Taddeo gets up with the sun; he prides himself on not being one of those Brazilians who think every day should be carnaval. He looks out his twelfth floor window at glass and concrete towers that are home to people from all countries of the world, people who live peacefully together. He’s proud of his adopted city.
I am here. I am here. I. Am. Here.
With eight hundred miles of road under my butt in the last three days, my blood sugar barely holding the line, a couple of old wounds still talking sass to me, whatever else was bugging me besides my errand, fell off the face of the Earth when Disher Menkin’s wife Elsie, the new widow, still somewhat of a knockout though she’d collected some flesh under her chin she’d never try to hide, a few other imperfections lost in a surprisingly good figure, hardly ever taciturn at best, said, “Where the hell have you been, Coop, when we needed you most?”
Continue reading “Company of Angels, Company of Men by Tom Sheehan”
Ms Allison has revisited an old story by one of the site’s most prolific writers and we think it’s wonderful to see this having a new crack of the whip. Swan River Daisy is the story that she has pulled from the dusty archives and this is what she said.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Swan River Daisy by Tom Sheehan”
Her name is Kristy or Kristal or Kelly, I’m not sure which, so I just call her sweetheart and babe and she never seems to mind. She’s too busy talking about her ex-boyfriend anyway, a guy who’s still her boss at work.
A Few Rings of Hell’s Bell Ago
The little god of unfounded happiness at an unlikely place seemed to be smiling on me. I was up 500,000 bit-pesos at the online Uruguayan poker site, and someone had finally restocked the Snax Machine in the lobby with chili-cheese Fritos. Yes, the good guys were winning, and no one was supervising my activities. I fondly recall whistling “Dance Ten; Looks Three” from A Chorus Line, prior to carb-loading for that long elevator ride back to my office, deep in the bowels of the Smiling Face of Darkness.
Continue reading “Glooning the Chartreuse Lemon by Leila Allison”
Bang! It went. Bang! Bang! Bang! A whole series of bangs, like gunshots at a shooting range, echoes coming atop one another, full of alarm and the awful promise of consequence. Eleven-year old George Pearl, twelve before you’d know it, his birthday but an hour or so away, ducked his head as he walked down the dark center road of Riverside Cemetery. Shadows of stones moved around him, angular blocks of darkness set upon darkness, the ground and the shadows giving up other noises steeped with night and night things. Sounds swelled like thermals, unseen but known, catching up what was loose in the air, broadcasting strange messages that he could identify in a split second … fear, catastrophe, disaster, strange hands reaching to touch his backside, strange sounds at his ears. All around were strange things that boomed or blasted or bellowed in the night.
Continue reading “A Cryptic Night for Halloween by Tom Sheehan “
“The planning of a new chair can take much longer than the actual construction,” Shinji said as he laid out his sketches. “No other kind of furniture has a purer function.”
Around the table stood three rows of sixteen year-olds dressed like old men in once-white shirts with the school crest on the pocket, ill-fitted black trousers with frayed hems, and green sandals. They jostled and pushed and muttered insults at one another.
Leila has sent in another Reruns choice, this time with a little reminiscence of her own. He Died was, I believe, the first story that we published of Ms Herting and this is what Leila Allison said: Continue reading “Literally Reruns – He Died by A. Elizabeth Herting.”
