The room felt cold, the curtains around each bed swaying slightly in a draft that seemed to come from nowhere. Dennis walked down the centre aisle, the soles of his work boots sucking at the floor. He stopped at his mother’s bed, stood at the end of it, waiting.
His mother eventually opened her eyes, the act seeming to take some effort. The skin of her face was slack and grey, seeming to have shrunk since the last time he visited. ‘Dennis…’
He come in like dat. A black man on a black mare, seventeen hands, with three white socks. No saddle, no blanket, no shoes, bald head, no hat. Dat mare dancing and turning, kicking up the dust in the bright sun light.
I saw dat. Dat is what I saw.
Shadrach A. Williams
Recorded March 3, 1868
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Scouting locations for the 2015 Literally Stories Editors team-building weekend — or jolly as the vernacular would have it, is as you would imagine a thankless task, especially when the phrase ‘shoestring budget’ overstates the resources at your disposal.
A three-man ridge tent (for five) with en-suite latrine in the second week in December is hardly Glamping but should at least concentrate the literary mind.
Abii. Vidi. Unde digressus sum.
I went. I saw. I digressed.
In order to ascend vertically and eliminate the need for a runway, the plane was designed to mimic a helicopter on take-off. Then, once airborne, its propeller would shift through 90 degrees, transforming it neatly into a plane.
Neat on paper perhaps.
Due to low funds the whole operation must be effected entirely by hand. The propeller wound into place, the wings extended quickly, creating sufficient drag to lift the fuselage into place. Then the whole structure bolted tight. If they messed up, if they took too long, there was a chance the propellers force would tear the plane clean in half.
“I apologize,” Professor Plotnik said, a compact man with thinning hair and patience. “You’re not an imbecile but naive.”
Jane Birk bit her lip and clutched her tablet to her chest. The professor might fire her for insubordination. She couldn’t imagine life outside the Clusterings Institute and never completing her research. With her thesis two and a half years overdue, Birk knew she’d crossed the line, again.
Living in a mouth is precisely what you’d think living in a mouth would be: wet, aromatic, and exhilarating. It’s cozy and rent-free in here. She’s not a big talker, so it stays as dark as Anchorage, Alaska during a typical winter. I sleep well. I bathe in her saliva. I nibble on specks of food that dangle from the roof like edible stalactites. When she’s wrecked and raging on a Friday night, getting blitzed on gas station wine, blaring Linda Ronstadt, we both stumble into el diablo’s embrace. When she peeks at the mirror while applying lipstick, or washing her face, I pop out and wave hello.
Mount Carmel Road was a quiet dead-end in the north of town. In the middle of the night when the war in the Far East was over and the radios blared the news, all lights went on in all the houses on that blind street, except where the card game was played. Many of the neighbors were solidly indignant about that turn of events on VJ Night, two Mount Carmel boys would not be coming back from the mad Pacific, which most of us only saw in Saturday newsreels at the theater.
This house was a dark house on a dark street in my town that, with some lesions and scars, hangs on to a place in my memory and will not let go. Tenants and landlords hardly leave scribed notations of a dwelling, thinking all things will ferment, dissipate, and eventually pass on. Fifty years or more of recall usually get dulled, terribly pockmarked, or fade into the twilight the way one ages, dimming of the eyes, bending of the knees, slow turns at mortality. But this one rides endlessly in place, a benchmark, a mooring place. It resides as a point of time, a small moment of history colored up by characterization of one incident.
The Lake Huron sunset looked unnatural, as though painted by a child. The tremendous orb hung low in the sky, its colour so deep, so vivid that it no longer qualified as orange. As it slunk below the horizon, wide swaths of the same indescribable colour settled on the water’s rippled surface, then streamed through the trees to the screened-in porch. My mother was cast in an ethereal glow. The copper hair of her youth reappeared, framing her pale skin and the spray of freckles around her nose. For a moment, she was young again. Sensing my gaze, she put down her book. “Did you send the driving instructions to the girls, dear?” she asked—again.
Continue reading “The Lunch by Jennifer MacKenzie-Hutchison”
Mary wanders home and dreams of television. She has all her favourite shows recorded, ready and waiting to be watched. She passes a sign for fried chicken. It flickers overhead, metal shutters pulled up, open for business. At home, Mary knows, there are jacket potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge.
She is more than Fahrenheit, she is electric, not the lightning kind that will blast you hither and yon, but wired, the connections to all of me, my eyes bright and seeing the stars mirrored in the river, almost where they belong, bucket-spilled or tossed across the sky above Vinegar Hill, above all of Saugus… above old Scotts Mill directly across the street from my house, above the Iron Works from 1636 leaving figures and ideas larger than fossils on the land (like the 300 year-old remnant of the slag pile), above Rippon’s Mushroom House where I’m bound to work in a few years like most of my older pals, above Stackpole Field, where I’m bound to play with some of the same pals… and me on top of Theda Burton’s back side and she is bumping and bouncing and being electrically delightful as we are on a Flexible Flyer sled rushing down Bridge Street toward the bridge, halfway fallen into the Saugus River, and provides but a dangerous and narrow passage across one side of it.
Continue reading “Fahrenheit, Electricity and a Flexible Flyer by Tom Sheehan”
