In a house in the woods, smoke churned and twined through the red bricks and out into the cold autumn air. A very pale girl sat on a sloping hill and watched the smoke huff and puff and disappear.
She remembers now. It does not always stay with her, like a word on the tip of your tongue. She can almost taste it but in the end it evades her, staying silent and unknowable. Today is different.
Continue reading “Friendship by Brooklyn Peters”
This is another of those stories that we really wanted to publish but for various reasons it wasn’t a good fit for the usual posts. It was too good to pass over and so – we give you-
Horton Hears You by Rosemary Grant
The paramedics found him in the snow at a bus stop, nursing what they called a Hennepin Avenue cocktail: grape juice and Listerine, mixed half-and-half. When he got to the emergency department, he did nothing but stand at the door of his room and stare through the glass. I walked in and introduced myself as his nursing assistant. He took off his Horton Hears A Who! t-shirt and said he was cold. I asked if he wanted a sandwich. He replied: “I never killed anyone.”
He stood in the corner of the room as I took his blood pressure and temperature. He didn’t look at me. His arms were circled with lines of round cigarette burns, spiraling down his palm and across his hands. Seven on each finger, four on each thumb.
When I left his room, the doctor was at the door talking to his nurse. He couldn’t stay, the doctor said. He was sober enough to walk and talk. He wasn’t suicidal or homicidal. He burned himself and drank—but that was how he lived—and maybe he acted psychotic, but only God could say for sure, and he didn’t meet criteria for admission, and anyway the hospital was full and the hospitalist would spit in his face if he asked for another bed.
“Should I call a cab?” said the nurse.
“He wants to walk home.”
He walked out into the snow as I was checking in a woman who had three children with the flu. I didn’t see him again.
This story really impacted the team here and so we approached the author to suggest we link to a couple of sites that care for homeless and desperate people.
Madison Street Medicine brings together doctors and healthcare professionals to provide healthcare for homeless people in Madison, WI https://www.madisonstreetmedicine.org/about/.
and
MEDiC is a system of student-run free clinics affiliated with the University of Wisconsin that provides free care to underserved populations, primarily homeless people and undocumented immigrants https://www.med.wisc.edu/education/medic/.
She was the craggy-faced, big-boned, broken-nose blonde on the ripe side of 50 working the night shift at the front desk at the small New Hampshire Hotel.
Continue reading “Checking In by Frederick K Foote”
Tonight, there was a man in my room. He appeared when I turned out the lights. He wasn’t there before. And then he was. Crouched at the foot of my bed. Smiling
It’s just his white eyes. His dark pupils. Always looking at me. His teeth are glowing in a big smile as he stares at me. The whites of his eyes pronouncing the void of his pupils as their darkness looks unblinkingly at me. Ready to welcome me into bed.
Continue reading “The Smiling Man at the Foot of My Bed by Noah Love”
I walk in; he’s watching Andrei Rublev walk through a shoddy doorway into the rain and disrobe.
“That’s an oldie,” I say. “Are you finding it any good?”
“Hmm,” My son hems. “It’s a lotta doorways. And he’s not very nuanced.” Done thinking, his face flashes. “Don’t spoil anything if you’ve seen it.” Still hung up on the Citizen Kane snafu…
Continue reading “The Trip by Dillon Cranston”
I knew I wanted her for a model when I saw the portrait selection at the Portland Art Museum. She was painted hanging out of the passenger seat of a car waving at something unseen by the museum visitors. I don’t know if I’m right, but I thought of early Marilyn Monroe.
Continue reading “Twin Sisters by Doug Hawley”
The other week I encountered a most unusual sport. You may know him. Wilson Mizner is a Broadway playwright, fine art forger, fixer of boxing matches, California hotel manager, and above all a professional gambler in all games concerning chance. His God-given talent of seduction enticed me into one game of cards I will never forget. The evening prior, the quick-witted 47-year-old traded a pistol fired by Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral for a mint condition 1922 ‘green pea’ Aston Martin, which he swapped for a remote ice-fishing shack on Devil’s Lake. He bet the icehouse on a game of war.
Continue reading “An Overnight Train to Minnesota by A.R. Carrasco”
“It’s the hardest thing to make someone laugh especially if you’ve had nothing to laugh about.” –Tracy Morgan
“You know, I’m homeless.”
Silence.
“Hey you in the second row. You look surprised. Do you think I’m too cute to be homeless? It’s pitiful. I don’t have a floor, a roof over my head, a refrigerator to put food in, a place to shower. Do you feel sorry for me? Ah, a few of you. Don’t. I’m a poet. I don’t follow the rules, and I get inspiration looking up through the moon roof of my 2008 Buick, La Crosse, Gold Mist. My grandpa left it to me in his will. I think of him every night as I sleep under the silver apples of the moon and wake to the golden apples of the sun. You probably think this is a poetry reading. Don’t worry, it’s not.”
Continue reading “What’s Your Opening Line? by Nina Welch”
George thought of it while he was shaving. He was pulling the skin of his right cheek down and carefully stroking with the razor held in his left, less adroit hand, and it was such a shock that he cut himself: Lawyers are magicians. As he applied styptic to his dark cheek, he spun it out: Lawyers bring entities into existence by naming them and delimiting them. Without lawyers, there are no geographical countries, and barely peoples. (And those peoples, insofar as they exist, tend to be distinguished as much by the language they speak as by their companioning.) Lawyers set boundaries, and the lesser wizardries of surveying and mapping arose to aid them.
Continue reading “Merely Semantic by Mary Ann Dimand”
literally stories 