“Quietness, at what cost?” Reid said as he swung in his hammock on Burnaby Mountain. He pushed his legs over the edge of the canvas. Then he put his legs back into the hammock. He wanted to live in the wild, to make a new start away from the city noise. “I’ll call for that teaching position at Pinantan Narrows reservation,” he decided.
Continue reading “The Scrapheap Centaur by Alex Sinclair. Caution – Extreme Adult Content.”
The house keys fell from my pocket when I reached for my gloves. Attached to a silver ring, they clattered on the sewer grate, slipped through, and disappeared with a splash.
I cursed, threw my head back, and considered the enormity of the problem: it was the week between Christmas and New Year’s; my wife was at a yoga retreat with her sister, in upstate New York; my landlord was probably out of town; I had only loose change in my pocket; less than a quarter-charge on my phone; and my bladder was almost full.
After donning the gloves, I tried lifting the grate but it wouldn’t budge. Recovering the keys was unlikely, what I wanted was a hiding place from my shame.
Mary and the Photobomb Fairy
Mary was lying on a couch at a psychiatrist’s office, getting her head explored. It was your typical wood panelled and diploma-laden psychiatrist’s office, the kind you see in films, TV and New Yorker cartoons. There were the already described walls, the couch containing Mary, an occasional table on which lay a box of Kleenex, and a seated shrink, who, if she resembled Dr. Melfi from The Sopranos one atom more, might prompt a lawsuit. No creativity was spent on the presentation of this office, for it was borrowed from the Public Domain Library for use in this story. In fact the sloth in this paragraph alone is so prevalent that your author hasn’t bothered to look up whether Dr. Melfi is a psychiatrist or a psychologist. It’s because all that’s required of this paragraph is for the author to get across the image of a woman named Mary getting her head explored by a professional in that field (from here, “Dr. Morley”) at a place where such explorations normally take place.
How better to celebrate a milestone than to have a re-run featuring Mr Cron. Leila has presented this little gem from the dungeons and this is what she said:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Dilemma – An Experiment by Hugh Cron”
If I think back to it, I can still feel that moment when I really thought you were going to burst my skull. Your whole weight pushing my head into the ground, your mouth right next to my ear, hissing at me that I couldn’t tell anyone. Like somehow if I did, people would mistake her illness for your weakness. Even after the first three times I’d promised I wouldn’t, you didn’t let go, and when you did, you left your knee buried in my chest. I carried that weight, your weight, every day until she died, all those years later. But I never told anyone, not even my parents. I even lied to them when it happened, and I pretended to share their shock and grief at the news.
The smell of garlic and oil filled the gaps between my fork and her brown eyes, one darker than the other. Her eyes followed my fork down to my plate where it picked up one of the eighteen left over ziti noodles.
“When you say you love me, do you really mean it?” Iris asked.
“Of course I do. I love you.” I said.
“No, I mean, is this just a sentence to you? Like when I say ‘I love you’ in German, I don’t really feel that much.”
“I feel it’s cheesy to say ‘I love you’ in Chinese.”
Continue reading “Two Languages and an Imaginary Number by Jie Wang”
Long and lanky and always of a dark eye, ever adept at study of any kind, Wingsy held a broad maple leaf aloft, with fine fingers at the end of one long thin arm, against an angle of penetrating August sunlight. To a young friend he pointed out the webbing of shadowed filaments. As he pointed out the leafy veins, he spoke in an instructive manner, yet indirectly, as if for the moment he had but half interest, which was somewhat unlike him. Interest was something he had a facility of generating, no matter the subject.
I hope Leila remembers about trails of breadcrumbs. She is going deep into the darkness now and we don’t know what will happen if the canary is busy. She found a piece from 2015 and this is what she said:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Pow Wow Travels by Darlene P Campos”
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