Here we are at Week 594.
Before we start, I need to answer the question that I asked in my last posting –
Swims is the word that is the same upside down as it is right side up.
How many of you will write it and check??
Or how many of you have cricked your neck looking at that typed word on your computer screen??
Continue reading “Week 594 – Riddle Induced Spinal Problems, Look Deep And I Loved The Ice-Cream Ones.”
He wasn’t a special man. He was just a guy with an above average trashcan. It might merit an even higher title than “above average.” Consider it magical. Yes, magical.
Continue reading “Gary’s Magic Trashcan by Peter Biles”
Mate is so much more than a drink — it’s a living tradition
that binds us to each other and the land.
Fabiana Pose
The Eurovision Song Contest winner that year was a stunning brunette from Paraguay, Gisela Ortiz, who represented Spain in the contest and sang an enthralling guarania (romantic ballad) that won the acclaim of a large segment of the voting public and the members of a jury of music industry professionals. She soon turned her meteoric rise to fame into cash by tirelessly promoting a variety of products and services.
Continue reading “Death in a Gourd by Matias Travieso-Diaz”
AUGUST 2021:
“My will is your authority,” says Vern, the bishop’s mitre wearing business dealer. His blue veined cheeks turn red, then purple, as he laughs until the tears flow, rocking back and forth, holding his sides in front of red-bearded, yellow-toothed twenty-seven-year-old Alex as they sit making connections and trades in the rusted bus that is Vern’s hoarder home. “Hold the mirror higher,” Vern commands, and Alex does. He sees the red capillaries bulge under Vern’s eyes. “Where did you get this holy hat?” the dealer asks.
Continue reading “Between Vern and Alex by Harrison Kim”
This is the first time we’ve made eye contact, but I’ve been looking at his face my entire life. I know those narrow, close-set eyes almost as well as my own. Eyes so blue they almost glow in direct light. Eyes I always had to turn away from because of the way they constantly laughed at me.
All these years, they’ve never stopped laughing at me.
Continue reading “Pissing Bullies by Rasmenia Massoud”
“You scary pretty,” she said, settling onto the lattice bench. She wasn’t her, but she looked at me the same way, as if she knew the part. Ever since Celeste’s funeral, I kept finding her inside strangers. I checked the time out of habit. The second hand trembled near the six. The woman was small inside a brown trench coat made of possum fur, seams hand-stitched with thick black wax taxidermy thread. The woman kept her eye on me, then threw a coin into the fountain beside us.
Continue reading “Inside the Possum Coat by Patrick G. Roland”
The dreadful ghoul has been beaten to death after death with cudgels, sticks, baseball bats and dirty old men, but the hardest thing in writing to do, I think, is setting out to be funny and actually succeeding. I do not know if Todd Mercer had that in mind when he set out to write The Assistant Town Drunk: From Zero to Hero in Seconds, but funny is what he delivered. There’s subtle wit and slapstick all the way through this one and we highly recommend it for those who might be feeling low.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns: The Assistant Town Drunk: From Zero to Hero in Seconds by Todd Mercer”
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The dumbest question to ask a kid must be “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (Often preceded by “So”). For me the best answers for that are “How the fuck should I know, I’m seven”; “Lizzie Borden” and “Anything that takes me away from you.” But I never used any because even at that young age I knew it was an insincere “points winning” question usually asked by some dweeb whose aim was to screw my mother.
Continue reading “593: Limping Mind Games”
I still read about wanderlust though my nomadic days have dwindled. Reading about the swish current Melbourne-Sydney train, the XPT, kindles a memory of The Spirit of Progress, the titan of the tracks from my boyhood. When I first rode it at thirteen, paddocks of silvery grass shivered, wan morning light breaking over imagined desperadoes’ campfires, rural Victoria flying past like life, silent stations a blur. Ticketless, wearing sad belligerence’s long overcoat, I rehearsed my tale. This account was not for my furious parents’, but my schoolmates’ ears. My burgeoning description of speeding back in custody for daring crime when skipping school, and the resulting vivid arse-whipping, having hitchhiked from big trouble, would consolidate my schoolyard status.
Continue reading “Clickety-click by Ian C Smith”
In my mind, I walked in bare feet on a narrow, yellowed, dry-grass path, not stilettos or Merrell’s, Asic’s or glass slippers. Posturing and protection seemed incompatible with the advancing disclosures.
Left and right there were walls of water like the falls in certain hotel lobbies and shopping malls, but seemingly static, not flowing, like glacial ice, the same layered turquoise and white, and mirrored, warped, the way shame distorts what isn’t love into something recognizable and consequently accepted. There was enough width for my shoulders plus an inch or two on either side.
Continue reading “Almost Cinderella by Claudine Mussuto”
literally stories 