Cover Blurb for Story, "The Final Cruise"
By F. Ellsworth Lockwood



In The Final Cruise, TJ Auldman is set drift in the deepest sea … that of the mind.

TJ’s tiny cabin, having no foundation, breaks loose from its spindly stilts, and the shack tumbles down the hill, landing as a pile of splinters at the bottom of the cliff. TJ, who is an old seaman, is knocked unconscious and set adrift in a torrent of dreams.

The riptide of hallucinations draws him seaward, into a mirage of old shipmates, who pull him aboard a ghost-like ship, the creation of his subconscious mind, and TJ embarks on his final cruise.

The shipmates, he finds, are colorful characters from his past. These forceful men and women, with their contradictory messages, have returned from like ghosts from the underworld, perhaps to set him free, or perhaps to swamp him with new miseries.

Either way, it is as if he were in some perverse version of purgatory, and he is given a second chance, the option to alter critical choices and to undo mistakes of his past -- or not -- and all the while he is fully aware that he has sailed irreversibly into the swirling vortex of death.