This poem was inspired by a group of artists who invited me to share my poems with them. Every Sunday morning, they brought things we could see — paintings, pottery, masks, sculptures. They could hear the words of my poems, but my Muse told me to share a poem they could see… and they liked it!

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Roman Strings was originally published in MuserScribe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A short alternate history story adapted from my unfinished screenplay about Scotland

This was originally intended as the opening narration in a screenplay, but as I developed the play a little further, I decided to scrap the entire original concept and move the action from Scotland to West Virginia. However, this original narration is still compelling in my opinion.

During the early 1600s, Highland Scotland and Northern Ireland were the last bastions of Celtic civilization. Tribal petty kings called chiefs-of-name ruled over interconnected family units known as clans. These clans lived in a system of land ownership where the chief gave his followers the ability to live semi-nomadic lives with their livestock on his land in exchange for loyalty in battle.

These people spoke Gaelic Irish and followed cultural traditions enforced by aristocratic bards and semi-religious judges, who had lasted almost unchanged since the fall of Rome. Tragically, when he ascended to the throne, James II forced the Irish and Scottish rulers to exile their bards and send their children to English boarding schools to ‘cure’ them of their Celtic culture.

While it never completely took, it did finally break a truly ancient civilization that had survived almost everything else, but what if that hadn’t happened?

What if Scotland and Northern Ireland were still a Celtic tribal society? How might such an old-fashioned Celtic society look in modern times with modern technology? What might the world think of such a society existing on the fringe of modern democratic Europe?

Winston Churchill called it ‘a no man’s land beyond the civilized world’. American writer Robert Howard said it was ‘a place where men never forgot what was in their hearts.’

The Gaeltacht, the autonomous region of northern Scotland and the Irish coast, has held an appeal to the western mind for centuries. Despite being a region of Great Britain roughly the size of Maine, the area has been the setting for countless romance novels, action movies, and role-playing games.

Its inhabitants, the Gaels, a Celtic people related to the Welsh, are famous for their warrior ethos. When Gaelic auxiliaries fought in WWII, some famously carried broadswords, Winchester rifles, and even dueling pistols, but defeated the Germans again and again in guerrilla warfare. Gaelic pirates were given free rein on Russian cargo ships during the early days of the Cold War with devastating effect.

This has led some commentators to claim they are a perfect time capsule of Viking warrior culture unchanged since the Middle Ages, and to others it has led to accusations of barbarism and backwardness. 19th-century American racial theorists thought the Gaels were Mongolian in origin and even put forward that Afghans were actually Gaels converted to Islam.

Missionaries who have visited the region have described ancient religious rites that mixed Catholic masses with alcohol-fueled Dionysian revelry, where stories of pre-Christian gods and heroes are told like they happened only last year. UN aid workers have told horror stories of civil wars and revenge killings between local strongmen and their supporters.

These contradictions and tales that are perhaps far-fetched or perhaps disturbingly believable have only added to the mystery and romance of the area to many throughout the world. Between 1900 and 1975, over 300 books about the Gaeltacht were published in Japan, 115 in India, and almost 250 across Mexico and Central America.

So the question is, what is the truth? What is life actually like in the Gaeltacht? That’s what we will explore tonight on Modern Mysteries with Jack Clarke.

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The Last Tribal Society In Europe was originally published in MuserScribe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I went down a rabbit hole of weird fantasy novels and penned a tongue-in-cheek response.

I recently published my first romantasy novella, and to my shock and dismay, I was shelved next to a novel that I kid you not was called Trailer Park Goblins. The cover featured two little green goblins who somehow looked like supermodels and wore tight bikinis. I blinked. What the absolute hell was this, and what did it have to do with my poor romantic comedy?

A quick Google search revealed that Trailer Park Goblins was part of an entire subgenre of trailer park-themed fantasy romances published by Royal Guard Publishing. There are Trailer Park Elves, Trailer Park Goblins, and finally Trailer Park Bikini Vampires. Each cover featured a suitably weird-looking AI bikini model.

What the hay?

Royal Guard claims to be a publisher of men’s adventure: a genre usually categorized by tough guy heroes and quirky damsels in distress. I have nothing against men’s adventure as a retro genre.

Honestly, the line between classic pulp and early men’s adventure is very thin. L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter’s Conan the Barbarian parodies were sometimes published as men’s adventure stories, and Robert Howard’s Afghanistan stories only lacked the sex expected in the genre, which came to prominence almost 30 years after his death.

Many of these books certainly included a lot of tasteless misogyny, but some were no different from romantic thrillers marketed at women except for the gender of the protagonist. You can’t tell me that Storm Cycle by Iris Johanson wouldn’t be men’s adventure if told through the POV of the love interest, snarky mercenary John Tanek: the man who repossesses fighter planes.

All the same, the question that interested me was what’s the point of setting all of these in a trailer park?

Firstly, what is a trailer park? There are two different meanings to trailer park, at least in North East Kansas, where I’m from. One is a rental community of tiny, cheaply made buildings called trailers. Such places are thought of as scenes of abject rural poverty: basically, the Midwestern version of a slum.

Two is a semi-permanent community of house trailers and RVs where the retired and digital nomads live transient lives, sometimes among beautiful park-like locations close to highways. These places are for well-to-do bohemians, and I wouldn’t mind living there at all if I made more money.

Both these are paradoxically good settings for a book. Both involve tight quarters with little privacy and are places where fascinating people could be believable as living. One is a tight-knit community filled with potential for friendship or hate, while the other is almost not a community at all, but just people passing through.

A rural slum is also a good setting if you want to talk about class and discrimination. Perhaps in a fantasy world, some races are relegated to these slums. Perhaps Goblins live in trailer parks because they are forced out of the town proper?

A semi-permanent campground is a good setting because people can arrive from all over the world. Maybe nomadic societies move from one campground to another, or maybe a campground is a patchwork society of many people from many cultures who happen to be together at one time, cue tension and drama. Perhaps Elves live in these places because the deep forest has been cut down and turned into this park.

I get it. I’m overthinking the setting of a clearly bad novel series. The goblins in bikinis should honestly be a dead giveaway that the author isn’t thinking about these things.

And indeed, the official blurb for Trailer Park Elves, the earliest example, describes it as a LitRPG based around base-building mechanics. The trailer park is level one in a base-building progression fantasy, and thus, the hero presumably turns it into a more complex society as he romances the scantily dressed elves.

That doesn’t mean that this setting doesn’t have possibilities that these particular authors are ignoring. Thus, if I was writing a trailer park themed men’s adventure romantasy it would be something like the following excerpt:

Theovald the Magyar thought as he worked. It had been a shock to have to fight a man the same day he arrived in camp, but he wasn’t going to let what the man said about the elves go unchallenged. Forest elves were the only permanent residents in places like this because they had always been here.

His heavy arms and, of course, the crowbar made short work of the broken-down SUV, and soon he’d have his 300 dollars for the scrap metal. Even this rusted junk could feed him for a while. After a moment, an old man in sandals crept up behind him. Theovald turned and held the crowbar high to block any oncoming attack.

The old man smiled; his long hair and tasseled leather vest proclaimed him a wizard. Everyone knew a wizard couldn’t be defended against with a crowbar.

“Saw you fight Jorn Oakenbarrel last night. A very strange move. If you fight for a young woman’s honor, you should call yourself a knight. This morning, his cousins said they would use the young lady to get to you.”

Theovald wiped his brow with his bandanna and put his armored coat back on. The garment was thick denim covered front and back in metal studs and spikes, which made attack as annoying as possible.

“But being a wizard, you know where she is, so I can get to her first.”

“Bravo, my brother! You, I can dig!” The wizard took out his pouch of green gold and lit his pipe. In a moment, the smoke opened his third eye and granted him the power needed to teleport Theovald where he needed to go.

Within seconds, the Magyar appeared with armor and weapon on the path which separated the section of camp where he had previously been working from the more remote section, where, unbeknownst to him, Dahlia and her brothers had their own trailer.

Turning around, he saw her looking confused as she picked roadside flowers. He held up a hand to his mouth for ‘shhh’, and that’s when he heard the boots of the Oakenbarrel cousins in the tree line.

“You’d better run; this is more about me than you.” He said and readied himself for another battle.

It was bad luck, but at this point, it only ended with him or their clan being run back into the highway to the next camp. If the gods were feeling righteous, it wouldn’t be him since he was willing to fight hard.

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My Attempt At Trailer Park Fantasy, Yes That’s A Genre was originally published in MuserScribe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This writer reflects on the unsettling truth behind her story “Under Long-Term Observation” and on when a husband stops being a partner and becomes a rather sinister observer.

The pothos plant on the windowsill had drooped after the move.
That morning, the soil was dark and damp.

Nancy stood there longer than she meant to.

She had not watered it.

She was certain of that.

Excerpt from “Under Long-Term Observation,” a story in Scarlet Yearnings: Beyond First Glance: Stories of Love and Desire by Scarlet Ibis James.

Something Feels Wrong in this Relationship

Most people who leave a relationship can point to a moment when they felt it. Not proof. Not evidence. Just a feeling.

Something was wrong.

In my short story “Under Long-Term Observation,” that feeling sits at the center of Nancy’s marriage.

Nancy believes the problem is simple. The marriage has grown cold. Communication has collapsed. Divorce feels like the only honest next step.

So she signs the papers.

“That completes it,” the lawyer said. “You are now legally divorced.”
Nancy set the pen down carefully, as if she were placing a glass ornament on a thin shelf.

For Nancy, the divorce feels like an ending. For Bill, it is the beginning of something else.

The Man Nancy Thought She Married
Readers who have encountered Bill and Nancy in an earlier story collection (LINK) might recognize them as an ordinary couple.

A strained marriage. Years together. The quiet erosion many relationships experience.

But in “Under Long-Term Observation,” the reader learns something Nancy never fully understood.

Bill has been living a double life.

He is not simply a distant husband. He is an operative. A contract killer. And the language he uses to describe his life reveals how he truly sees the world.

Cover. Mission. Tasking. Debrief.
The words that defined his life before her came back as naturally as breath.

Even marriage becomes something procedural. Strategic. Something to be maintained.

Marriage as Cover
Bill once convinced himself that his marriage to Nancy was simply a shield.

A normal life that allowed him to disappear in plain sight.

Tax returns. Couple photos. Neighbors who believed he was boring.

But when the marriage ends, something unsettling becomes clear.

Nancy was never just a cover.

Somewhere between the party where he met her and the morning he watched her cradle the mug that she said meant nothing, something changed in him. She had stopped being only a subject.

In Bill’s mind, Nancy becomes something else entirely. A file that cannot be closed.

Observation
After the divorce, Nancy moves to a small studio apartment. She believes she is finally free. But strange things begin happening.

A plant she forgot to water suddenly looks healthy.

The pothos plant on the windowsill had drooped after the move.
That morning, the soil was dark and damp.

…The mug sat in the center of the shelf, turned so the fading gold letters faced her.
She had placed it at the back. She was sure of it.

Nancy begins to doubt her own memory. But readers know the truth. Bill is still watching.

He learned her commute.
The path she walked from the train.
The bodega where she bought yogurt and plantain chips.

Observation is his profession. And Nancy has become the subject.

The Truth We Learn About the People We Love
When I wrote this story, I thought about a difficult truth in relationships. We believe we know the person we are with. But knowing someone is not a single moment of discovery. It is a process.

Years of observation. Small revelations. Unexpected shocks. Sometimes we discover tenderness. Sometimes we discover danger.

And sometimes we discover that the person beside us was someone else all along.

The Files We Leave Behind in Other People
One of the ideas that haunts me most about this story is simple.

Even when relationships end, the versions of ourselves that existed inside them do not disappear. They live on.

In memory. In imagination. In regret. Or, in Bill’s case, in observation.

And that leaves us with an unsettling question.

Who is still carrying a file on you?

© 2026 — Scarlet Ibis James. All Rights Reserved.

➡ Learn more about the book Scarlet Yearnings Beyond First Glance:
www.scarletibisjames.com

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The Marriage Was Over. The Surveillance Had Just Begun. was originally published in MuserScribe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.