I’m going to try something different here this week.
Normally I go off in tangents. I’m all over the place and one topic leads to another. But not today.
I’m going to investigate the status quo. And that’ll give me a reason to let you hear some music that a lot of folks hate but I hope that you listen with an open mind, or open ears or whatever the fuck.
Continue reading “Week 584 – The Norm, No Need To Iron And Mr Rossi Is Still Going!”
The pigeon pecking imaginary seed on the outside ledge thought it strange that Alan should open the office window and join her – his long gangly, shaky, legs unfit for perching eleven floors up.
‘Don’t worry little bird, I won’t be here long,’ he said at last standing with his back to the glass, the palms of his sweaty hands acting as limpets attaching him securely to the building.
Continue reading “The Jump by SJ Butler”
The abortion wasn’t the commencement or the culmination. The termination wasn’t the central event.
1.
It was a day when a more fanatical human placard did not carry a gun with which to shoot and kill the adult female receptionist. The procedure transpired in the summer of 1982 on Beacon Street in Brookline, an upscale suburban sister to Boston and, across the river, to academic Cambridge and its proletariat neighbor, Somerville, where I lived. Human billboards displayed the evolution of the species through its bloodied protozoan, bird, and fish forms at a proscribed distance from the clinic entrance. I and my volunteer escort were unmolested up the short flight of concrete stairs and into the locked steel and glass door of the health center brownstone.
The one-night stand wasn’t the inception or the finale. The encounter wasn’t the foremost incident.
Continue reading “Memoir of a Fiction by Claudine Mussuto”
Once upon a time in the future, when you’re long dead in your grave, two brothers with magical powers meet again in the middle of the Indian Ocean to settle their dispute once and for all with a final duel.
Sam and Mitch are ship captains, just like their father. They own big container ships and spend almost their entire time on the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. Each brother has twenty-two crew members and a magical power. Sam can control the weather, and Mitch can mute whoever or whatever he wants.
Continue reading “The Storm and the Silence by Sam Kandej”
I stood alone at my stepmother’s funeral, fondling a plant, watching rain bead down the fogged window. The funeral parlor’s black walls, and black curtains were heavy-handed leaning too much on the death knell. Ten lines of bright red chairs clashed with a maroon carpet. The organ music droned like it always did—my whole life.
Continue reading “The Convert by Christopher Ananias”
Like all large things taken for granted, the North Atlantic Current knew the importance of what it did and thought long and hard before jacking it in.
An elemental system shifting oceans of warm water from Mexico to Europe slowed in protest at anthropogenic climate change then stopped altogether.
Nature’s last laugh. A landmass expecting to fry now pondered winters twenty degrees below average. No North Atlantic Current, no band of temperate air wrapping the Celtic fringe. Have another ice age, Nature seemed to be saying. Exactly what you didn’t order.
From Galway to Hamburg, people laboured through a winter of deadening snow and ice.
The next year, they stayed at home.
The year after that, they felt like staying in bed.
The year after that, they did.
Continue reading “See You Next Year by Mark Barlex”
When I attended graduate school for writing in the midwestern USA in the mid and late 1990s, all the best classes and writing workshops were held in bars, pubs, and-or saloons. A slight exaggeration, but only slightly. It was the tail end of an era when drinking and writing, at least in the USA, were still seen by many as activities that go hand in hand. And hand in hand with drinking goes smoking, so most of the drinking writers in the writing workshops were also smokers too, either heavy, medium, or light. The second-hand smoke that was consumed along with the first-hand smoke along with the beers along with the shots of whisky while writing was being discussed in the writing workshops that were happening in the bars, makes me not wonder why I already have Stage One Emphysema nor why I’ve already had a stroke. I’m healthy as a horse otherwise (yes this is possible) and I’ve already done what you need to do to slow emphysema down which is quit smoking. I stopped drinking twenty-one years ago and there is no doubt that I would be dead now if I had not stopped drinking. Three of my writing teachers from those days are dead from drinking and smoking even though, if alive, they would not yet be 80 years old. All three of them died from some combination of chain-smoking cigarettes and alcoholism, the functional, working variety of it, that is. These men never stopped working. But they also never stopped drinking or smoking. And it put them in an early grave, just as it promises to do for almost everyone who goes too far with any of these activities. My fellow students in the writing programs were also alcoholics. One of them I almost married, except that she turned out to be an even bigger alcoholic than I was. It’s sad to see a brilliant brain slowly bludgeon itself into submission right in front of your eyes when you yourself have already done the necessary work that is required to save yourself from a similar fate. Keith Richards quit heroin in the 1970s before it killed him and his girlfriend refused to do so which is why he had to tell her sayonara, beautiful lady.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever Escaping from Prison: A How-to Article By Dale Williams Barrigar”
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day in the U.S. of A. (In the UK and Ireland it was 15 March–a belated happy one to Diane and the rest of the Islanders), I am not a mother, but I had one and found her to be sufficient. She was the sort of Mother who would die for her children and often made this one wish she would do just that.
We are awfully unfair to our mothers. We either over praise them up to Mother Mary Poppins or we blame them for not just all the heinous shit we do but for all the heinous shit ever committed in history. Expecting mothers to maintain a higher standard than what we are willing to consider is one of humankind’s greatest failings. Still, objectivity is not something we associate with family members. But alack and alas, all in all, in the end, everything tabulated, I’m glad I got the mother I was stuck with (vice versa); I do not believe anyone else out there could have made me and–despite my plentiful laments on the subject of me–I am used to being the person I am, and I’ve never been one for wishing I was someone else.
Continue reading “Week 583: Mama Mama Please No More Step Dads”
After a groan of a day at work, Harmon Donovan riffles through the musty comic books he salvaged from his mother’s estate sale. He feels something under the stack. A beak? Of course—Danny. Harmon turns the toy over in his hands. About six inches tall, the wooden duck stands upright. Harmon traces his finger down the head where the blue-green paint is chipped and fading. The plaything transports him to simpler times. Before his boss, Mr. Murphy. Before—
“Harmon, are you going to mow the lawn or not?” His wife’s sharp voice from downstairs pops his daydream.
Continue reading “Danny by David Henson”
The décor of the Hollywood Space Diner was a neon and chrome nightmare. Adding to the charmless ambience was an unavoidable aroma of hot garbage. It would not have been Dave’s choice of eating place, that was for sure. He could just about stomach the interior design; it was the vile food that was the real concern. He found himself battling the urge to run screaming from the establishment, clutching a super-sized sick bag.
Continue reading “Working Lunch with the Space Vultures by Joel Bryant”
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