General Fiction, All Stories

 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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All Stories, Fantasy

Lunalae By Robert Reece

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The first thing to disappear was the dull, half-moon circle on the fingernail of his left index finger. He’d never considered that spot in his life except for the day that he noticed it was gone. Then he remembered that he had thought about it once before. He smashed his fingernail with a mallet when he was a kid. He was trying to nail a novelty license plate that said “Future” to the back of his soapbox derby car. He made the license plate a carnival in Idaho for 1 dollar, and he made the soap box derby car in his garage one summer because he wanted to feel like he was living in the 1950s while every other kid was atrophying into gelatinous blobs playing video games. He didn’t want his dad to scream at him for using his special rosewood mallet he’d received at a Toastmasters convention instead of the old hammer in the toolbox, so he never mentioned that he took it to nail that license plate from Idaho. Even when his fingernail turned greenish purple and eventually fell off, he kept that hand hidden from his parents.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Poem That Changed His Life by Michael Bloor

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I was reading James Fenton’s ‘Selected Poems’* and was very taken by one called ‘The Skip,’ in which the poet decides to take his life and throw it in a builder’s skip, parked outside the next-door neighbours’ house. Then he goes down to the pub. And coming back home, half-pissed, he’s surprised to see that his life was no longer there – some bugger had nicked it. The next morning he wakes up, checks, and sees that there is in fact a life lying in the skip, but it’s not his: someone must’ve spotted the poet’s old life lying in there and decided to swop. So the poet takes in the other life, sodden from last night’s rain, dries it on the stove and finds it fits him like a glove.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Spared by a Sign by Matias Travieso-Diaz

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He gave their crops to the grasshopper, their produce to the locust.
Psalm 78:46

Once, in a remote corner of the world, two tribes dwelt in nearby settlements along a plain that opened beneath towering mountains. The land was fertile but its expanse was narrow, and the tribes were ceaselessly at war with each other, jockeying for control of one strip of terrain or another. After countless deaths and great devastation, both sides remained bloodied but resolute in their determination to overwhelm, and if possibly annihilate, each other.

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