Pendulum

Josh, a befuddled seventeen-year-old, wakes to a phone call declaring that his girlfriend Mary is in the hospital from a self-inflicted overdose. As he arrives and receives her dying gesture, a frail hand pointing to a folded piece of paper on the table next to her, his adventure begins. Opening the paper he reads the two words, Myrtle Beach, and then she dies.Suddenly everyone begins to disappear as well and he finds himself alone in the world with only bugs to keep him company.After a month of solitude, he begins his long journey from St. Louis to Myrtle Beach, hoping to find an answer to the riddle scrawled on the piece of paper left behind by his dying girlfriend. Past, present, and future collide inside of Josh's story and his feelings toward Mary. In the past, we see how much he loved her. In the present, we see how much he misses her, and in the future, we will see what awaits him at Myrtle Beach.Sometimes outrageous and sometimes downright honest, Pendulum swings from sarcastically funny to desperately sad. It's a tale of the persistence of love, and a teenager's inability to move on, even in death.

Nathan Provence was born and raised in the Kansas City Metro area. He recently moved to Portland, Oregon where he spends most of his time fixing computers, and writing. He is currently hard at work on three other stories he hopes to publish within the next few years.