Frontier Road - Short Stories (written by humans)

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Frontier Road podcast includes short stories, poems, and excerpts and or abridgments of classical literature, often deriving themes of questioning God, liberation of unbelief, ambiguity and the absurdity of life. We often introduce themes of mid-life crisis, sometimes from a male perspective. Issues of marriage, raising children, mental struggle and melancholy are all major themes within the selected literature. *Frontier Road can often times be satirical and/or irreverent and/or sincere. Viewer discretion advised.

  1. 5d ago

    Layoffs, Happen (A short story about a man that lost his job to ai)

    I read the email notifying me that I had lost my job, then shut my laptop and stared at the cubicle wall in front of me. I could already hear my wife asking if there was anything I could do; petition someone, beg, stay on in some lesser role? I thought about calling Tyler Rinock myself and agreeing to take a pay cut if it meant I could just stay. Tyler made something like thirty-five million dollars a year, plus stock incentives, and was said to be worth somewhere north of three billion. I wasn't mad about that. I was, at least one time in my life, a Republican. I still believe in markets, ownership, in men building things and keeping what they earned. Still, those beliefs felt a little more abstract sitting in a cubicle at nine in the morning wondering how I was going to pay my mortgage. Maybe Tyler could show me some mercy. I'd seen the writing on the wall since the first time I opened ChatGPT four years earlier. That thing can code like crazy, I'd thought as I watched it script in seconds what sometimes took me hours. It translated languages more efficiently than I ever dreamed software could. It found bugs, wrote documentation and explained unfamiliar code almost instantly. I knew where this was headed. The industry would eventually move away from large teams of engineers toward smaller groups of higher-level engineers who knew how to use AI to do the work of several people. I raced to become one of those engineers. What else was I supposed to do? I didn't have a fallback career. I had received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and was hired by Ribbed Software almost immediately after school. Coding was what I knew. For the last eleven years, I'd worked on the systems that kept Ribbed Software's medical dictation platform running. The product itself was mostly invisible to the people who used it. Doctors spoke into a microphone, our system captured their dictation and converted it into a record that could be stored, searched and signed. I kept the dictations flowing, the records synced and the whole thing from breaking. If something failed at two in the morning, I got the alert. If a hospital's dictation files stopped processing or a physician's notes didn't make it into the record, I traced through the logs until I found the fault. I felt like I was an integral part of the software. If it wasn't for me, the software would fail. That's how I felt. I've also never been especially ambitious about my job. My passions were elsewhere. I enjoyed writing and I did so on the weekends, maintaining a small blog that noone read but that kept me entertained and educated about classical prose. I wrote short stories and submitted them for publication, but was never published. Life was fine really.

    Layoffs, Happen (A short story about a man that lost his job to ai)

  2. Jul 20

    Odysseus: Homer vs. Hollywood (a short story)

    "Hello, students. Hope you had a crappy weekend. How many of you went to the theater to watch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey?" Three hands shot up. One very excitedly. "Yes, Jeremy. What did you think of it?" Jeremy was a polarizing figure in the class. Intelligent? Yes. Disruptive? Yes. Rude and obnoxious? Yes and yes, almost always. But Mr. Grey liked him anyway because he was always there and usually willing to contribute to the discourse. "Bro, Mr. Grey, this movie was slinging. I've seen Troy with Brad Pitt. This ain't Troy. I liked it." "Thanks, Jeremy. What was it about, at its core? No spoilers, but give me some context here." "It's Odysseus, played skillfully by Matt Damon, journeying home after war, and the people waiting for him." "Thank you, Jeremy. And if you don't mind, I'm going to keep you on the spot for the rest of class. We're going to dissect what this story means and the greater context of one of the greatest works of literature in the history of the world." "Okay, now a quick lecture about what The Odyssey is. Don't get lost here, and don't fall asleep. I'll keep it short." "The Odyssey is a Greek epic poem. It was composed sometime around the 700s B.C., but it wasn't originally written down. It was part of an oral tradition, passed down and recited by bards over the centuries. The story was eventually written down, and later manuscripts preserved it for future generations." A hand from the corner shot up. "Yes, Julie?" "What's a bard?" "It's a poet, artist, or singer." "Thanks." "No problem." "And by the time The Odyssey was composed, it is almost certain that the poet had before him a well-arranged mass of legends and traditions from which he could select his material. And as Jeremy said, this recent Christopher Nolan film has re-sparked interest in the tale." "Odysseus was the king of Ithaca, a small and rugged island off the western coast of Greece. Soon after he married and had his only son, Telemachus, the Trojan War began." "The poets tell us the purpose of the war was to recover Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Odysseus had no interest in Helen himself. He was already married to Penelope. But years earlier he had sworn an oath to defend Helen's future husband if the need ever arose, and when Troy refused to return her, he was bound to keep his word."

    Odysseus: Homer vs. Hollywood (a short story)

  3. Jul 15

    Making my High School C Team

    I am fifteen years old, and I can only tell what I see, what I hear, and what I think is going on. If you want the whole story, you'd have to ask my dad, my coach, the other parents, and probably a few of my teammates. They might all tell it differently then I do. There are a little more than three minutes left before halftime, and we're losing by ten points. It's to a smaller school. Not a terrible school or anything, but a school we should be beating. We have more athletes than they do. At least that's what everybody said before the game. I'm sitting on the end of the bench. It isn't really the end. There are two guys sitting farther down than me, but they are on the JV team, even though they are in my grade. They are just here to watch. I look across the gym and see my dad.

    Making my High School C Team

  4. Jun 28

    The Left Side of the Bench (A Short Story)

    Part One - Left Side of the Bench In the coastal town of Lincoln City, a horticulture engineer with a unique perspective on life finds unexpected connection with a mysterious, but familiar stranger. Excerpt: "Oh hey, how are you?" I responded. It was the girl. She was beautiful. I adjusted my headslightly to make eye contact with my good eye. "I think I know you," she said. The analytical mind of an engineer quickly deduced that thisgirl, whom I slightly recognized, but possibly never met, had left her group of friends and returned to me. There had to be a motivation.  "Stop overthinking," I scolded myself."Say something, you damned idiot. She asked you a question, and you're sitting here speechless."  "You know, you seem awfully familiar too. We must haveknown each other at some point in our lives. When do you think it was?" I replied with a question.  I ease into a sense of relief. This girl is way out of myleague, both in looks and style. The truth is, I don't stand a chance. Thank you, God. Now, I can just relax, be her friend for just a moment, and not worry about the complexities of romance. There's something about our human nature always pushing for romantic relationships, which ironically can work against them, especially when pushed too early.  Lately, I've found a certain contentment with the idea ofbeing a single man—not a bachelor or a party animal, just a human living solo. There's a wonderfully relaxing aspect to it that I've come to appreciate.   "Quit overthinking, you fool. You've only exchangedone sentence with this girl, and you're already reconsidering your entire future." I thought to myself, still waiting on her response.

    The Left Side of the Bench (A Short Story)

  5. Jun 2

    The Beardless Jesus Postscript: The Face in Iznik

    An archaeological team in Turkey had recently uncovered an ancient image beneath layers of plaster inside a church near Iznik. This image of Christ, portrayed as the Good Shepherd, was among the five oldest surviving depictions of Jesus as an adult ever found anywhere in the world. It dated from the early-to-mid third century AD and was the best-preserved early image of Jesus ever discovered. Because it had been sealed inside an exceptionally well-preserved, oxygen-depleted underground chamber, the fresco’s pigments remained almost exactly as they had been painted some eighteen hundred years earlier. The image was so complete that Christ’s facial features, the individual folds of his tunic, his hands, and the distinct outline of the ram across his shoulders remained clearly visible and sharp. The newly discovered painting gave historians a remarkably detailed glimpse into how some early Christians perceived Jesus. Short-cropped hair. Middle-class Roman clothing. And beardless. Professor Buck zoomed in on the fresco, this work that seemed to solidify a lifelong thesis. He smiled to himself. And that felt like enough.

    The Beardless Jesus Postscript: The Face in Iznik

  6. Apr 24

    Writing a Book in My Spare Time (a short story)

    Excerpt: "My dreams however, kept me awake—Claire, William, the breakfast at the Caffè Florian. The conflict. She was nervous, but not refined, and not always on edge, just this morning. The man, the nameless man, or William now, but that doesn’t fit. That’s ok, we will use it anyway. William and Claire at the Caffe. And there was a child, there were children, but this child, their last to leave them, and now they were alone on this trip, alone on a trip for the first time in their lives, really. They had taken trips, vacations, second honeymoons, but there were always children at home, demands to come back to and to worry about. But is that a plot? Who are the characters? Dream on, brain and soul, find me answers, give me questions to ask. I know the story, it’s the details that I don’t know. The story is already in me. But can the story survive one setting? There is another man. He enters the picture soon, as the reader will see. A tall man, slender with a beer belly. A man in his 20s, the reader may presume, or pushing 30. A gentle man, but boy can he drink. And boy can he eat. He joins William and Claire for breakfast and orders immediately. A large bowl of clam chowder, an extra roll or two for the dipping, and a glass of Aperol spritz. That is all for the night."

    Writing a Book in My Spare Time (a short story)

  7. Mar 16

    On Being a Collector of Books (a short story)

    Short Summary: I was sitting in my car thinking about hobbies and somehow ended up inside a bookstore pretending to be a serious collector. I bought Edward Newton’s The Amenities of Book Collecting for twenty bucks, convinced for a few minutes that I had discovered the secret world of bibliophiles. Newton’s book led me to Alexander Pope, which made me feel briefly intellectual, and then to the story of Harry Elkins Widener—the young millionaire book collector who died on the Titanic at twenty-seven. Widener treated collecting books like gold mining, digging through dusty piles to find hidden treasures. Inspired, I kept reading, turned a few more pages, and there it was, a treasure. But was it the only treasure I found? A handwritten note from Widener himself to Edward Newton, dated April 1912, just days before he boarded the Titanic. Excerpt from the story: I’m sitting in my car in the Walmart parking lot wondering if I should go inside. I know there are Pokémon cards in there, but I also know there are people. And not just normal people. These are the people who know exactly when the card vendor restocks the shelves. They walk straight to the aisle without looking up. They scowl if anyone is near them. They aren’t afraid to box out a child for the cards. To get a pack I’d have to compete with them. These middle-aged men. These monsters. These vultures. I stay in the Civic with the heater on and watch them come empty handed and leave with boxes of pokemon in their hands. I’m just thinking about what a petty life this is. I scroll. Humans are the most interesting things in the world. I just don’t enjoy being around them very much. I need a hobby. I do enjoy reading. I read a book, or maybe it was a movie that said, “Young man, go West.” Now people tell me, young man, get a better job, or young man get a wife, or young man find God, or Young man, get a hobby. I want to just say, Old Men, die.

    On Being a Collector of Books (a short story)

  8. Mar 5

    Mission Impossible: Finding Noah’s Ark (a short story)

    I was a young missionary when my companion persuaded me to abandon our assigned duties and join a strange expedition to Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. What followed was five months of faith, doubt, cameras, preachers, and men who desperately wanted to prove that scripture could be found buried in the ice. We found no ark, no beams, no planks—but before I left that mountain I stumbled upon something far stranger: the frozen body of a creature no man could properly name. Whether it was evidence of ancient myth, forgotten species, or simply the imagination of men too eager to believe, I cannot say. I can only tell you what I saw.

    Mission Impossible: Finding Noah’s Ark (a short story)
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About

Frontier Road podcast includes short stories, poems, and excerpts and or abridgments of classical literature, often deriving themes of questioning God, liberation of unbelief, ambiguity and the absurdity of life. We often introduce themes of mid-life crisis, sometimes from a male perspective. Issues of marriage, raising children, mental struggle and melancholy are all major themes within the selected literature. *Frontier Road can often times be satirical and/or irreverent and/or sincere. Viewer discretion advised.

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