Author: ireneallison12

Short Fiction

Name Game By Leila Allison

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Vital Information

Before we begin, it is important to know that Satan never cheats at games. In fact she may be the only thinking being in the universe who is honest to a fault when it comes to games of chance. But her truthful nature does not mean that she is a good loser. Oh, she’ll shake your hand and heartily extol your virtues as a gamer; but she’ll never forget the sting of losing. In that regard it might be better if she did cheat, or at least flipped the board to conclude a Monopoly match with a mistrial. But, as we will soon see, that is not her way….

Now On With the Show

The Witch needed a name for her newest season on Earth. The need had nothing to do with business. Her vast wealth and properties were under the enchanted aliases of her human familiars–a trustworthy lot because they knew that something much worse than death (a something most likely to be as creative as protracted) awaited any servant caught dipping in the Witch’s till. Such certainty reinforces loyalty. No, the want of a name stemmed from the idiotic peasant need for labeling things.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns: Walk on By by Jane Houghton

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Even the stars will go out, one by one, the great and the small, at entropy all will be done. And such is the case with Margot, a small star in the show business sky, yet a first magnitude sun in Jane Houghton’s Walk on By. This is a fine example of parallel writing. The current story nurtures the backstory and both resolve together in a bittersweet, even uplifting conclusion.

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General Fiction

Week 384 -Born Too Late; Five Timely Tales and a Saturday Special Not Written by Tom

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Once upon a time it was possible for a writer to earn a living writing short fiction. Now, by a living, I mean at the lowest level of subsistence. Enough for a rented room, paint-thinner bourbon, shake doobie, stamps and cigarettes. The late Harlan Ellison used to get by working the penny-a-word market for the pulps. But this was back when thirty dollars a week could support a person.

The thriving magazine market began to die off during the fifties. Some say TV did it in, as it had radio plays–maybe in the same manner that streaming is draining television today. Whatever the cause, writers like Ellison began to write for TV because that was where the money went. 

Still, that doesn’t completely explain why the paying short fiction market dried up long before online journals (such as ours) could do to it what Napster did to record sales. After all, novels did not die due to TV; mass market genre paperbacks still sell; so do anthologies written by the masters of fantasy and science fiction. But writing short stories no longer supports even the least demanding lifestyle. And like poetry, it may be that more people write short stories than read them.

But it is still an art, thus valid. Sadly, malletheads think that anyone can write a short piece and the real art (aka, money) is in novels. Malletheads see good and profit as being the same thing. Although I believe that producing a great novel is a monumental accomplishment, it doesn’t follow that short fiction is inferior to the long form–save for the effect each has on your bank account. Besides, some writers are distance runners while others are sprinters. Dorothy Parker discovered that she was a short track specialist incapable of writing a novel, and drank a bottle of shoe polish after she had spent the advance for a novel she could not write. She survived, as do her shorts, which, unlike the lady herself, have never been out of print. 

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All Stories, Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns- Hi, I’m Stacy by Nyx-Bean

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Quite often a writer will streak across our virtual sky, a word comet, who graces our viewing for a while before moving in. From late 2016 into ’17, Nyx Bean gave us four memorable stories, and it is a shame that they should sit in the vault, alone, neglected.

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Short Fiction

Meet the billygits by Leila Allison

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Word has it that the first billygit was the result of a passionate affair between a runaway Disney Princess and a Flying Monkey on leave from the Wizard of Oz. The Princess was tired of being a thirty-two-year old woman forced to play a “tween” and the Flying Monkey was bored due to the liquidation of his Witch. It was a “what happens in the Emerald City stays in the Emerald City” sort of fling. Or so I heard. I really can’t say much more due to copyright issues, but I won’t refute it, either. Whatever their origin, the now plentiful billygits (who did not stay in Oz, and insist on a lowercase b to start their name) are. Yet unlike most things that are, billygits multiply when some PDQ Pilsner is poured over their heads; this action instantly produces a twin billygit.

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All Stories, Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – Word Puppet by Nik Eveleigh

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Word Puppet by Nik Eveleigh is something I can relate to. Writers create characters and then take the job of their God and that of whatever Universe the character inhabits. Even though we control the action, no one can be certain exactly what kind of God is in charge of her/his reality. Does your God care about you? Or are you stricken with a God who has a nifty twist in mind and you are nothing but a means of arriving at it?

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Short Fiction

Week 382: Good Old Days on Viagra; Five Stories That Do Not Need Enhancement, and a Salute to 90’s Cinema

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As I sit here at five o’clock on a June Wednesday morning, wakeful aphids zooming through my open window from the garden and gathering on my screen, and as I unsteadily wait for the coffee, nicotine and little pill I took to kick in, I reach into my mind and pull out the first thing I find: Let’s go with The Good Old Days–when all was great and there were fewer aphids.

Everyone needs Good Old Days to fondly recall and inflate with virtues not evident until a minimum of one generation has passed. The constantly under construction present and a future whose only certainty is our eventual permanent disappearance often conjure the Ghosts of the Good Old Days; those shades of What Never Really Was, whose remember when voices speak sweetly of yesterday.

Our increasingly labeling society tends to measure out The Good Old Days by the decade. All a time gone by needs to ascend to Good Oldayian status is a decade to call home. I believe that this is a 20th century thing–for I’ve never read olde literature in which someone in 1202 pines for the 1170’s. How else to explain the 1990’s ascension to old times not forgotten? (I’m certain there are many “elses”–but the desired effects of my addictions remain tardy.)

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All Stories, Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – Concealer by Hugh Cron

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MC “Laura” is nothing short of honest, which gives Hugh Cron’s Concealer an extra level of irony. At her interview for what we Americans call Unemployment Insurance, she divulges the reasons for her loss of a job–and how. Her delightfully profane observations and storytelling (only half-heartedly, so it seems, warned off by her interviewer) say much about the downside of the workplace and people in general.

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All Stories, Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – Byrds Syndrome by David Henson

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Long time site friend David Henson has published everything from tragedy to jocularity with us. He excels at stretching reality until you believe that, why yes, I can see a future in which handling a black mamba for forty seconds without dying can improve one’s credit score.

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