All Stories, General Fiction

The Attic Room by Cris Aboobaker

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In the dim twilight of Charlie’s bar an old man sat at the counter muttering about the weather. Outside, night winds blew up from the sea, salving the day’s heat still rising from baked pavements. It was too hot the old man said, it was too dry; his bones ached, his bowels didn’t move; John, the barman nodded, wiping glasses with a small towel. The barking laughs of other regulars, the clinking of the pool table, the air conditioner’s hum and Bob Montgomery’s measured voice on the TV lamenting another Red Sox loss mixed with the old man’s mutters.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Backwaters by Christopher J. Ananias

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Jenny stood at the dingy laundromat’s bulletin board. She wore a bright red Indiana University shirt and jeans. The crude flyer showed five or six stick figures holding hands in a circle. Two suspiciously looked like they had a penis or almost three legs. She smiled and thought, Maybe that’s what I want to see. They danced in bright green crayon slashes of grass in some pagan ritual around a blue gazing-ball. The smiley-face sun, shining from the top right corner, looked sneaky and somehow hateful. Like it was holding its middle sun-finger up just off the page. Black words cut across the lightly shaded blue sky. FORTUNES READ by Sue at Backwaters Salon $50. No Refunds.  

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All Stories, Fantasy

They Say It’s Wonderful by Prin Sairungsri

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In our city, the floodgates are kept shut by a machine powered on human breath. We call it the regulator. It listens to the lungs the same way a metronome listens to music. If rhythm breaks, the gates slip. Then the river takes everything.

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All Stories, sunday whatever

Sunday Whatever. An Essay – No One But a Blockhead Would by Stephen Silvester

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Why and how and what do we write? This question could (and probably should) be reordered and its verb could equally be changed to paint, sculpt, act, dance … Human beings do these strange things to make their mark, a little stand against the indifferent and inexorable passage of time, and have been doing so, it seems, ever since they could, as has been revealed in distant caves: stencilled hands in Argentina and pictures of pig hunting in Sulawesi. This brings to mind for some reason a discreet headline I spotted years ago in a once reputable newspaper: ‘Carvings twice as old as thought.’ Were they being done instinctively, or was the sub-editor mischievous or sloppy? But the original question was about writing. Does graffiti count? Seen by some as an ugly nuisance, by others as valid self-expression, it can be inane – Kilroy woz ere – or emotionally significant to the inscriber – Jack cartoon heart with an arrow through it Jill – and innocent enough as it competes with similar 2,000-year-old declarations on ancient monuments; the lovers are marking a moment in their own story (or stories if the imagined one takes a new direction). Maybe all writing is about story: the shopping list a snapshot of my diet and tastes at one time; the letter a revelation (or concealment) of how I feel about what’s going on in my life and in the wider world; even the essay exposes thoughts or beliefs that may change the next day. Or maybe it’s even more fundamental than that: the power and promise of the word, the uttering of a certain form of words in the incantations of religion and magic, the straining of a word in select company towards the ineffable. In the beginning was the Word.

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Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 604 – Inhaling Soot,I’ll Walk Next Time And Rob And Kevin.

gwencron

Before I forget, I’ll answer the riddle that I set on Week 602.

What completes the list?

sore

keel

cosh mark

???

The first three are anagrams of the National Symbols of England (Rose), Wales (Leek), Ireland (Shamrock)

So the fourth has to be:

The list

That is an anagram for Scotland’s (Thistle)

I was being a bit unfair as there was a distinct advantage from this side of the pond!

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

Bangkok, If You’re Listening by Prin Sairungsri

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I wake up face-down on cold vinyl tile, my sweaty cheek glued to the gray-specked floor. My mouth tastes like someone juiced a cigarette, poured it into a rotten durian, and forced it all down my throat. For a second, I think I’ve died in a stranger’s apartment. Then I see my crusty Jordan 1’s stuck on the ceiling fan.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction

I Don’t Like to Complain by Russell Dupont

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I don’t like to complain.

When you live in a neighborhood, side-by-side with other home owners, there’s a little give-and-take that has to go on. On one side of us there’s the Cummings. The Cummings are in their fifties and almost every Sunday they have a little family barbecue, their two sons and their families come over and the kids, they’re still kids, and they make a little noise but Fred Cummings is a good guy and I don’t mind the smoke from his grill because what he’s cooking usually smells good. By seven o’clock, they’re long gone.

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All Stories, Fantasy, Horror, Short Fiction

The Landovers by Frederick K Foote

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I’m Lloyd Landover (aka Low), and this is the first day of high school for my twin sister Linda (aka Falling Down Girl) and me.

Our Mom is Lidia Landover, and she works with numbers for the federal government. She’s not a mathematician, statistician, physicist, astronomer, actuary, or accountant.

Mom doesn’t solve math problems. She doesn’t create theories based on math. She plays very intently with every level of math, and somewhere in the results are stuff the government really wants. She calls her work “math doodling.” 

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Amelia in Waiting by Leila Allison

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The cataract sky saw not, yet watched; the wind moved not, yet listened; God spoke not, yet instructed. The day simply was and would be until the last mind stopped thinking about it. A low slung blotch of scuzzy radiance, which Amy assumed was the sun, slouched west within the ashes.

Amy gazed out the living room window. Only a double thickness of glass lay between her lungs and the poisons of an imagined alien atmosphere

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All Stories, Fantasy

Penny Catch by Marco Etheridge

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A moment before the horror begins.

Imagine two ruthless creatures, each a child’s worst—and often last—nightmare. The first fiend
is a shape-shifting monster. He terrorizes and devours children in the guise of Pennywise, an evil clown. Pennywise gained public attention in a book by a famous American author. The book is purported to be fiction, but this was a ruse to hide the author’s desperate fear of the main character, Pennywise. Alas, the child-eating clown is all too real.

Our second nightmare is the officially sanctioned kidnapper and imprisoner of children, the notorious Child Catcher. This greasy villain from the land of Vulgaria came to notoriety in the documentary film Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.

An ocean separates these two terrors, and we must be grateful for this small blessing. For if these monsters should ever meet… No! It is too horrible to contemplate! 

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