Ahmed falls from the steel deck thick with diesel oil and malice, through a rain unlike anything he’s known, and he glimpses an almost touchable shore, shameless, sharp and cruel, unreal and foreign, rich with waste and electricity, though the air’s not a thing to loiter in.
I’m flying to a distant destination.
Continue reading “Here Come Grandfather’s Goats by Antony Osgood”
Frankie is his least favorite nursing aide. She wears cheap perfume that smells like cherries and he hates cherries, the knotted pits inside them, the red juice that blooms across fingers and teeth, the bittersweet taste spread across the tongue. His mother loved cherries, left bowls of them half eaten sitting on dressers and counters and even stacked on the floor, the pits stinking and rotting with bits of the fleshy fruit still attached. The stain on her fingertips resembling the lipstick smeared around her mouth.
Continue reading “Cherries by L’Erin Ogle”
For these past 70 years, since 1951 in Korea, I have carried a 1000 Won Korean Banknote in my wallet with the signatures of all my squad members on the face of that banknote, our unit being Headquarters section, First Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division, when we were deployed on the far side of Lake Hwachon, and when squad members put their signatures on that bank note, given to me by a Korean worker assigned to our unit, Lee Bong Ha. He was a chief figurehead in his own right when he made a replacement crystal for a comrade’s broken watch crystal out of a plastic spoon, which was carried in many military papers under the title of “Time to Spoon.” Lee Bong Ha had been paid off from his government contract with a basketful of such banknotes, and passed them out like the near-useless paper that they were (some of them used for the most unlikely reasons you might think of.)
Continue reading “What’s in My Wallet? By Tom Sheehan”
He loved the drive up to Inverness: leaving Edinburgh on the motorway, crossing the Firth of Forth and looking across to the old railway bridge, wondering, each time, if it really was true that when they finished painting it they had to start all over again … Even the inevitable congestion around Perth he didn’t mind so much because once he’d got through all that it was the A9 and a free run all the way up to the Highlands. On a beautiful autumn day like today it was just unbeatable. He felt so good in fact that with only an hour or so still to go he decided to pull off the road into Aviemore and grab a bite. There was a wonderful ice cream store there that also sold cannoli and he picked up a box for the trip home. That put him behind schedule a little but he reckoned he still had plenty of time to do what he’d come for and get to the bed-and-breakfast by a reasonable hour.
Continue reading “Loch Ness Monster by Steven French”
Something wicked this way comes as the bloody moon fills the room with the foul scent of red rum. I didn’t say my prayers before I passed out. I’m living in this grand dragon’s layer protected by a glasshouse. Now, as I’m creeping into these stages of sleeping, this drinking got me numb, and I’m hearing sounds like Vietnam. We weren’t warned about the shit that would follow. I woke up scareder than that nigga Ichabob Crane in Sleepy Hollow.
Continue reading “Soul Under Siege by Kindaka Sanders – adult content”
The old woman in front of me is dead, this is an absolute, something I cannot change regardless of the power I have. She has been dead for quite some time, but she flutters around the broken-down trailer house like she has just been reborn, and in a way, I guess she has. It is my job to facilitate these things but she seems not to need me and moves in a busy rhythm to a beat only she can hear.
Continue reading “Trailer Parks and Sagebrush by Rachel Sievers”
‘Çoè-àòk!?’ blurted officer Gargles.
‘Çoè-àòk!?!?’ he repeated with a bemused look. ‘How the feck am I supposed to pronounce this? Christ but these alien names would wreck your head. Why can’t they just be John or Bob for feck’s sake!?’
Continue reading “A Dose of the Glitters by Cataldo Carroll”
Cookie Simms loved a single piece of furniture in her home, the two-foot wide, seven-foot-tall mirror in her bedroom, away from all the other fuss and bother in the house. She found it easy to favor the mirror because it favored her ass, her breasts, the elegance of timid nipples, the unnerving black clutch of hair highlighting her pubic area, after her ass or nipples, that dark and mysterious claim to feminine wares was knockout number one in the man-parade of gazers, she was ultimately sure. It had begun when she was a mere 15-year-old sophomore in high school and often heard the boys saying, supposedly in private, what was so good about the privates that roamed around them all day in school and much of the balance of day rushing to midnight, where new and nightly dreams about hidden female treasures flooded dark hours as well as supposedly sleep-like twists and turns of growing boys. Those secret hours were loaded with ideas of how all such goodness would soon be theirs, by hook or by crook.
Continue reading “The Fair and Dear Damsel in Distress by Tom Sheehan – Adult Content”
Two of the three fish tanks were ok. Only, where were the large angel fish in the third? My daughter, Sam, walked around to the side. She was standing on tippy toes and still her nose only came up to the sandy bottom of the aquarium. Nevertheless, it was she who found the fish lying flat on their sides gasping. I couldn’t understand it. We had used the same filtration, the same water in all three tanks. What had happened? Five year old Jo, on the other hand, was busy running in and out of the spacious rooms. Finally, at last, our flat was finished. The pictures were hung, the antique carpets were laid and looked luxurious in the mahogany sitting room. It looked like home. Home away from home. Home now in Japan.
Continue reading “The Ancient Wisdom by Crispen Lish”
Everyone showed up to the funeral. They grieved, they said nice things, they ate a nice meal, and then they left. And moved on. Or at least tried to. But then it happened again, just a few days later, and they were back at the same church, the same cemetery, saying the same nice things and eating leftovers from the same nice meal. And this time, they were afraid to leave. Because the important questions aren’t usually asked this close to the grieving process. The important answers aren’t usually as necessary. One death is sad, but two, and so similar in nature, is alarming. Were they both accidents? Or were they linked? And if they weren’t accidents and they were linked, the questions that came to mind among the grieving townspeople were as follows: Who killed them? Why did they kill them? And am I next?
Continue reading “Aunt Sarah by Jeff Hill”
literally stories 