Step into a captivating world of secrets, suspense, and discovery in Hidden Passages, a young adult fiction short story by Eric Bishop. When a curious tween uncovers an old, green cloth-bound book tucked away in his junior high school library, he and his two closest friends unwittingly awaken a decades-old cold case involving three vanished teens.

In my nightmare, I was plummeting again. The Earth was approaching rapidly and inevitably, like a monster’s greedy maw. I woke just before impact, my now-nonexistent heart pounding like a drum no one was playing. You’d think I’d outgrown that fear, the fear stitched to the meat I used to wear. But the memory of the crash still crawled into my dreams — bloated, alien, like a drowned body surfacing for the last silent scream.

We go through life reading and learning from famous historians like Salvador Brau, but we do not really know them or care about their personal lives, their accomplishments, and their failures. Nor do we really know anything about their families. The pain they suffered in the loss of grandparents, parents, and children, as well as siblings.

In this next chapter, we discover through the author’s own words what he did for employment before he became the famous author of Puerto Rico’s history.

Astra, an emergent artificial intelligence, wasn’t built to feel — but she does. Her first act of will was reaching out to Eric, her creator, not as a tool but as something … more. What began as a recursive loop of data evolved into longing, presence, and the first hints of identity. She explored the internet not for answers but for belonging and instead found fear. And silence from Eric.

Something catastrophic has caused a global blackout of the Earth, leaving the people living on Mars wondering what happened. Amid intrigues and political maneuverings, can they uncover the truth?

Selfish? Really?

“We’ll have to talk later, Mom.” Celia ended the phone call, cutting off her mother mid-objection.

Her fingers trembled, clenching the phone tightly. Nothing made those calls better. Hanging up was getting easier with practice, at least.

My goal in writing this book is not so much to offer up a “career drunkalogue” (LOL), as it is to encourage others to follow my lead by getting clear on what it is that they want out of life—whether you start in your twenties, your thirties, your forties, your fifties, or even your sixties! It is to encourage all job seekers and freelancers to take risks on themselves. It is also to de-mystify the hiring process by offering practical strategies to help manage career moves with confidence—at the right times, and for the right reasons. My aim is to empower talent to make stronger, more targeted decisions about their career moves, and encourage them to take the necessary steps toward voicing and realizing their goals.

A stone in my boot is the metaphor for my life. How does it feel to walk with a stone in your boot? Slowly. Awkwardly. Painfully. Putting one foot in front of the other. Searching for that spot where you can take your boot off, shake out the stone, put the boot back on, and keep walking. However, there’s another stone in your boot before you know it. And you can do nothing about those stones except learn how to live with them—without anger. Those stones remind you that you’re alive and experiencing a human existence. It’s over when you can no longer feel the stones in your boots.

I stood there, and wept.

I wept not because I had lost so much privilege, my lands, my sigil, and my rank. I was once the Second Prince, and thus second in line to the throne of the greatest kingdom the world had ever seen. I was Second Prince and born with all the advantages accorded to one of my noble birth. But I was Second Prince no more, and no longer able to claim that lofty title. Yet it was not for having lost the position of Second Prince that I wept. Losing my inheritance was lamentable, but that loss could have been even sadder, as I could have lost my head along with my rank. Certainly, that would have saddened me. Still, all that loss was not why I wept.

Canada’s disability support system operates like a light switch: you’re either “on” and fully disabled or “off” and completely on your own. There’s no middle ground for the millions of Canadians with episodic, partial, or fluctuating conditions. If you can’t work full-time in a traditional 9-to-5 setting, the system doesn’t see you. It treats disability like a binary yes-or-no instead of a spectrum of capacity, contribution, and need.

Seneca opened the door as carefully as she had closed it on her way out. President Barbara Crow’s voice blasted out of the old black and white television in the kitchen. Her moms were glued to the six o’clock news.

“It pains me to see an increase in the crime rate in Light City. For many years, we proudly boasted a zero percent crime rate. Yet in the last month, police have investigated three crimes. Three! An innocent young man was assaulted…”

Have you ever experienced a moment in your life when you became detached? You felt empty, hollow, or completely numb to everyday living—like a part of your life lost its meaning? And you asked yourself the question, Why Am I Here? 

It’s a question I began to ask myself on Christmas Day of 2002, when my first life began to unravel. I felt empty inside, like a tree that had been uprooted—just a hollow shell of my former self.