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Author: literallystories2014
The Possession by Brittni MacKenzie-Dale
Eastern B.C.; nestled in the heart of the thick-treed Kootenays; a small, mountain town; winters cause hands to callous, to bleed.
Twenty minutes from town there is a small log home. A child and a lycanthrope live there. She is small, ashen, could disappear into the snow if it weren’t for her dark hair. They once lived with a woman, too. The woman didn’t know what the little girl knows, that the man they lived with turned into something uglier and beastlier when the white moon grew fat.
9/12 by Bruce Levine
My wife never got over watching the second tower of the World Trade Center crumble to the ground from our apartment on the twenty-first floor on West 43rd Street in Manhattan. Nor did she ever get over the loss of her friends in Ladder Company No. 1 down the block. Each time we walked past the firehouse and saw the purple bunting draped across the garage bay we relived September 11th all over again.
The Samurai by Larry Lefkowitz
The epiphany seized Sondheim at breakfast. The morning after he had seen, or rather dozed in part through, the Japanese movie on television. Scenes had flitted through his dreams and he was still in a vaguely Japanese mood as he descended to breakfast – or what he thought would be breakfast. There was none. To his query as to why not, his wife was dismissive. “My morning run,” she said; her white running shoes flashed briefly in the burst of sunlight before the door closed.
Down for the Count by Fred Vogel
Calvin Allen and Leo ‘The Lip’ Grady were superstars in the world of boxing during the seventies. Their three fights against one another are legendary. Allen won the first bout with a TKO in the eighth. A year later, Grady would turn the tables with a fourth round knockout. But it was their rubber match that people still talk about today. It was the lanky, reserved, black man from New Jersey against the stocky, white, Irishman from Queens. The crowd was divided in their loyalties. Back and forth the two boxers went, bobbing and weaving, each landing devastating blows on the other. One would be knocked to the canvas and then the other. The sold-out arena was in a frenzy. It was the closest, most brutal, of their three meetings. Round after round it continued, with neither fighter giving an inch.
Martyr by Paul Beckman
It was time to make peace with my mother.
Ten years, three shrinks, and a busted marriage had gone by since we last spoke. By my family’s standards that is not considered a long time not to speak to each other, but I was trying to put all the pieces together as I approached my fortieth birthday, and this was a piece that I couldn’t do without.
The Manufacturing Of Sorrow by Bob Thurber
When the bell rang, signaling mid-morning break, the floors of the factory shook as workers scrambled away from their stations, rushing to vending machines or out exit doors for a smoke. Morning break was eight minutes. The men on the loading dock kept working. They kept working because they were blind and eight minutes was not enough time to navigate from one place to another.
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Two Characters Caught up in Shantytown by Tom Sheehan
Judd Helme, as a youngster, was held by his naked heels out over the edge of this very same bridge by his drug-addicted father, and in front of his mother, now long deceased. The act was done in view of a small group of onlookers, one of whom related to me the events of that situation. Nobody knows why Judd was not dropped. It was only after a considerable amount of time, and rehabilitation, that the witness was able to tell me the circumstances, he too being hit by the slam-bang of it all, he too taking a look down into that awful reflection… thinking, as he often said, that memory comes in most horrid shapes, and most horrid visages.
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A New Book of Numbers (Part I) by Leila Allison
5:50 A.M., 21 August 2017, New Town Cemetery, Charleston, WA
“Have you met yourself in a Legend yet, darling?” Emma says. Her Spirit and that of her love, Lewis Coughland, have just gathered-to, as always, in the oak, prior to daybreak.
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The Path Home By Frederick K Foote
Back in 1949 or 1950 when I was six or seven, my grandfather took me on my first trip on ‘the Slave Road,’ ‘the Hidden Highway,’ ‘the Nigger Byway,’ ‘the Devil’s Footpath,’ or ‘the River Styx Trail.’ All these names and more for a narrow, dark path, a little over a half-mile long, that saved almost a mile and a half between our farm and Corn Row Road. The “Row” was a dirt road, where our black friends and relatives lived.
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