Author: literallystories2014

All Stories, General Fiction

Things You Shouldn’t Say to Your Mother with Dementia by Maggie Nerz Iribarne

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“I’ve just told you that.”

When things became worse, I brought my mother to our abandoned-since-Dad-died beach house for the summer. A sabbatical and a newly west coasted daughter freed me to lug Mom like a bag of silent, bewildered groceries into the passenger’s seat of my car. We sped along the highway from the city to the coast, chasing the rickety car of Mom’s memory, lumbering just ahead. I savored the hopeful sensation of control and the encroaching smell of sulfury sea air.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Bicycle Man of Carlin Hill by Harrison Kim

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Shig Sagimoto appears to me in one short image, a slim, fedora hatted old fellow on a bicycle coasting down Carlin Hill, both hands on the handlebars.  As I observe him, he raises one arm upright into the blue sky of summer, then holds down the top of his hat, and for a few slight seconds, raises high his other hand, and balances as his bike wheels fly downhill through the hot afternoon air.  Then, he sees I’m watching.  Both hands press back to the handlebars, and he moves his head down as he pedals into the Tappen Esso parking lot.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Hold Your Breath by Sarah Macallister

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Underwater light flickers and dapples the sea floor, glowing through seaweed drifting in the current. Miles of sand undulate into shadow. The goggles bite hard into Colin’s cheekbones and behind his ears, but they do not leak. Colin swims deeper, releasing bubbles as he descends.

His chest tightens but the sand is close now. He stretches his fingers out.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Swerve by Tamara Barrett

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Q never swerved to avoid a beast on the road – dead or alive. He would drive through it with an iron fist, as if fur and soft tissue were nothing. A mental illustration of focus, a kind of road karate like the art of board breaking. Always direct your power beyond the wood stack. A fox, a kangaroo – he had a bull bar and was not squeamish about death – an emu once near Broken Hill, had snapped a rabbit’s neck.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Seizure Fugue by Max Klement

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When my head hurts, the shiny brass kettledrums play late into the night.

At first, I tried not sleeping. One day without sleep left me feeling a little unsteady; after two days I was getting stupid. By the third day it got bad—“all of the above” as they say on multiple-choice tests with little black dots that have to stay in the circles and hurt my eyes—plus, I felt like my head was filled with Rice Krispies. After that it just felt like my brain was deep-fried.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Mummers by Cathy Browne

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Three mummers scurried down Halstead Lane. They huddled together, a mass of grey and brown rags, buckets hanging off their elbows and pockets bulging with brushes and cloths. Somewhere in the folds of their shapeless rags, each one had a tin cup half-filled with their earnings of the night. They moved with little stubborn stomps, their buckets and coins clinking with every step, determined to keep their footing on the ice-slicked pavement.

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All Stories, auld author

Auld Author – Meat by Joseph D’Lacey – by Hugh

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I’ve decided to do a few of these. Now if you think they will be deep and meaningful with an in-depth synopsis you are reading the wrong review.

I will try to take these another way – I want to go off the cuff, not look back at plot and technique but simply to tell you why these have stuck with me. I will give you as much info as I can about the book, but it will be at the best, a bit sketchy. Fuck, a few of these I’ve read over twenty years back! That’s the point!!

…It is why they have stuck with me that I want to explore. And if they tweak your interest – So be it.

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Short Fiction

This Way to the Warden’s Office by A.V. Pankov

literallystories2014

The colony looked like it would sink into the bog of permafrost underneath it but it never did. It towered over a carpet of arctic lichens and scrubland like an apparition of a place imprinted on time and existence, the view around it never changed. The steel fence coiled around the brick edifice like a drunken domino line of panels knocked and dented askew and topped with a rattle of barbed wire. And the place spoke none of its inhumane ordeals.

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All Stories, Fantasy

To Wilt by Djordje Negovanovic

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Death loved Life, and she loved him, too. 

Life was everything and nothing. Her skin, translucent and radiant, was the sun, and her shining eyes the millions of stars. Her small mouth was the clouds and her hair was the singing forests. Life sang, passionate and golden, and green was brought to the world. Life wept, and water nourished the land. Life slumbered, and there were nights of twilight.

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