To whoever has the misfortune to find and listen to this recording, this is not a hoax, joke, or the results of delirium, hallucination, or a fevered drug dream. My name is Oslo Jennings, and I’m a 64-year-old victim of a fatal heart attack while driving. My medical records at the San Juan Medical Center document I was dead for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
Continue reading “A Hell of a Story Part 2 by Frederick K Foote”
NYC 1978. Just got here from Ohio, to be an actor.
Confession. To be a movie star.
I get a single room on West 22nd st. It’s 15 by 8.
So I put the bed in the basement and get a mattress that stands against the wall. A folding table and chairs
Voila. It’s roomy.
Continue reading “The Village by Gene Bray”
Dimac looked again and the white house at the end of the lane was pale yellow. He tried to find a simile, then a metaphor, and was lost in the miracle before him. The change had happened in the blink of his eyes, and it unnerved him so that he closed his eyes, waited for the white shingles to settle back into place, become their proper selves, as if he could say that about shingles, and opened his eyes.
Continue reading “The White House at the End of the Lane by Tom Sheehan”
I’m in Southside Park sitting on a bench at 7 am Saturday watching five Southeast Asians fishing in the pond that we locals have promoted with the title of “Southside Lake.”
Continue reading “A Hell of a Story by Frederick K Foote“
“Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the grave.”
A while back, I was reading an account, by the poet and journalist James Fenton, of the fall of Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975*. In the middle of the despairing mob outside the US Embassy, begging to be evacuated, as the last of the helicopters departed, Fenton came across one man simply shouting over again, ‘I’m a professor, I’m professor.’ Poor guy, he was well behind the times, we university professors get dumped on nowadays just like any other employee. The trick is to spot when the shit-shower is imminent.
Continue reading “An Historical Fotnate by Michael Bloor”
It’s my second month in L.A., and I’ve already forgotten about pizza. New York feels like years ago, and the only thing that matters now is wood ear mushroom, pork bao, and beef noodles. They arrive plump on Chinese porcelain and slam down and slap awesome like we do on a Friday night.
Continue reading “Cherry Pie by Elana Kloss”
A mansion of fire crackled against an azure sun and the people who lived there were dark and crispy, their day had just begun. Panting and limping, the glass behind their eyes already misty, they set about their work at once. Staggering between each room, their lungs rattled in the hot air and their teeth were bared sharp behind cracked lips. Their hair was stringy and knotted, and stuck down the long of their backs – with skin as cracked as the salt planes that stretched for hundreds of miles around them. No one was around to smell the stench.
Continue reading “Careful Who You Save by Benjamin Pluck”
Thump. Bump. Bang. Sixty years collapsed around his feet as if they were a single lump. Merricut was one step inside the front door of the antique shop, an hour-old beer settling within him, his wife Lynette three steps ahead of him.
Continue reading “The Rifle by Tom Sheehan”
Leona Wiley stood outside the casino, waiting. She leaned against its brick facade, one suede heel up against the building’s side. Her dark blonde hair was neatly curled, just barely hitting her shoulders. Dangling pearls weighed down her earlobes, obsidian mascara darkened her eyelashes, and her lips shone a vibrant vermillion. She wore a copper fox fur coat and, under it, a black velvet dress. Leona watched as people slipped in and out of the casino’s double doors, looking for the person she was sent to see.
Continue reading “Snakeskin by P.L. Salerno”
