Charles Frenzel

I am having Friday lunch at a popular French Quarter cafe with the youthful, as well as pleasant, Sandy Meraux, an engagement fueled by the upcoming renewal of my lease on her wealthy father’s building where my fledgling business, the Nightwing Testing Laboratory, is located. I’m most fortunate to be offered a long term lease […]

The Cassells Part 2 Then the troubles started. Nancy flushed with anger at the memory of the way she and her husband had been manipulated by a European consultant. Nancy shook her head as she remembered when Blain had insisted on hiring a certain Dr. Fuchs, a German manufacturing consultant. It seemed to Nancy that Fuchs came highly […]

The Cassells Part 1 Nancy Cassell wondered if the summer would ever end. New Orleans sweltered under a haze of chemical laden salt air that colored the short shadows cast by the relentless midday sun a pale yellowish gray. Out here in the east where everything seemed to settle, there wasn’t much in the way […]

Malcolm Adams: Part 3 Adams returned to his point, “Our sources tell us that the pouring schedules in the concrete foundations at the Chernobyl site are faulty.” “And this means,” she prompted. “The critical supports under the reactor pile will probably fail within a short period of time—probably not until after the reactor is brought […]

Malcolm Adams: Part 2 For her part, Madge Gonzaga brought out her eyeglasses and fiddled with the thin folder in front of her, trying to decide what she thought of Malcolm Adams. On the surface he was an ordinary British business man who owned some minor oil interests in Nigeria as well as a small […]

A Meeting with Malcolm Adams, Part One: For Malcolm Adams, the flight from Mobile, Alabama back to Washington, D.C. had seemed almost as long as his earlier flight from London Heathrow to the States. By now, he hoped, the replacement diesel generator would be fitted out below deck and his freshly painted yacht would be […]

Lydia and Charles Frenzel (pen name L.C. Frenzel) announce the pre-publication of “Claire and Pem” on Amazon Kindle in mid-December. Read more on fatsquirrelpublishing.com or lunarianepic.com Back Story: Lunaria is an old world with a culture that at first seems medieval, but slowly Claire Miller finds what seems like magic is actually underlying technology that […]

I call Julie who by now is at the office to tell her my immediate schedule. After further adventures at the bank, I have a few extra minutes before Monday’s staff meeting at the office, so I drop by Noel’s office to have a chat about my liability insurance—or soon to be lack of said […]

“Ms. Nightwing?” The voice belongs to my field tech in Houston, Texas. “What is it, Laz?” Laz, short for Lazarra. Lazarra Rayburn, my field tech at the Sabine River Nuclear Project. She is a smart young woman that I like a lot. Background noise on the connection blurs her speech.

I am a voice in my head. As long as I don’t interfere, the rest of me functions rather well—until Miss V hands me the fortune cookie at the finish line of a plateful of her twice baked pork. “Herro Razalla,” Miss Violet does the Chinese thing with Lazarra even though she’s Stanford, Class of […]

Thump, thump, and bang…thump, thump, and bang— repeating endlessly. Macquereau winces and I hold on tightly to the vibrating steering wheel as we bounce over a stretch of bad highway between Vidor and the Louisiana border. The concrete slabs were poured over a poorly prepared foundation. Heavy trucks slamming across the loose slabs caused them […]

Captain Srrith smoothed her orange fur across the bandage over her right eye and suppressed her irritation by concentrating on the trajectory displays flickering across her pilot’s console. Imagine being mistaken for a cave leopard! Aldren would be laughing all the way to the next star system when he saw her recording of the indigenous […]

The tragic episode began when Carl’s wife said that Jim’s barbeque was better than his. “A damn site better than yours,” he remembered her yelling at him. Jill had said it, and he couldn’t forget it. After her loud and slightly drunken pronouncement, she had flounced off across their new, Mexican-tile patio leaving  him standing […]

I pull the sealed tab on the bottle of skimmed milk and pour a slug of soured milk over my beautiful peach. A key turns in the side door in the dining room. Molly Flannigan lets herself into my house with her usual, intimidating flourish. With grace and skill I jerk back the hand with […]

I’d never make it in paradise. I ask too many questions of management, stuffed animals don’t make me feel warm or cozy, and I stir up trouble when I get bored. I swallow hard against a lump in my throat and then shiver with a sudden chill. For a moment I hope that the dream […]