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Week 591: Natural Born Quillers

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Birthday Well Wishes

Happy 250th Independence Day to America! (and to everyone also born on this date, Eva Marie Saint at a whopping 102 and Elliott the Header Pigeon who is attending the Extreme Cigarette Butt Eating Contest in Philadelphia this holiday weekend ). It may not be in season for some to say nice things about and to America, but the U.S.A., like most places is far more good than bad and is a collection of people–not just one person. To all who sneer, I suggest you read what J.C. had to say on the subject of stone casting. And although it is further ironic that the UK should wish the former colonies happy birthday, just think how chaotic things would be if the Revolutionary War had gone the other way. PM Trump anyone?

Now, On with the Show

Asking writers why they write is pointless. It’s the same reason why kleptos steal and killers kill; it is a mental compulsion, sometimes good sometimes bad and always somewhere along the borders of insanity. Some people have the writing disease way worse than most. The bad off will cut words into their skin if they have no other way of getting the job done (and for the visual artist, Van Gogh’s ear-ectomy definitely got a lot more than a thousand words across). Most of us can control ourselves to the extent we can wait until a saner method is handy. But the answer is always the same. Writers write because they are writers. Birds bird. Lizards lizard. Maggots get compared to unsavory people. Writers can go through long periods of inactivity (for some that may be weeks, for me not even a day), but there will always come a time when it must happen, or (to quote Hemingway) we state: “I feel fucked inside.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Boots and Cats by John Tregoning

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The music thumped up the stairs towards him in the queue. I’m way too old for this he thought, edging forwards. Much had changed since last time he had been to a night club; more remained the same. Ticket checked on his phone, driver’s license scanned. Why? No one in their right mind could possibly think he was 18, his age telling in the wrinkles on his face, the receding, greying hair, the middle-aged spread. But also in invisible ways: twinges, aches, sadness.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Short Fiction

Cup of Flour by Tim Boiteau

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Woke up to frosted window panes and frozen pipes. Marta and I made do with the gas stove, lighting it old school with matches against the hissing invisible stream. Water supply was low, but would last us a few days. The driveway had vanished beneath the white, with only the stitch of barbed wire fence to mark road from field. While I was attaching the snowplow blade to the truck, Marta called out from the house that Pam, our neighbor, wasn’t answering her phone.

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All Stories, General Fiction

 The Crying Story by T. A. Young

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Boo-hoo, as we say in Staten Island, New York City, New York.

Ornella Splice is crying. She sobs and wails and moans and heaves with the weight of her sadness. She is soaked in her tears. There are traces – bubbles – of saliva in the corners of her mouth. She tries to utter words, but she is incoherent: all she seems to say is, “mwah mwah mwah,” or the subtle variant, “mwaw, mwaw, mwaw.” The former is reminiscent of the Staten Island  dialect; the latter more common in the midwest. The subtle alteration in endings moving west is attributed by D. M. Pollard to the shift from crop farming to cattle herding during the middle and late seventeenth century. Pollard does note that Staten Island, itself, had no agriculture to speak of, shifting inexplicably from a foraging culture to a labour-union-kickback-and-freeloader-dependant culture, probably explained by the reluctance to become literate.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Prayers Do Not Always Reach the One Prayed To Geraint Jonathan

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Many a truer word was said, certainly, but, as unpalatable truths go, none less welcome. Or put another way: You prayed for it: You got it. Took no notice of the world’s oldest adage. Be careful what you. Etcetera.  Wishing’s one thing, praying’s quite another. You went for the latter. The result is your current predicament. Circumstances cannot be reversed, annoying as that is. No telling how a prayer turns out; most are lost in the void. But the consistency of your desperation accounted for something, I suppose. You were out of sorts. The car was due its MOT. The sheer Jimmy Dean of it all. Similar stretch of road, late afternoon, early autumn. You’d not been drinking, you were simply in a foul mood. The sun was in your face and you’d forgotten your shades. How often over the years had you forgotten your shades? Approximately never. Shades and you went back a long way. Just as you and juiced up transit vans went back a long way. Back in fact to those days with Mariella, dreams on your sleeves the pair of you, worlds to conquer, the glitz of showtime sure to follow. How did it go, that repartee? One of you’d say ‘See you at the movies’, the other would reply ‘Third row from the back’, both of you knowing of course that neither of you was destined to be a lowly pair of eyes looking up from the dark. That was for the punters. You’d be among those gazed at, ten times your own size, Mariella the Bonnie to your Clyde, you the Abelard to her Heloise. And Mariella seven years dead and you getting by on the doorman gig. What Mariella would have done with Lady Day in your Billie’s Lonely Sunday is for you to imagine, others to ignore or deride or otherwise befoul. How long had you longed to see your name in print, see your own eyes looking up at you from the glossies? Long time, and as I say consistency of desperation does have its currency – especially when coupled with undimmed rage or greatness unrecognized, a state of misery as fresh today as it was back in the sepia. You were not feeling well, and the acid-reflux was back. There’d been no call from your brother, and there’d been words the night before between you and the landlord, his tone ever more peremptory, yours a notch or two up from humble but soon plummeting to the reedily apologetic. Where was the man you were meant to be? There’s six-foot of you. When was it, do you think, you blinked?  A lot of bridge gone under the water. The day marked X. The glory that was yesterday, how small misery would be welcome. You had things, you know ‘things’, on your mind. What comes, be it good or ill, does so in battalions, that old fangle. The car was having problems. There was your tooth, and the clove oil it was taking to numb it. You’ll’ve heard such things are sent us. You took the highway smiling. I’ve seen that smile, the one that says fuck with me at your peril. You don’t mean it of course but not meaning it is not enough. And so, into view came Stupid Person Number One who failed to indicate before switching lanes. Soon enough Stupid Person Number Two slowed to a crawl and seconds later Stupid Person Number Three, a motorcyclist, gave you the finger. Persons, eh? The likes you’d have once called ‘worldlings’. Poor them. Poor you.

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All Stories, Horror

The Cold Baby by Christopher Ananias 

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Content that some readers may find disturbing.

She must have looked alluring, though, on her midnight shopping trips to Walmart. He imagined a shopping cart full of red meat and baby clothes. Dr. Lieberman worked alone inside the morgue. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees.

 A toe tag, said Jane Doe. Lieberman, a single man in his mid-forties, studied her with a clinical detachment which made him a poor guest at the hospital mixers. Her enormous stomach under the sheet was hard to miss. It would be a cold baby.

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Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 590 – ‘A Scottish Soldier Is Worse’, ‘Perfect Skin’ Is As Good And A Happy Century!!!

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Week 590 has crept up on us.

I am writing this before Scotland’s last group game at The World Cup. They began well with a win over Haiti. Let’s just say that the game with Morocco didn’t go so well. After seventy seconds, the whole of Scotland screamed ‘Awwwwwww FUCK!!!!!’

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All Stories, General Fiction

Indian Summer by Mike Lee

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There was a sense of peace, anticipation, and of place when I arrived at the Krispy Kremes that cool October morning; autumn leaves turning and the sun bright over the roofs of Asheville and the surrounding mountains. It was a Friday, before school, and coffee and glazed donuts beckoned while waiting for Mariah, my girlfriend, and walking on to the bus stop. Suppressed an urge to talk her into skipping school; we had fifth-period English together, and it was our chance to read our story assignments.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction, Short Fiction, Writers Reading, Writing

Dirty Glass by Hugh Cron – Adult Content

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“Dirty glass…Fuck!”

…The first time that Martin had really focused on a dirty glass was decades back, in another one of his lifetimes. He’d had a few lifetimes and each had caused him a different level of grief.

Martin thought back to that morning at 8.00am, when he had been told that he had to check on a property. He found that depressing, fuck all was said about checking on the resident, no, he had to check on the property.

He pulled up beside the row of Maisonettes and sighed as he saw that the main entrance door was hanging off its hinges. He headed into the building. It always made him laugh that this was a building that you had to go inside, to go upstairs, to then go outside to get to the front door. He rattled the door. He could hear some mumbling and drunken giggles, “I hope that’s a lovely lady with nice tits!!”

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