Week 421: Sunday Will Never Be The Same

Like Nature, Literally Stories abhors a vacuum. And like the Victorians, LS considers the occasional empty space left open on Sundays as scandalous as showing too much ankle before marriage, or opening a post with consecutive similes.

When the weekly Rerun became a monthly feature, we found ourselves a bit restless on the other three Sundays in the month (yes, I know some have five, but let’s jump off that bridge when we get to it). The Sunday Whatever, a collection of essays and odds and ends, was invented to take up a bit of the slack, yet along with the Rerun, only half the ankle was covered.

Fortunately, there are Big Ideas inside every bottle of spirits. There are also just as many in the feverish hallucinations caused by the stomach flu. Somewhere between these two states of being we hit upon two ideas that once more will make Sundays worth living until and even beyond.

The first is a monthly article dedicated to a favorite author of yore that has meant something to you, and is an artist you fear will be eventually lost in the mists of time.

Or, you may even suggest a single book that touched you once, but is getting increasingly harder to find, or may even be out of print. What we don’t want are touts for friend authors; that sort of thing will earn a red card faster than a player giving the ref a wedgie. Mainly, this is reserved for fine writers of once upon a time, perhaps before the world was in color, former big shots who now, sadly, put the “Who?” in the eyes of most people at the mention of their once famous name.

Just think, you are getting a rare opportunity to do something nice for a ghost or someone who might as well be one. For those interested in this feature, please submit the work the usual way. No set minimum or maximum word limit for that yet. I plan to do one in an effort to set a good example for the first time since I gave up punching people in the face (coincidentally, or otherwise, a stomach ulcer developed shortly afterwards).

But that idea left just a touch of ankle to conceal, the part that drives people with ankle fetishes wild, call it the “nape” of the ankle. To forestall potential acts of debasement and secular perversion we have added a fourth feature, one that should appeal to the ego even though we are certain that each and every one of you is as selfless as a Golden Retriever.

This feature will be a questionnaire sent monthly to an LS contributor so everyone can get to know her/him better. An interview of sorts, but conducted via email, and, naturally, we will approach the subjects of the interview by email. Fear not, your turn shall come someday! A great deal of thought is going into the development of the questionnaire; and although the questions are still in the suggestion stage, at the end of this article there appears a list of inquiries that failed to make the cut.

Now onto the business of this week, the main reason why someone comes by to ring the tower bell every Saturday morning. Except for the prolific Tom Sheehan, four new contributors debuted brilliantly on the site this week. The topics are widely varied. There’s proper flowers for beginnings and ends, a Spirit quest, more than fun and games with words, love gone feloniously awry and educational AI abuse.

Flowers For a Wedding by Victoria Mei-ling Kerrigan opened the week. Victoria related the contents of the MC’s mind–all the knowing little asides and observations, as well as casting a light on the unaware character herself. It’s hard to get inside a mind and not succumb to cliches, yet there’s not a single false note in this tale.

Tom Sheehan returned for the 200th plus time on Tuesday with Caves of the Gods, Heart of the Mountains. It juxtaposed the ephemeral nature of humankind with eternal Nature, whose works, too, are ephemeral in the greater sense.

Alison Kilian marked Wednesday with The Scrabble Player. It is the study of an incredibly complicated human being, a living testament to loneliness and the will to stay alive inside, even if it meant strip Twister. Wonderful touches, especially her disappointment at the funeral.

The Impossibility of Death by Tiffany Williams shone brightly on Thursday. It is well balanced throughout with an especially keen ending that actually can be interpreted in several ways. The set up of the characters is flawless and it leads to a somewhat shocking, yet sense making conclusion.

The future is seldom what it used to be, and the best dystopian hellwords are really not hellworlds at all but are the logical, or at least possible continuation of the long established hellword system founded at the dawn of civilization. Evolution. In such light, After the Robot Wars by Kim Morrissy makes perfect sense and really describes neither a good or bad world, but one that simply is.

There they are. We will certainly be seeing Tom again, and we hope that will be true of the others.

Now, to put a sock on the ankle, I present…

Rejected Questions

• Whose face do you think would melt first in a fire, Wayne Newton or Barbie?
• If you were a tree what kind of Dog would pee on you
• Road rage: tire iron or automatic weapon?
• Most interesting item you have done time for
• More likely to come out of the sky first: Message of Love from an Alien Race; Asteroid the size of Ontario or Jesus Christ wearing a “Boy Am I Pissed” t-shirt?
• Ever wonder if you have died and that everyone in your life is actually a demon?
• Ever told the awful truth just to see the look on someone’s face?
• If you were a Dog what kind of tree would you pee on?
• Which celebrity has come the closest (or has) to causing you to snap and do violence to your tv set?
• Which foreign country’s jail would you prefer to come to, after a prolonged drunken blackout?

Leila