Sounds burrow in, fill Walsh’s craving mind. The bus door opens, like a hospital emergency room. He lunges on board, his orange sash of the Buddhist colours close to his cheek, hiding the scratches and whiskers on his face. The bus driver doesn’t even flinch, hits the accelerator. “Their Union tells them don’t get involved,” Walsh thinks.
“This will be my healing ride. Over the bridge to the other side.”
Continue reading “The Orange Sash by Harrison Kim”
“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”
– Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
“We are all of us alone.” – Harold Bloom
“As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
“Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” – Harold Pinter
“NO EASY WAY TO BE FREE.” – The Who, “Slip Kid”
Warning to the Reader: The following essay will sometimes appear to jump and leap from thing to thing with no apparent reason. As in life, there is a reason, even if it isn’t apparent. While under the influence, the author believes this discontinuous form is a part of the modern condition. Thank you. – D.W.B.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – A True Tale of Stories Literally by Dale Wiliams Barrigar”
Here we are at Week 574.
I can’t believe that the first week in March is already now over.
Idiot gardeners are outside tiding up. They’re wasting their time. March is a sneaky bastard of a month. You think the weather will get better but it doesn’t. Rest assured we will be in for gales and snow. Twice I spun my car off the road and both times it was in March.
Continue reading “Week 574 – Satanic Third Month, I Never Mentioned S.O.B, And Impossible Travel Insurance.”
Gregor hesitated at the door of ‘Till Dawn Night-Club’. He took a deep breath and walked in. Two rather large gentleman walked over to him.
“Don’t think you should be here pal! We’re fucking shut.”
One stood in front of him and the other guy moved slightly to his side.
He took a deep breath, “I know. I’m not here for any trouble, I was just wanting to speak to JoJo.”
“Is he expecting you?”
Gregor looked round at the other man.
“No…”
‘Well fuck off then!!’
Continue reading “Godfather JoJo By Hugh Cron (Adult Content)”
“I hate this fucking job!” Rob, the disgruntled night security guard, muttered to himself as he did his rounds in the empty department store.
Continue reading “Seasonal Angst: High Drama in the Diorama by Bud Pharo”
The sun is sunny—not thoroughly unpleasant—but not a sun for picnics with Mary Lou down on the Potomac. Mary Lou is dead and buried by some Godless creek in Kansas. Her cross will rot away. A weak hastily made thing of silver birch branches and binder twine. In a year, a month, a week? She will have no marker unless I can find it again. Find her under the creeks torrents of land-grabbing muddy currents and sulking floods. Find her under the black silt and plants rotting white and stinking. Carp flopping on her grave. Then the water washes over again- recedes- and pulls the entire bank and her into it. Best to leave the past in the past.
Continue reading “A Thousand Vultures by Christopher Ananias”
Windy and me were digging the back garden of another new kid who’d just moved in to Horseshoe Walk. This time it was on the other side of the garages, opposite my house. I didn’t play with Windy normally because he hung around with the little kids, so I’d been a bit taken aback when he knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted a job. Sitting in our conservatory that day he’d also showed me how there were naked ladies hidden in magazine adverts if you looked at them the right way – Martini and Cinzano bottles were the best. We found pictures of Mrs Cropper in Mum’s Women’s Own too. Not naked, but modelling fancy dresses which was weird when you considered what a complete tip her house was. He told me his cat had come back as well after disappearing for twelve months, rattling their letterbox late one night to be let in just the same as she always had, although there was something strangely different about her now, he said, fixing me with his wide puffy eyes. Windy wheezed like an old tap on those rare occasions he played football with us, or handled a spade, but I began to think I’d underestimated him.
Continue reading “A Builder’s Tan by Mark Czanik”
She was beautiful. Shoulder-length, auburn hair. Almond-shaped, hazel eyes. Full, sensual mouth. And I imagined her skin was a warm, walnut-shell tan underneath that chic, skin-tight, iridescent, body suit—the latest haute couture fashion, designed to dazzle with a spectrum of metallic hues and shades that shimmered like the shell of a scarab beetle. She looked directly into my eyes with such confidence I felt I knew her. There was something familiar about that beautiful, captivating face.
Continue reading “CF58 by Héctor Hernández”
‘Lampedusa’ (2020), the second novel of the Canadian poet, Steven Price, is an imagined account of the last years of the Sicilian author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), as he struggled with illness and self-doubt to complete his only work of fiction, ‘The Leopard’ (1963). That book, ‘Il gattopardo’ in Italian, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s top literary award, and became an international best seller. It was made into a Hollywood film, directed by Visconti, in 1963 (re-released in 1983), starring Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster. Apparently, Visconti wanted Laurence Olivier for the part, but the producers chose Lancaster.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever: The Canadian Poet and the Sicilian Prince by Michael Bloor”
A friend from my youth died recently. His name was Kim. We were close through our twenties until he moved to Japan (due to marriage). The only contact we had for decades was the occasional Facebook “happy birthday like” (I fell out of using Facebook fairly quickly; too many ads and idiots, but the premise is a good one). I considered writing letters, which I (without modesty) am pretty good at writing. Maybe I should have–but to paraphrase James Taylor “I didn’t know where to send them to.”
Continue reading “Week 573: An Elegy For a Friend and the A to Z of Adjectival Slight”
literally stories 