Oil running amber along a thin white line. In another time, in a different kind of world it would have its own strange grace. But here the amber turns to a sickly yellow green that rubs out the world.
Author: literallystories2014
Ollie-Ollie By Marco Etheridge
I can’t believe what you’re telling me, Danny. I can’t believe Bonnie’s dead. I thought she was way too tough to die.
No one is too tough to die, Dimitri, not even Bonnie. You know that better than anyone. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that’s the way it fell out.
One Prisoner Too Many by Tom Sheehan
The sound came once more. He stiffened. It was closer. His whole body knew it was closer. It was not just in the hearing. It approached. It made inroads. It said so. The metal toe. The kick. The slash. Ping Too smiling through his teeth. Oh, would Ping have a thirst for amontillado! Oh, were he himself the finest of stone masons, setting Ping Too up for the full sentence; to make an end of my labor, to force the last stone into place; to set the best of mortar, forever?
Caught between the professor and the captain!
The Witch by Dallas Yates
I burned a witch to death last night. She was a standard specimen: long nose, black hair, broomstick, pointy hat. I looked for a cat but couldn’t find one, which is not unusual. In my experience, few witches travel with their cats. Ditto for cauldrons, wands, crystal balls, and any other magical items you can think of: Witches travel light.
Literally Reruns – The Sicilian by James Hanna
Leila has rootled down in the archives again and pulled out this from a long time supporter of the site, a multiple contributor. This is what she said.
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Mean, Median, Mode by Dominic Dayta
It was the topic of discussion, the day he took me to sit in his Elementary Statistics class. He had on his signature look: slim-fit polos with elbow-length sleeves, jeans, and sneakers. He looked closer to a student than a lecturer. In his class, the boys yawned at the sky out the windows while the girls regarded him with glassy eyes and flushed cheeks, asking question after question, swooning at his careful answers. Everything about him was measured: how he smiled, how he modulated his voice, how he angled himself at the chalkboard. Whenever he went to the teacher’s table to check his notes, he would hold his hair at the forehead while he looked down. From the back of the room I watched him man his class like a blockbuster performance.
Fancy Goodnight by Frederick K Foote
At the dinner table, Fancy Goodnight, my seventeen-year-old granddaughter, drops a bombshell, spills the beans, or lays an egg depending on your perspective.
“Hey, you guys, guess what?”
Lavender Green Goodnight, Fancy’s twelve-year-old sister, responds. “You’re pregnant with twins, and you don’t know who the father is. It—”
Topaz Goodnight their fifteen-year-old sister interrupts, “It could be any of twelve homeless, drug-addicted, ex-cons that—”
Mavis Goodnight, the girl’s forty-year-old mother attempts to put the conversation back on track, “Enough, don’t joke about that. Fancy, what do you want to tell us?”
Wishbone by Jennie Boyes
The castle ruin was the only shelter Famine could see for miles, a shadow cast on withered land, on mud, bracken and brittle heather. And on bones. Beyond was the sea, and snow clouds on the horizon. The gatehouse, its great rounded towers broken and jagged at the tops, stood defiant in the desolation, like an old, wounded knight after a battle. Wind, sea-salt, and even War had not defeated it, and as Famine traced the silhouette against the sky, he could have believed the castle would withstand time itself, if such a thing were possible.
The Sense of Something More by Matthew Hobbs
The silver bullet train slips like mercury through nacreous tunnels; it spikes through brown hills; it plunges deep under the poisoned Thames. The bullet train slides across skyways high in the warm air, a beam of refracted sunlight among the glinting mirrored windows of office buildings shaped like so many onyx, bronze or purple vegetables. Silent, the bullet train glides with great economy at impressive speeds: there is no friction from magnetic rails.
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Yakima Escapades by Tom Sheehan
From one minute of the day to the next, Neckwrek Handel-Handel sang the song endlessly, “Ain’t No Jail Aholtin’ Me,” sang it, mouthed it, uttered it, yelled it. For his five years in Yakima Territorial Prison the guards always knew where he was, in what disposition, secure in one cell or another, or laboring on a prison work detail. Prisoner #127 was known by the only name ever used by him, Neckwrek Handel-Handel, but history had other versions that are worth unveiling if the man is to be known if not understood. Yakima Territorial Prison, as described by some Washington folks in the know, was “200 miles of nothing between here ‘n’ there,” and about the toughest place in the territory. He was 24 years old when he was brought to Yakima, the prison then just over a year old, and 29 when he escaped, in 1881.
