On a balmy day in May, Betty Brown said to a joyous Black boy jiving around on Broadway, “Walk that walk, Boy. You know you sooo fine. You know I’m gonna make you mine. It’s just a matter of time.”
Continue reading “Show Off by Frederick K Foote – Contains adult language and themes.”
It’s a circuitous route via thumb from my home in the old Borsch Belt in upstate New York to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. And when I’ve decided it was time to move on, I bummed rides through rural Southern towns trusting the unspoken agreement, the rules of the road. I made my way to the interstate — a flip of a coin, a wet finger held high in the sweet tarry air. I made a fist of my right hand, extended the thumb, and rode it all the way to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, pitching my backpacking tent near Pequea Creek.
Continue reading “The Road Finally Home by William R Stoddart”
These days, you’re the only Townie I would know on sight as you grace our Riverside Cemetery in your own hellos, tall as all get-out, robust, time marking your way past that mere issue, and a charmer from a distance on any day of the week. I wish, among other issues and dreams, that you’d recognize me, wrap those loving arms around me, greet the passing among all these stones, upright, neat in place, fighting off the centuries one by one.
Continue reading “Charlestown Calling Back by Tom Sheehan”
Charice went to check on Nate after having laid him down for a nap only twenty minutes ago. She had an almost obsessive need to check on him, which the online forums she frequented said was normal for a new mother. She found these social media groups to be just as helpful as they were harmful. There was a lot of information not based in science that made its way around. She found the support of other mothers to be the most helpful. To find reassurances in the words of other moms. Despite her enjoyment of the groups she was taking a break for the day after nearly getting herself worked up over someone being rude on her post mentioning Nigri, her cat, having taken a liking to the baby. They raged in warning her against the cat hurting the baby, against toxoplasmosis, and one nut told her the cat would steal her baby’s breath while he slept. While Nigri had been very interested in baby Nate since Charice had brought him home, quite the opposite of how she thought she would be, she didn’t feel there was anything more than curiosity of a new creature inhabiting the home.
Continue reading “Baby’s Breath by Quinn”
Tom Kenner sat looking out the window of a waiting room at the Columbus Orthopedic Hospital. He had been through the magazines but, dog-eared and dated, they couldn’t hold his attention. “Maybe staring out the window will make the time go more quickly,” he thought. It didn’t.
Continue reading “Sawbones by Edward N McConnell”
There was the smell of fried wires and greasewood; the sound of tempered glass shattering, the echo of it like bar chimes.
Continue reading “It Was Like You Saw the Devil in Something and Just Kept Going by Rory Hughes”
Yuko says she wants to wear a gray dress. I told her she can’t.
Sachiko sighed at the text from her younger sister. Yuko wasn’t even supposed to be in charge of everything, she was.
No, gray is fine, too, Sachiko texted back.
Continue reading “Hatsubon by Sarah Hozumi”
The first place I search for Mum is Sainsbury’s. It’s the first shop that pops into my head. Maybe she needs ingredients for a cake or something. Though the last one she baked stirs up images of a smouldering mount Vesuvius. She forgot the eggs. I whip through the supermarket to the beep of the checkouts, panning every aisle, even the frozen food section. But she’s not there.
Continue reading “Gone by Robert Steward”
Murder, when it comes in pairs, causes echoes. The push and pull, the cause and effect, the what and why, bounce off every surface. The sound jangles and makes intrusive inroads into daily and otherwise common sense. When one of the victims is a small account part-time drunk, bar room stentorian, an ex-jailbird, and the other is Doyle Hapgood, Harvardian, Commissioner of Police for the City of Boston, there is resonance, there is reverberation, and the black ink of headlines runs red.
Continue reading “Quick Death of a Lottery Foe by Tom Sheehan”
People on honeymoon visit a different time zone and endure a surfeit of shared hours. We learn the language of negotiation when volunteering to lose a little of ourselves. Both of us feel change to be obligatory, though we can never quite express who we might become; we know we will be less ourselves. Adding to our transformation, impending parenthood: the great world tilts.
Continue reading “The Mother Dog by Antony Osgood – Content warning. This story has content that some readers may find upsetting.”
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