I found the blackest, blue-black woman in the world, at least in North America. When she took me between her thighs and into her heart, I reached a level of pleasure, satisfaction, and lust I had never experienced in my forty-five years of life.
I sat in Clarice’s office every week. My bedroom closet was bigger. A black leather couch with holes in it took up half the room. White stuffing like cottage cheese spilled out of it. Her pine desk overflowed with files. Clarice had more books on her wall than a library. They were in boxes on… Continue reading Fractured by Lisa Lahey
She was the craggy-faced, big-boned, broken-nose blonde on the ripe side of 50 working the night shift at the front desk at the small New Hampshire Hotel.
The man carried the three-year-old boy on his shoulders hurriedly pointing out to him as they made their slow and winding way through a crowd of smiling faces, the large bonfire, nearly as tall as a church tower. They stood and watched with amazement a firework display burn and spark into a myriad of colours,… Continue reading Picture The Dead by John Cantwell
It was early Thursday afternoon on Halloween. The sound of an email alert on the other side of his studio apartment made Wally Ray Tucker sit up beside the pale redhead drifting off in his bed. Their extended nooner had given them enough time for a double play, but there would be no hat trick.… Continue reading One Known Drop by Gary Earl Ross
Q never swerved to avoid a beast on the road – dead or alive. He would drive through it with an iron fist, as if fur and soft tissue were nothing. A mental illustration of focus, a kind of road karate like the art of board breaking. Always direct your power beyond the wood stack.… Continue reading Swerve by Tamara Barrett
I trudged into the kitchen, pulled my socks up over my long johns, and grabbed the parka we keep by the door for outhouse trips in the middle of the night. When you’re freezing, half asleep, and unable to hold it anymore you don’t want to hunt around for a coat and boots. The weathered Sorels sat… Continue reading Running on Snow by Bruce Snyder
I was seven years old when I first tasted death. My father Nehemiah had sent me down the pit so he would have some drinking money, and I cut my leg on a jagged sail of rusted metal as I made my way down a tunnel. It sang its way through my undernourished leg meat… Continue reading The Many Deaths of Neptune Gilderoy by Alex Sinclair
Chuckata-thuck Chuckata-thuck Chuckata-thuck Chuckata-thuck … The rhythm of the boxcar rumbling down the track reminds Billy of a song he wrote a long time ago, back when he was still playing for nickels and dimes outside the lumber yards and cotton mills along the Mississippi River. Although he hasn’t sung the thing in years, he… Continue reading Boneyard Blues by John Vander
I am standing on the beach. The sand under my feet feels like soot. An uncanny, organic look emerges from the bowing, rusting skeletons of the sea-view skyscrapers. He is gone, like his father, into the ominous, omnipotent water.
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