For Peterjohn Carlyle Morrison, it is the terror of the burned staring from two black holes reflected in hospital windowpanes. 

Mom is not apple pie but a clone devastated by her son’s wounds, who needs as much care as the dying did in battle. 

Mrs. Warren, his former elementary schoolteacher, offers sanctuary, but Peterjohn's ruined presence is testament to war’s inexorable legacy: loss. Peterjohn's return is not that of her son, killed in a previous war. 

Abandoned to his life, Peterjohn must choose between suicide or reconciliation with what remains of him. 

Micaela Duncan takes him into her lovinghouse. Their relationship is too fragile to withstand the rape of a violated world. 

Imprisonment is not an inevitable destination but arrival at liberation’s gate. In the glass-walled cell of sixty men, Peterjohn Carlyle Morrison experiences the affirmation of the human spirit to transcend despair. 

Images of war do not go away.

First Writer Magazine awarded "I Killed Your Son" one of twelve Special Commendations in its Twelfth International Short Story Contest of August 2016. "I Killed Your Son,” is a short story centered on an 80-year old World War II vet whose images of war crammed away in old boxes remain to be reopened.

After Vietnam.

After 9/11.

After Iraq. 

Before Now.

Parole from San Quentin prison is no release for Peterjohn Carlyle Morrison. Washing dishes in a downtown San Francisco diner provides temporary meaning to his existence. Parole’s end is solitary confinement to despair. Vomiting into the gutter delivers him from the skid-row drunk he has become, sending him South.

Los Angeles confirms he will not find his lost, child’s soul in the post-Vietnam War era of hippies with their dying peace and freedom.

Mason City, Iowa, Heartland of America, is no hegira to Mecca. Peterjohn's marriage to Nancy Linnea Sloane, who visited him in prison, exacerbates the political-Fundamentalist conflicts within her family that mirror America’s increasingly dysfunctional responses to the disasters threatening its survival as a nation of free people. 

Their children’s maturation creates their inexorable destiny to suffer the havoc wreaked upon their parents.

Those family members not killed by 9/11 and Iraq or destroyed by Right-wing Fundamentalism and the Big Short must choose to grieve not or perish in self-pity and regret.

The dissolution of their family forces Peterjohn and Nancy to accept that their mid-American life is an opiate prescribed by Fools perpetuating the destruction of their country. 

In their decision to run the Boston Marathon of 2014, Peterjohn Carlyle Morrison and Nancy Linnea Sloane resurrect their enormous, human capacity to remain unconquered  in the midst of catastrophe.

Tales of humanity told by artists.

Idyllwild Arts was originally known as ISOMATA, the Idyllwild School Of Music And The Arts, conceived in the char of the atom bomb and the holocaust as a place where people could reaffirm their humanity through participation in music, sculpture, painting, dance, and drama. Today, the Idyllwild Arts Academy is the country’s premier and internationally-acclaimed residential arts high school (9th-12th; PG) (September through May) which provides pre-professional training in the arts and a comprehensive college preparatory curriculum to a diverse student body of gifted young artists.

Idyllwild Arts Academy’s 300 students hail from more than 30 countries and pursue artistic excellence in Music, Theatre, Dance, Visual Art, Creative Writing, Film & Digital Media, InterArts, and Fashion Design. Graduates of Idyllwild Arts Academy currently excel in every professional field of the arts including Broadway theatre, primetime television, classical and jazz music, motion pictures, graphic design, photography and more.