I can’t help the past. Even if it would have been good, and sometimes it was… It’s gone. I met Angie where all transitory beings are met. I met her in a bar.
A cool basement bar, the “Das Keller,” scattered with peanut shells on smooth cement. Where a young demonic Hitler might thrive, but there were no demons on that bright, wasting-away afternoon. Unless you counted the ones inside me.
Continue reading “Old Haunts by Christopher Ananias”
Will stopped at the doorway of the small unkempt home, his hand grasping the door frame. He stood for a second, hesitating, before walking inside. His father had lived there for a few years before he died, but Will had only been inside the house a handful of times. The damp smell hit him as soon as he crossed the threshold. A solitary recliner sat in the corner of the living room. A TV guide perched on the arm. The place where he remembered his father the most. In front of the TV watching old shows, replying only in grunts when Will spoke to him.
Continue reading “The Painted Smile by Matthew Whistance”
A lack of intricacy in the way of plot is no bar to fine theatre. In Mingus Mahoon’s so-called ‘adaptation’ of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, however, it is. Put baldly, this is, in Mahoon’s own words, “the Hamlet of Polonius’s mind”, more specifically a Hamlet who bedevils Polonius’s dreams, a Hamlet wild-haired and swivel-eyed and clad in a straitjacket, a sayer of one word, and one word only, the word “words”, the one word he appears to mean when he says it, and he says it repeatedly. It could be said that there are a lot of words in this monodrama, and there are, lots and lots of them, but all variations on this one word “words”, the very word, or words, of course, repeated by Hamlet in his reply to Polonius’s one time query, “What do you read, my lord?” A perfectly reasonable question, one might think, given that Hamlet had, at that moment, his nose in a book. What Mingus Mahoon’s interpretation does, and that so affectedly, is to pose several key questions. Is this a Hamlet made mad by reading deep into the night? Is this a Hamlet of the homeless mind? A Hamlet not overly concerned with affairs of state? a Hamlet without his Horatio to keep him in check? a Hamlet unknown to himself but long suspected? a Hamlet not yet acquainted with the wisdom of gravediggers? a Hamlet so out of sorts he thinks himself dust, yet lingers, unable to unloose his restraints and fly free of the padded room he occupies? Clear as it is from the outset that this is Hamlet as phantasmagorially conceived in another man’s psyche, that of Polonius, it is equally clear that the Polonius who dreams this Hamlet is a Polonius most unfamiliar to his daytime companions, a Polonius not given to doling out advice, a Polonius bootless under the bedsheets, a Polonius well acquainted with the vicissitudes of being alive, a Polonius pencil-bearded and sweating by the light of a mint-green lamp.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever: Hamlet North-North-West by Geraint Jonathan”
I am not a cynical luddite, but I believe everyone ought to have a little oldfashionedness in her for the sake of maintaining a soul. Still, progress isn’t completely evil. It brings more good than bad in medicine (at least it does when you compare modern TB and smallpox statistics to the way things were a hundred years ago). But I’m also convinced that as an animal, one whose evolution is influenced by long-term realities, we are not wholly prepared to accept sudden changes. Moreover, being small we are overwhelmed by reasons to feel worthless and dumb; and when it becomes clear that a ten-year-old can do more with our phones than we can, let’s just say it is not good for the self esteem. (Then again I can drive a stick and parallel park without an AI, so there you little Weaselings!)
For at least 99% of human history we lived the same way. It was hard to win a living from the soil and when we managed to light a fire with rocks and damp kindling and somehow outlasted another winter we felt like whatever the word for rock star was way back in the Middle Ages.
Continue reading “Week 581- Have You Never Been Melodramatic”
By the time the rain arrived in earnest, the house already knew where it would fail.
The first leak appeared near the window. One drop fell with stubborn consistency, as if the roof had chosen that spot long before the clouds gathered. At first, it was easy to ignore. Rain always starts politely in Liberia, tapping the zinc roof the way a visitor taps a door—soft, respectful, almost apologetic. You tell yourself it will pass. You tell yourself the house has survived worse.
Continue reading “The Weather that Lives With Us by Marvin Garbeh Davis”
Xius waved at the family driving away in their BMW M3—it had license plate frames from his cousin’s dealership—with their brand new Fénix rolled up and strapped to its roof. He locked his showroom’s front door, hit a switch, and the sign reading “New and Used Flying Carpets!” flickered out. Sighing as he tried to ignore the worn linoleum, and the faded map of the world, marked with places such as El Dorado, Xanadu, and St. Brigid’s Well, he gathered together his receipts—paperwork would take him about two hours, he figured. He smiled as he thought of his daughters nagging him to get a computer, but he didn’t see the point, now—he had been at this for almost forty years, and every day seemed as if it might be the last.
Continue reading “Xius and his Flying Carpet Emporium by Hermester Barrington”
At what point, the man wondered, does semi-light become semi-dark. It was, he recognized, his first intriguing thought of the day after sitting immobile at his desk for hours with legs tightening and stomach growling. And the idea had only come to him after looking out his window and noticing that the sun was beginning to set. So it was becoming semi-light. Or semi-dark.
Continue reading “Transition by Chris Klassen”
Dad’s baritone booms through my cell phone, his words striking.
“So, how’s teaching going, old sport? Are you getting tougher with them?”
I stare at the cardboard box that I’ve plopped onto the plastic coffee table. The box looks like it could break.
“I think people are too tough already. They’re freshmen, not Marine recruits.”
A pause. It practically hums.
“Old sport, but that’s your problem. You don’t understand. The world’s got to kick your ass a little bit.”
Continue reading “Breaking by Yash Seyedbagheri”
It was a cold day in the Tonopah Basin. Ground temperatures hovered near freezing. Even seasoned Nevadans found such days eerie; frightening almost. The sun still arced through the sky, the desert looked as it did on the days it was baked, but William Navarro’s breath had condensed during his last refueling stop. It was as if the air had been shifted one world over, destabilizing the familiarity of the landscapes through nothing more than a drop in temperature.
Continue reading “Test Site by Zachery Brasier”
Forget George and Martha, Bill and Hillary and even JFK and Jackie–and although Eleanor Roosevelt was a winner, there was a tremendous distance between her and FDR that was probably enhanced by policies rather than feeling. No, for me the most interesting relationship between a husband and wife who at one time occupied the White House was that of John (1735-1826) and Abigail Adams (1744-1818). They were married for fifty-four years (when such lengthy unions were common amongst people who managed to live long), and through their correspondences (which were required due to John having to serve the nation from afar) the reader is able to admire a loving relationship between two opposite personalities who met correctly on higher thoughts and had the admirable ability to like each other.
Continue reading “Auld Author: Dearest Friend: The Letters of John and Abigail Adams.”
literally stories 