It was a backyard party with an announcement. Bev’s promotion had been long coming and George Filmore had broadcast invited her coworkers and as many neighbors as he could get hold of. The two groups, unknown to each other and with little in common other than Bev, exchanged oil and water chit chat, slithering off each other without really blending.
Continue reading “The House Guest by Edward Ahern”
“You’re too young to be gallivanting around looking for a job.”
“I’m nearly fourteen,” James puffed his chest out. “And jolly reliable.”
“Who says?”
“My sister.” He switched to a well-spoken accent, “One should always consider James for tasks of this nature. He is excellent and jolly reliable.”
Continue reading “The Milkboy and The Vampire by Michael Shawyer”
“Welcome”, chimed that cheerful and, to be honest, in recent weeks, increasingly irritating voice.
I took a deep breath, what did I really want?
“I can sense you are undecided. Allow me to run through some of the options you have enjoyed in recent visits.”
Continue reading “Here to Serve by Michael Smith”
Everybody prefers iceberg lettuce. That’s always been true, but these days it’s bougie to admit it. Before, if someone told you they favored romaine, or worse yet kale, they were lying, but at least it revealed their rank. I’m not white trash, they’d tell themselves. Iceberg is what you eat if you live in a trailer park, it’s what they put in gas station sandwiches.
Continue reading “Everybody Prefers Iceberg Lettuce by Geneviève Goggin”
The funeral had been over for hours. The condolences had been murmured, hands shaken, and hollow nods exchanged. Tyler sat alone in the quiet living room, staring at the floor like the right combination of thoughts might finally break him open. However, he could only think about one thing: the clock on the wall ticked too loud. Each second landed sharp and mechanically like a hammer in the silence. The steady, unshaken rhythm, indifferent to the weight of grief pressing against Tyler’s ribs, was too precise for this raw moment. He tried to focus on each tick, breathing in and out on every other one. Time was moving forward, unaware that his best friend, Patrick Andrews, would never move with it again.
Continue reading “A Eulogy for Us by Darleine Abellard”
Let’s make one thing clear: I’m not a necrophiliac.
But I am in love with a three-thousand-eight-hundred-year-old corpse.
There.
I said it.
Ethics committee be damned.
Continue reading “Tilda the Ice Maiden and her life in the tundra circa 1785 BCE by Lincoln Hayes”
Kyla scanned the exhibit, looking for the kangaroo. When she asked her dad where it had gone, he shrugged. She asked again, and all he said was, “Sorry, honey. This has been happening more and more recently.”
Continue reading “The First Thing She Noticed Disappear Was a Kangaroo by Michael Degnan”
William stands on the upper level of a parkade leaning on a shopping cart some employee had forgotten to rack up with the others. He’s waiting for a friend to pick up a jug of organic milk. He knows his friend will be forever and come up the elevator loaded with ‘two-for-one’s’ and any specials he can find on pasta, ice cream and pineapple juice, not to mention a stack of car magazines. William doesn’t mind waiting. It’s two in the morning and a beautiful night in San Francisco, the concrete rooftop a checker board of symmetrical parking spaces, the only vehicle on the horizon his friend’s sky blue Dodge Caravan, clean and American in its loneliness.
Continue reading “Man With a Shopping Cart by Tom Bentley-Fisher”
“Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” – The First Letter of John
T.S. Eliot was not who we think of him as.
Far from dying his hair green, instead he sometimes wore green face powder (very faintly) to dinner parties in order to shock, discomfit, and confound his cultured, highfalutin, aristocratic hosts and their hoity-toity guests.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever: Eliot Behind the Mask – An Essay by Dale Williams Barrigar”
The guy standing in the middle of the road is a writer, and he’s getting away with it too.
He can get away with it because he has been published but not self-published, and also because there’s no longer anybody around to give much of a shit anyway.
He’s also, to a comparable degree, getting away with standing in the middle of the road.
Continue reading “Epilogue by Jeremy Bader”
literally stories 