Author: literallystories2014

All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction, Story of the Week

Table for Four by Louis Hunter

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‘A judge tells a condemned man he’s going to hang next week, but he won’t know when until the hangman comes a-knockin’. The judge only says one thing, that it’ll be a surprise.’ The man with dark rimmed spectacles pauses to smoke, his hair is black and slick with Brylcreem.

‘So, when he’s locked up and waiting to be hung, this guy thinks to himself: “This shit ain’t fair, they have to tell me when I’m going to die. I’ve got rights.” So he decides to work it out. He figures if hasn’t been hung by Thursday, he can’t be killed on Friday because it wouldn’t be a surprise, he’d know it was coming.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Driving on the Sausage Run by Tom Sheehan

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(Une tranche de vie, inbound)

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This morning D’Espirito “Dez” Carmine knew that one of his passengers was in trouble.
Dez shifted gears of the twelve-seat bus as he came out of Revere onto the highway north, his eyes, as ever, studying the dozen passengers on their way to work, determining a snarl, a scowl or grimace, as a straight-out give-away. Oh, they were splendid facial characters, make-up aficionados, the mostly imperturbable cast for his play-going. Each one of them he knew almost intimately, their habits, likes and dislikes, their temperaments; how they showed impatience or worry. The lip biters were evident and the knee tappers, the finger squeezers and the puckered, silent whistlers. Who slept around, who was prone to wander come of an evening after work, he knew. Evidence of it came from eye flight or hair disarrangement, an early exhaustion showing itself off or a head yet rolling in a kind of rhythm. The morning body electric, he heard a voice say in the back of his head.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

Silent Treatments by Goran Sedlar

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Laughing out loud.

Rolling on the floor with laughter.

Smiley face.

This last one was from Barb and Trevor’s heart-felt like supernova.

The night was going well. He was being charming, funny and confident. His body language advertised a great catch and a man who should be forgiven one honest mistake.

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Literally Stories – Week 38

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When I visited the back door portal to Literally Stories Friday morning charged with the task of ordering random words into something a little less random my first thought on typing Week 38 was; Is there any significance to the number 38?

In short. No significance.

The best ‘fact’ I came up with was it is the probable year of the marriage of Claudius and Messalina.

Fascinating.

However if you add ‘th’ to 38 and then parallel, too, the plot thickens into something almost but not quite significant, as you now have the 38th parallel. The demarcation between North and South Korea. An imaginary line that also passes just north of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, all of which makes one wonder how newspaper columnists survived before the advent of the internet search engine? None of which leads me to this week’s litany of literary marvels that began with The Aviator.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour, Story of the Week

Pow Wow Travels by Darlene P. Campos

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“This truck is so old, Chief Sitting Bull drove it to his senior prom,” I said to Larry Kicking Bird as he got onto Highway 18.

“Quit your bad mouthin’ on my truck, James Eagle. How on earth do I get to Sioux Plains from here?” Larry asked.

“Easy, easy. Sioux Plains is pretty close to where Sitting Bull grew up. Put your truck on cruise control and it’ll remember where Sitting Bull’s senior prom was.” Larry sped up to about 80 miles an hour, but not long after, a cop tailed us.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

The Aviator by Frederick K. Foote

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God help me. God help me be patient. God help me harness my anger and control my paranoia. I don’t want to go off on Carol again. Night Hawk completing weather analysis for scheduled high-speed run in forty-six hours, twenty-seven minutes. Alright, I take a deep breath, and I clear myself for take-off for a fifty-minute flight in the turgid air of psychobabble.

I open the door and start to greet Carol, Major Greer, but there is a linebacker looking white dude with blond hair and a neat little beard. Where the hell is Carol? This is her office. Did I get the time wrong or maybe the wrong day?

“Major Harris, I’m Doctor Clark. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

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Literally Stories – Week 37

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Last Sunday Literally Stories Editor, Tobias Haglund, chose his three favourite stories published on the site in the regular weekend feature,  ‘Editor Picks’.

If you would like a turn at Editor Picks email us at: literallystories2014@gmail.com and tell us in less than a 1000 words why you think your three selections are special.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour

A Miracle on Granville Street by dm gillis

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It was said that the Grove Café was so cheap that the Health Department had to bring its own cockroaches. It occupied an abandoned Bank of BC storefront on Denman Street in the west end of Vancouver, a mixed neighbourhood of the snotty middle class and the grubby poor. The café is gone now. The lease ran out, the landlord raised the rent and the Grove ceased to exist. The storefront sits empty now, and though he’d never admit it, the greedy landlord laments the loss.

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All Stories, General Fiction

River Water Larceny by Tom Sheehan

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English Wells fought the Pumquich River for forty years, moving his will ever by degrees at it. “By God, Miriam,” he often said to his wife, “I’ll go at it until I drop, most likely. What you work for, you get. You get what you work for.” English, lacking funds or worldly promise, wanted to steal more land from this side of the river, to push his small estate out over the river’s run, to claim energy’s due.

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