Author: Jeff Cassman
The Ashes of Olaf
The Ashes of Olaf
A tale of kings and crosses, set in the blood-soaked North
The Seer’s Fire
The old man’s eyes were milk-white, the color of a dead man’s skin, though he swore he had seen too much to ever be truly blind. He squatted in a seal-hide tent on the Scilly Isles, beside a fire that smelled of fish oil and ash. When Olaf came ashore—tall and broad and cruel-eyed—the fire danced. The blind man did not rise. He only spoke.
“You were born in blood,” he rasped. “You’ll die in it.”
Olaf snorted. His sword still dripped from a raid on the mainland. “So do most men.”
“But you will rise again,” the seer said, “as fire rises from ash. A king. A Christian. A death worthy of songs.”
The Viking prince laughed then, but quietly. The wind carried that laugh into the sea, where it sank like so many ships.
Olaf Tryggvason, Son of the Sea
The boy was born of a murdered king and a fleeing queen, and both his name and his fate were forged in exile. Pirates took him on the Baltic and sold him like cattle. A whore’s child, some whispered. A wraith. But others said the gods marked him, that Odin had placed a raven’s feather beneath his tongue.
In Novgorod, he killed his foster father’s murderer with an axe in the marketplace. The blood splashed across the bread of a merchant’s stall, and the crowd parted like sea foam. His … Read the rest
Raiders of the Lost Cooler
An Old Hickory Odyssey
There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and that if you put an anarchist, a militant atheist, a left-wing nurse with a mobile petting zoo, and a devout Catholic father of 14 on an 80-foot houseboat, you’re going to need bail money or barbecue. Possibly both.
It was a furnace of a late July morning on Old Hickory Lake, the kind of day when the air feels like someone else’s breath. My wife Sarah—God bless that long-suffering woman—had packed us off with her usual combination of precision, pity, and quiet resignation. After 31 years of marriage, she’d long since not-quite accepted that I was part husband, part chaos agent.
“You and your misfit brigade better not die without bringing my Tupperware back,” she said as she kissed me on the cheek and handed me five coolers—three bursting with prosciutto-wrapped cantaloupe, mini beef Wellingtons, bourbon-glazed salmon bites, deviled eggs with truffle oil, and desserts layered like international politics. The other two coolers sloshed with beer, bourbon, and enough mixers to open a bar in Belize.
We were headed out on The Floating Deficit, a Reagan-era 80-foot houseboat docked at Creekwood that belonged to a dentist friend who’d lost a poker game and part of his soul to me. In lieu of cash, he’d agreed to give me usage rights to this floating monument of questionable electrical wiring and faded leather upholstery. The microwave was bigger than most Nashville apartments and the stereo system could rattle your
The Divorce Admiral
Ronald Eugene Traylor had always dreamed of a quiet retirement. Not of grandeur, mind you—he wasn’t that kind of man. A recliner, a flat-top grill, and maybe some quality time teaching his youngest how to skip stones with military precision.
Instead, the very morning of his retirement ceremony—before the sheet cake had even been cut—his wife of nineteen years and 364 days told him, quite plainly, that she had never loved him, hated the sound of his breathing, and was leaving him for her Zumba instructor named Kyle, taking their four kids and both Labradors.
“The kids too?” Ronald asked.
“And the dogs,” she said. “But you can keep your Air Force retirement and your dumb little coin collection.”
She left him with a pension, a sad jar of cocktail peanuts, and the lingering scent of betrayal mixed with Bath & Body Works. Ronald signed the divorce papers with the same stoicism he’d once reserved for nuclear protocols, then drove straight to the VFW where he drank enough to put down a Clydesdale.
He stood on the bar at one point and gave a speech no one asked for, about patriotism and how “you don’t really know a woman until she says she’s leaving you for a guy with clear skin.”
The next morning, wearing aviators, tube socks, and a Hawaiian shirt that smelled like regret, Ronald wandered toward Green Hill, TN—drawn by nothing more than a whisper of lake wind and a promise from a former colleague that said … Read the rest
The Pirate of the Cumberland
It was a fine July morning on OHL—humid, sunlit, and vibrating with reckless optimism.
Mark rolled into the Cherokee marina parking lot like a man with a plan and zero understanding of physics. He emerged from his 2003 Suburban (which he had christened The Kraken) wearing aviator sunglasses, board shorts, and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt that screamed divorced magician energy. Draped over his shoulder was a pool noodle he referred to as his “first mate.”
He strolled up to the rental kiosk with the swagger of a man who thought liability waivers were merely suggestions.
“I be the Pirate of the Cumberland,” he announced to the teenager behind the counter. “And I’ll be taking Pontoon 14 off yer hands.”
The teenager blinked once, then twice, unsure if this was cosplay or a mental health emergency.
“Uh… okay. Ten people max. No towing. No excessive noise. And absolutely no renaming the vessel—company policy.”
Mark slapped down his ID and a laminated certificate titled Official Renaming Ceremony for S.S. Wet Dreams.
“She sails under new colors, lad.”
By noon, the pontoon was a floating estrogen bomb. Thirteen bridesmaids—yes, thirteen, not counting Mark—wearing matching neon-pink swimsuits emblazoned with “Bride’s Babes” had boarded the now-rebranded S.S. Wet Dreams. They came armed with Bluetooth speakers, vodka in Capri Sun bags, seven coolers, a charcuterie board shaped like a penis, a fog machine (for reasons), and at least one vape pen that doubled as a highlighter.
Mark was the only man onboard, … Read the rest