Author: literallystories2014

All Stories, Science Fiction

Home Again by Keith LaFountaine

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1.

Alarms blare. It is the end. David knows it as much as he knows anything else. Below, glorious golden clouds meld in a blue atmosphere. So much like Earth. But his family won’t see the light of this star system for twelve years. They will grow old and die, and if he ever makes it back all that will be waiting is a grave. Assuming, of course, there is a planet to return to, and a way home.

The ship falls, and David with it. McLonsky’s blood bubbles and flutters around the cockpit in globules that have minds of their own.

This is it. The end. David closes his eyes, and he waits for his Maker’s embrace.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Dreaming in the Third Person by Adam West

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He dreams he is a young Asian woman. Diminutive. Pretty not beautiful. Not distinctly of Indian or Pakistani heritage but notionally from that region of the world sometimes known as the Indian Subcontinent.

And yet in his dream he isn’t actually the young woman in question. Not as such. More, he is her in the third person.

Whilst the dream lacks structure he experiences a resonance throughout the day. An intangible notion of being someone else. It’s a novel experience but one that returns periodically.

Earlier in the day he had a fall.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Hill 407 Reboot by Tom Sheehan

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He was uphill again, part way on the steep incline, where time, circumstance and opportunity had taken him. But time had crumbled, and with it the matter of circumstance. Only opportunity, sometimes a laggard, held on, fate deciding issues as it had decided his. Downhill he could see how difficult the climb could be to anyone determined to go top-side, as jagged rocks appeared, thick clumps of trees turning toward the awed colors of fall, now and then a formidable gorge in the way of quick ascension. At his backside lurked the sense-awakening pain and the phantom ache lingering in his legs, as if archived for history, remnants of another climb, on the real Hill 407, northwest Afghanistan, in the formidable quarter of activity in that distant country.

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All Stories, Fantasy

My Wife’s Short, Strange Career as a Certified Ouija Boardologist  by Dave Henson

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Lois let out a whoop. “I passed!”

I went to my wife, who was sitting cross-legged on the sofa. The laptop’s screen displayed an image of the certificate. “I knew you could do it, Honey.”

We were out of college five years and married three, but not making enough at the milk studio to feel comfortable starting a family. So soon after the veracity of Ouija Board spiritualism was scientifically validated, my wife enrolled at Alternate Realities Online University.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Catch and Release by Heather Rutherford

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Jackson’s silver hair glinted under the full moon. His boots crunched the gravel parking lot in front of the ramshackle apartment building, long ago a hotel, where I shared an apartment with my mother. Jackson shared our space a few nights a week. He cursed and cast a black trash bag into the bed of his truck. It landed with a soft thud. He hadn’t noticed me yet, standing on the sidewalk, but his presence allowed me to soften my grip on the house keys poking through my fingers. My white, work button-down was stained and reeked of the whiskey spill from an overserved guest at the Angler’s Inn.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Unity by Phil Temples

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I’m drawn again to this little spit in the road about six miles outside of Tupelo, Mississippi on Road 1233 in the Town of Plantersville. I stand near a pasture across the road. Two hundred feet to the north, there’s an abandoned structure that’s falling in on itself.  A weathered sign with faded lettering in the front reads “Unity Church.”  It hangs awkwardly from a broken chain banging in the wind against a post. The roadside is littered with beer bottles and fast food wrappers. A car hubcap lies nearby.

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All Stories, General Fiction

On the Wretched Road by Tim Franks

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The lorry drivers trudged into the service station diner and lined up along the bar, slouching on stools. They were quiet and bleary eyed – yawning into their fists as they braced themselves for another fifteen-hour shift. With a series of points and gestures they ordered banoffee pie and pancakes, chasing cups of coffee with swigs of whiskey from their hip flasks. On the Perspex table top, they rolled cheap tobacco for the road and slipped the cigarettes behind their ears.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Ghosts at Horseshoe Creek by Tom Sheehan

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A soft, steady breeze, with no puff to it, lifted over the edge of Horseshoe Creek and carried with it the sooty odor of a dead fire, a dank, drifting smell that came like the death of an animal a man has long known, perhaps a favorite horse, like a black stallion unseen at night but a dark star in the sunlight. Another person might say the odor was of an old market in a corner of town or an old home left to rot in the wake of a hundred battles that raged around it, the inhabitants, a man and his whole family, gone to dust in one of those fierce battles, so that their essence alone remained of them. One could almost see the house as it stood decorated with gardens, pet animals, and lusty children bouncing with life. Yet the odor, despite various images passersby would have, remained the cold, dank ashes of a fire long gone into night’s realm, thus it came back each and every nightfall thereafter.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Mung Beans and Happiness by Emily Khym

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Sooner or later it’s going to happen to you. You forget the hand-me-down hanboks, blaring F-84s, stitched up sacks of half empty barley portions from a bustling market stocked with rows of mung beans and buchu. You weave through scenes of shirts drenched in sticky blood and machine guns shooting your neighbors down to become spine-chilling nightmares. You become another identity that hopes to forget the feeling of a complete family—a sort of silent-lipped desire that keeps you from proudly marching into Olympic Mart with your mother for a touch of authenticity you desperately want to forget. You force yourself to grow up to match the number of times you ate seaweed soup on your birthday, fourteen, to keep your ripped up photographs tightly shut in your safe.

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