. Energy was held in place by very finite rules. Which Kali was breaking right now. What did I know? In that moment, I no longer knew what was possible. But Kali, her death notwithstanding, would show me.

She breathed her slow breaths and swayed with the rhythm of the ocean as we all watched the stack of books.

The books began to tremble. Brett unfolded his arms and stepped back against another desk, gripping its edge. He started chewing his lip.

“You can do it,” I said again.

The top book began to lean at the binding. The book below it joined in, stretching toward the edge of the desk.

I watched as a drip of sweat cascaded from Kali’s temple and dripped onto her shirt.

Squeak! The books slid in a great leaning stack, and toppled off the table. They hit the tile floor with an impressive clatter, like the beginnings of an applause.

“That was amazing!” I cheered. I picked up a book and began examining it for the string Brett had believed was behind it.

“Thoughts matter,” Kali said. She pulled up the assignment ready to write down her hypothesis.

“You can’t move everything. There’s got to be a limit. Why can’t anybody else do it?” Brett said. “A car. There’s no way you can move a car. Magic trick or not.”

I watched Kali for her reaction to his continued unbelief. I was ready to use her thoughts hypothesis, but now Brett had been pulled into a tug-o-war.

“Why not?” Kali said. She set the pen and paper down had hopped to the door. “Let’s see what happens.”

We followed her out into the desolate saturday parking lot. Mr. Bell’s yellow Mazda and a few other cars speckled the pavement.

“What are you going to do?” I asked. “Slide it? Or lift it?”

“Well?” Kali asked Brett.

“Lift it. If you can.”

We watched as Kali first stood beside the yellow Mazda with her arms spread wide. The car sat solid and unmoving, pressed down with an insurmountable weight. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of a nearby aspen, and tugged at Kali’s auburn hair. She bent her knees and kept trying. I could hear her breath hissing out her nose.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

Kali straightened, and we all turned around as one. A couple seven year old kids stood beside their scooters on the sidewalk. The freckled one shouted again, “I have a cell phone. I’ll call the cops if you’re going to spray-paint that car. Or steel it, or whatever.”

“We’re not doing anything to it,” Brett called back.

The kids left the sidewalk and dragged their scooters over to the parking lot. “Then what are you doing?”

“An experiment,” Kali said. “Want to watch?”

The three kids joined me and Brett in watching Kali. They didn’t believe in Telekinesis, and made sure to let us know several times.

Kali breathed in deep and began to sway with the tide. She bent her legs, looking like a black- belt martial artist, and kept at it for five minutes.

“This is dump,” the friend of the freckly boy said.

“Shh,” Brett said. He looked back at Kali with his scowl softening. “You got this, Kal. Get under it.”

She turned back to us with several beads of sweat glistening on her forehead. “Yeah? Alright.”

There were three inches to spare below the car.

“She can’t really do telekinesis. They think we’re gullible.”

Within a minute, I could feel a tremble in the pavement. The wheels seemed to stretch away from the car as metal lifted.

“You’re doing it, Kali!” I said.

The three kids took turns getting on their hands and knees to see what Kali was doing. “She’s lifting it up!” one of them said. “Some kind of trick,” another one said.

I got down to see. Kali lay flat, with her hands spread to her sides. Her eyes were closed with a look of serenity on her face. I admired that face; it broke the rules. Here she was, doing the impossible, slandering Newton, laughing at Einstein, while looking perfect. This is the way things are supposed to be, her expression kept telling me.

“It’s just energy!” I shouted, giddy.

The yellow lifted farther, and the wheels left the pavement.

“This is—this is,” Brett said. “It’s incredible, Kal! Move it over here! Put it down in a new parking spot.”

The car lifted even higher, then began floating away from Kali. Once it had cleared her, the sun sparkled on her sweat speckled face.

It was floating three feet above the ground, drifting like a yellow balloon. Birds flew by overhead. The aspen tree shimmered in the breeze. We were watching a miracle.

“I’m putting it down now,” Kali said.

When the car hit the pavement, Mr. Bell’s car alarm went off, honking and flashing lights.

We whooped and hollered and ran back to the classroom, lightheaded and delirious. We tried to do our assignment, really, but now it was insignificant. Our reality had been shattered. Over the next week, it was shattered over and over again.

Our parents heard the unlikely story of why Mr. Bell’s car alarm had been set off, and Kali happily made them believers by lifting my mom’s minivan. The local news challenged her to move a bulldozer and she was greeted with a crowd of believing spectators.

“You can do it, Kali!” she heard over and over.

With every feat the blaze of hope burned brighter within me. She was my inspiration and my idol. The rules that governed the universe were in turmoil, and it was beautiful to hope for magic. If ever she struggled to move something, a voice would cut through the crowd to her ears, a new believer fueling her with their faith, proclaiming: “I believe in you, Kali!”

Finally she was confronted by a league of Magicians. They called her “powers” tricks, and demonstrated how each of them was an illusion. They called her a fraud and a charlatan.

“Does it really matter?” I asked her in the privacy of her bedroom. Her walls were decorated with posters of Indian Temples and shrines of all shapes and sizes. I made it through her parents barricade of security guards on the pretense that we still had to finish our assignment.

“I think it does,” she said. Her face had solidified with the look of supreme perfection that I couldn’t find anywhere else in the world. “Not to me, but to them. To the world. People are starting to think it’s all just tricks and games.”

A helicopter flew by overhead, casting a black shadow outside her window.

“And if they don’t think it’s a trick, then they think I’m the only one who can do it.”

“You are the only one, Kal,” I said. “You’re different. Why can’t anyone else do the things you do. I don’t know why, but you’re different.”

“If you think a plant with grow bigger, will it?” she asked me.

I stared at her for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. I pulled over our results sheet from our experiment. Out of five plants, the one that grew the tallest was the one we had focused our thoughts of growing bigger on. “But you were thinking about it; of course it would grow bigger.”

“I didn’t think about it though,” she said. “It was only ever you and Brett that thought about that particular plant, and look how it grew!”

Again, I didn’t know what to say or think because my world had no rules. She had to have thought about it. It had grown twice as big, and was already producing pea pods.

“They want me to move a mountainside,” she said. “Either come out as a fraud, or prove it beyond a doubt.”

I knew she could do it. She could move anything. She would move anything, and everything. Kali had changed the world already. This was just the next small step.

I was allowed to sit in the front, just yards away from the steep incline of the mountain. Cameras and news crews jostled about with cords and microphones. The crowd of hopeful onlookers spread like a thick ten mile long quilt covering the countryside.

“I know you can do it!” I yelled to Kali.

She was wearing a pretty pastel skirt and a short sleeve shirt, sunday best for the big event. A loudspeaker screeched, and after a short introduction from a TV show personality, Kali’s voice echoed out to the throng of people.

“Thank you, for all of your support. I just hope, that by doing this, I can inspire someone. I want to show you the truth. You can move mountains. I want you to believe in yourselves.” Her last words echoed quieter and quieter, until all the world was lulled to silence. She turned from the crowd to face the mountain.

“You can do it!”

“I believe, Kali!”

“I believe in you!”

“We believe, Kali!”

Kali raised her arms and began to sway back and forth slowly, ebbing with the rhythm of the tide. The air was still and warm from a cloudless day.

I turned around to see the faces watching my hero. Eyes sparkled. Lips split in joyous smiles. Then a moan as deep as the ocean rose from the earth. I returned my attention to the mountainside which continued to groan louder. The sound was all around me, rising to a crescendo that rattled my soul. I, along with hundreds of thousands of unprepared spectators, ducked my head and covered my ears in a futile attempt to save my hearing. Maybe I should have run away, but there was nowhere to

The ground began to quiver. The moan grew to a grinding shriek, and the earth before us began to sift like sand. Kali stood just a yard away from the crumbling dirt. I couldn’t tell if the arms raised above her head were trembling, or if it was just the vibrations of the earth. Sweat saturated her white shirt, pulling it down against her body.

“I need help!” I thought I heard her cry.

I had to go to her. She was calling for me. As I rose from my chair the earth split with a deafening, pop! I was thrown back with the force of the sound. Everything was a dull buzz. Dust flew out over the crowd.

I looked up at a terrifying sight. The world was moving beyond the cloud of dust. The side of the mountain, thousands of feet up, was moving. She had done it; the mountain was moving.

“KALI!” I mouthed. The sound didn’t make it past the dull hiss in my ears.

The ground grew still again, but my body still shook from the memory. I found my footing and moved toward where I had last seen her through the dust. Farther up, the hillside ended, replaced by a strip of pure blackness. I looked left, and right, and the slice went on forever, wrapping around the mountain. The dust swirled and an icy chill poured from the gap in the mountain.

There, the dust was settling, I could see her. She was covered in dark earth, moving to get under the titanic rock.

Behind me, the dust had fallen as a thick layer on the crowd. They looked at me in confusion. I was standing where she had been. One hundred thousand eyes looked to me for an answer. I gestured at the horizontal split. I could see hands coming together and smiles returning to faces. I could hear the faint sound of clapping and cheers.

“I can’t!” a shrill voice whispered behind me. “I don’t think …”

She needed help. I turned back to the crowd and threw my arms up. “She needs you!” I cried.

“Believe!” I don’t know if anyone heard me, but a small boy broke from the crowd and scrambled up the hillside to where I stood.

Beneath the earth, in the gap she had created under the mountain, I saw Kali turn back to face me. Sweat continued to gush from her pours, streaking the dirt in dark lines. Her eyebrows peaked with renewed hope when she saw me and the boy.

“You can do it, too! Help me! Help me lift it!” she called to us.

“I knew you could do it, Kali!” the boy said. “I always knew it.”

Now I could hear a chant of voices rising from the masses of people. “You’re amazing, Kali. We love you, Kali. We believe. You’re amazing, Kali. We love you, Kali. We believe.”

Kali smiled with a pained expression, listening to the song of praise.

“I can’t be the only one,” she said. This time it was tears streaking down her face.

People were climbing to where me and the boy stood. The sun shone down on the ocean of believers. TV news crews had their cameras clean and were broadcasting the gigantic split in the mountain with hope beaming out of them.

“Someone, please,” she called. Our eyes met again and she spoke to me. “I believe in you. You can do it. Help me.”

It’s taken me a long time to forgive myself for that day. I didn’t understand when she had called for my help. I didn’t believe I had the power to help. I couldn’t move books or lift cars. I was normal. But she believed in me, the same way we all believed in her. We gave her the strength to move mountains, but what she needed to move was our doubts. Any one of us could have saved her. I could have lifted the weight long enough for her to get out from under it. The person with all the power in the world, who could do the impossible, believed in me.

“I don’t believe,” I said in a whimper.

The mountain fell. My only memories of it are of the news videos that show the massive peaks of the mountain shifting an insignificant twitch; the seven foot drop was less than a micron in its scale. From reports of people a hundred miles away, the first sound in the universe was the mountain being ripped from earth, the last sound in the universe was when it fell. A crack started, right from the epicenter of it all, and went straight to the tip of the mountain, cleaving it in two.

I woke in the hospital. I had been knocked unconscious from the blast of air that had blown me a thousand feet. They said I only survived because the crowd of people had softened the impact. Maybe it was Kali’s last thought. But I think it was me. I’ve learned a lot since Kali left, about how my thoughts affect the world. I might not be a Kali, or even able to TK, but I’m always thinking. I believe in myself.

 

One hundred years ago, the Animalis were unleashed. Their intelligence and rough humanoid forms granted them basic rights, and humanity seemed willing to share dominance over the Earth with them.

Now, Earth is in turmoil. A deadly conflict rages between humans and the genetically engineered Animalis. Jax Minette hurls himself into battle, ready to make a hero of himself; determined to erase the shame of being son to a dishonored veteran. Jax is duty bound, until he comes face to face with the Animalis and is ordered to kill an innocent.

With blood staining his hands and growing disillusionment toward his cause, he turns to the only alternative he knows, a captivating red-head who has her own plans, and envisions what Jax thinks is an impossible future: one where the humans and Animalis live together in peace.

To change the future of mankind, Jax must hunt down the machine that created the Animalis. If he is captured, it would mean a terrifying fate: the arena. In the arena, the strong devour the weak. No human has ever stood a chance.

Until now.

Animalis on Amazon

Paperback on Createspace

A $5.00 discount is available when ordering from Createspace. Use the code 2E2KUXEG