Author: ireneallison12

Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – The Thing by Dianne Willems

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I’d rather that antlers grow in than have a child. Although it’s probably for the best that a person who has no children should feel that way, not everyone is so blessed. In an even more sinister conception, a combination of buyer’s remorse, potential Munchausen by proxy and our dear pals depression and fear drive this week’s rerun, The Thing by Dianne Willems. It is a simple tale of a complicated state of being, which I believe happens often, yet a shame enforced secrecy persists to the point of causing tragedy.

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All Stories, Short Fiction

339- Secret Rooms, Incidental Blonde Bashing and Results From the Tiny Wildcat Division at the Feline Olympics

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Hugh is on a well earned holiday this week. This leaves me alone in a room, thinking of what to do for Week 339 at 3:56 A.M. on a Thursday morning.

The cursor is blinking, and my mind is its usual unsteady and fearful self. Writing is like life, I go from here to there and make it up on the spot, then return to edit the mistakes later.

Yet there are always some things I miss and never fix. For instance, the fatuous simile in the previous paragraph.

Anyway…

When I was a child we lived in a house that had secret rooms. Actually, the secret rooms were crawl spaces above the eaves–one at each side of the attic, accessed through pull out shelves. Only persons the size of your standard six-year-old (or so) could move around comfortably in the crawl spaces; only persons of six (or so) have enough imagination to consider the places the Christmas decorations wind up secret rooms.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, Short Fiction

Week 338: Fearing the Two-Hundred Degree Day and Results From Feline Olympics

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The Pacific Northwest winter used to run September through July. The main features were a minimum eight hours’ rain every twenty-four and temperatures favorable for sustainable mildew. Some years, but not all, there’d be a relatively balmy August, which motivated many to rush to the rocky shores of the Puget Sound to frolic drunkenly in the sea until they suffered pointless deaths brought on by hypothermia.

I avoid Climate Change as a subject for debate because it really doesn’t matter. It could very well be that the cloud of hairspray sent up into the atmosphere by 80’s Product Rockers, Poison, alone, has punched a lethal hole in the sky. But it still really doesn’t matter. My advice to the people who are smart enough to change the world is stop wasting time trying to make the people who hate you see things your way. Be creative and invent something big that will end the problem. Channel the same egghead pluck and ingenuity that ended World War II. Your scientific ancestors impressively overkilled the most significant event in human history by inventing a device that, when applied vigorously, can wipe out our species’ future in less time than it takes to roast a turkey.

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Fantasy, Short Fiction

The Mynah Fall and the Major Lift: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison

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Marianne was an uncommon Common Hill Mynah. Hill Mynahs are native to Southeast Asia, but they can be hatched anywhere in the world as long as they are kept warm. This was the case with Marianne, who had been born in Norway, lived for a time on the Greek island of Hydra, then Asia, Canada, the American northeast and eventually wound up residing at a Bird sanctuary at the University of Southern California at Burbank. In her first six years, Marianne had seen more of the planet than most people see in a lifetime.

She was a well adjusted and happy Mynah, with a large, eclectic vocabulary drawn from several cultures. And all was going well until the following sort of thing began to happen on a daily basis:

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Short Fiction

The Cormorant and the Afterlife Coach By Leila Allison

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At age six, Gordon Cormorant suffered a midlife crisis. Sensitive and melancholy, Gordon believed that he’d explored every mystery that life had to offer a Brandt’s Cormorant. It seemed that the only thing left was to while away his remaining seasons on Cormorant Piling, with similarly disillusioned members of his species, gleaning hollow accomplishment from ferryspotting and offending humans with the frequent and hoselike power defecations peculiar to his kind.

Cormorant Piling stood fifty yards out in Philo Bay. There were other pilings, but the one taken over by the large black birds was by far the largest. It was composed of twenty steel-banded telephone pole timbers sunk deep into the floor of the harbor. The human reason for its existence was to correct the crooked approaches of incoming ferries to the terminal dock. The large vessels brushed their sides against the piling several times a day, with varying intensity. Most times there’d be a slight bump, on rare occasions the boats would strike with such force that the piling would rock violently–sometimes even cracking the timbers.

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Short Fiction

Week 336: The Words of Prophets and My Unsteady Jukebox

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The Words of the Prophets

I had lost the ability to hear The Sound of Silence until Disturbed brought it back brilliantly in 2015. My mind gets that way with songs; I can hear them too many times–at that saturation point they assume the guise of an echo that my mind ignores upon further soundings. But Distubed’s over the top yet somehow restrained remake of the Simon and Garfunkel classic brought back to me one of the truly great lines in the history of music: The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls…

I wonder what Paul Simon felt when he wrote that line in 1965. Did it excite him or was he so lost in composition that it was just more words to choose from. I also wonder what Da Vinci experienced when he finished Mona Lisa. Did he bask in the glow of his own genius or eat cheese? Now, obviously you can ask Simon the question, but I doubt he could give you the actual answer because time has a way of reshaping memories, and inevitably a legend of some sort will creep in and take the actual event’s shape. I’m not saying he’d lie, but there stands a chance he’d buy the mirage.

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Short Fiction

Week 334: Little Toughs, A Kvetch, Good Stories and an Extra Helping of Frederick K. Foote

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Little Toughs

My football-shaped black cat, Dudley, has been assassinating my left ankle again. He is an irresistible little thug who takes “No” poorly. “No, Dud, I’d rather you not shred the new sofa.” “Um, no Dud, you may not go outside and fight with the crows.” He can hold a grudge longer than a Catholic funeral; and has the sort of personality that would drop a nuke to end a snowball fight.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 332: At War With Reality, and The Apocalypse A to Z

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At War With Reality

I like to create an artificial sense of order. To achieve this I write a To Do List everyday. I neither accomplish nor consult the thing after I make it, but the act of creating a To Do List and peeling it off the pad and sticking it to the wall behind my monitor temporarily places me in control. It makes me feel like I’m doing something; that I am in charge.

I write my daily list on one of the dozen or so multi-colored sticky pads that may or may not have at one time been inside the office supply closet at my workplace. I use one of the fifty or so black “Precise Rolling Ball” pens that may or may not hail from the same source as the sticky pads to write my To Do Lists (used to do them in a fine point Sharpie until the supply dried up). I take heart from the pastel squares of Great Deeds to be Done accumulating on the wall like coral. Many have given up the stick and have fallen into the slim space between my desk and the wall, down amongst the spiders. But looking up at those which hang in there gives me the artificial sense of order that I crave.

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Short Fiction

Week 330: Fear and Recreational Violence

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Fear

I’m afraid of heights, close places, and small talk with strangers. This makes me a crummy candidate for riding in planes. Which is fine because I’ve only been on one air trip in my life, and I will never do it again. I’ll go by car, rail or ship first. Hell, I’ll walk, if it comes to that. A friend once told me that air travel is statistically much safer than going by sea. She also reminded me that I cannot swim. I retorted that I may learn how to swim anytime I please, but that my prospects for self propelled controlled flight are limited.

Excellent questions usually attract poor answers. For instance “Why do some people joyously skydive and bungee jump, while others clutch the sides of their chairs until the blood has left their knuckles just contemplating those activities?” I usually reply to something like that with “You never hear about anyone leaving a crater after she falls off a barstool, right?” Yet, later on, when doomed to spending time with my own thoughts, I wonder why I am afraid of the devil may care aspect of life.

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All Stories, Short Fiction

Week 327: Twenty-six Ways to Weave Your Drunkard

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Everything is offensive. There’s no plainer way to put it. There is no topic that can be brought up that is universally inoffensive.

“What about a box of cute newborn puppies?” A voice in my head asked, when I first conceived the opening paragraph.

“Gotta do better than that head voice,” I said. “Try to fight this: ‘Cute, but that breed shits on the floor, no matter how hard you teach ‘em not to. How dare you rekindle that memory.’”

“Okay. How about World Peace and True Love? Surely no one can complain about them,” my head voice said; for it was a stubborn head voice that needed to be smacked on the nose more than once.

“Munitions manufacturers will find something wrong with the first and the second does not exist. Go away, head voice.”

Case closed.

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