There weren’t many restaurants Harold still tolerated. Most were too crowded – like the buffet down the street which clearly had a busing arrangement with the local nursing home. Others were just too damn expensive. Harold also hated theme restaurants, anything cooked with cabbage, and food from countries that bordered the Mediterranean.
Continue reading “Just Desserts by Andrew Rodgers”
Anna sat quietly watching through the two-way window as the patrons marvelled at her paintings in the gallery below.
Everyone stopped at Vienna. The piece she kept in the old wooden chest with her sentimental collection.
Continue reading “Vienna by Karen Uttien”
This week’s whoever has been a wonderfully quirky and enthusiastic supporter of the site for a long time now. We first published Doug Hawley in 2016 and he has been with us submitting, reading, commenting, and generally getting in the way since then. Have a look at his back catalogue.
Continue reading “Sunday Whoever.”
The art form that had the biggest impact on my mind during childhood was TV cartoons. Yes, art form. And I will also say that cartoons were responsible for the stimulation of however much creativity I was endowed with.
Continue reading “Week 438: Raised by Cartoons”
When my wife falls asleep in the hospital, I write Brock on our newborn’s birth certificate then super glue his eyes shut. His hands arrive to this world calloused like he was lifting heavy objects for nine months.
Continue reading “Pocket Monsters (Blue Version) by Corey Miller”
Everyone needs to cry. Everyone needs to cry because it is not easy to live by simply breathing in this modern world. Everyone becomes upset by something, usually the smallest things that went wrong. Something that was out of their control, something that was not scheduled. An argument with a lover on the morning breakfast table. A sudden insult from a close friend that went too far and the thoughts following the insult going even further inside the mind. It’s the small things. Usually.
Continue reading “Half Moon Above Seoul Central Park by Yejun Chun”
Before my Hinge date I amuse myself by making faces in the mirror. I purse my mouth like an overripe strawberry, beckoning future rot. I slide oil through my hair, expensive oil that’s supposed to be very different from the grease that will seep through the roots after two days without a wash. A few minutes before sunset I slip on my combat boots and trendy trench coat and we’re out the door, me and the fragile home of my body.
Continue reading “Teeth by Amy Katherine DeBellis”
A Hermit-Crab Hiding In the Shape of a Husband
Continue reading “On Warmoesstraat, A Triptych by Antony Osgood”
The skirl of Citizens Arrest fills the stairwell of my walk-up. The electric guitar twangs and pulses through the walls; my key chain vibrates in the door lock, sending judders up my arm, rattling my teeth. I thump on my neighbor’s wall.
“Sorry, cielo!” Manolo yells.
The music stops but my head still throbs.
Continue reading “The Laws of Attraction by Carol Willis”
Derby in the English Midlands, where I was born and raised, is an industrial city, famous in the past for its locomotives, and in the present for Rolls Royce aero engines. In my lifetime, an awful lot of its old buildings have been knocked down, even the ancient church of St Alkmund’s, swept away with its graveyard to make room for the new inner ring road. But it still has a lot of old pubs: The Dolphin Inn, for example, dates back to 1580. So the fact that The Noah’s Ark pub is two hundred years old is hardly noteworthy. What is pretty interesting though, is how it got its title. It’s not named after ‘the illustrious first navigator,’ as one Victorian local historian phrased it. It’s named after a locally famous character called Noah Bullock who had a house on that site, back in the seventeenth century.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – What’s in a name by Michael Bloor”
literally stories 