A Hermit-Crab Hiding In the Shape of a Husband
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Author: literallystories2014
The Laws of Attraction by Carol Willis
The skirl of Citizens Arrest fills the stairwell of my walk-up. The electric guitar twangs and pulses through the walls; my key chain vibrates in the door lock, sending judders up my arm, rattling my teeth. I thump on my neighbor’s wall.
“Sorry, cielo!” Manolo yells.
The music stops but my head still throbs.
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Sunday Whatever – What’s in a name by Michael Bloor
Derby in the English Midlands, where I was born and raised, is an industrial city, famous in the past for its locomotives, and in the present for Rolls Royce aero engines. In my lifetime, an awful lot of its old buildings have been knocked down, even the ancient church of St Alkmund’s, swept away with its graveyard to make room for the new inner ring road. But it still has a lot of old pubs: The Dolphin Inn, for example, dates back to 1580. So the fact that The Noah’s Ark pub is two hundred years old is hardly noteworthy. What is pretty interesting though, is how it got its title. It’s not named after ‘the illustrious first navigator,’ as one Victorian local historian phrased it. It’s named after a locally famous character called Noah Bullock who had a house on that site, back in the seventeenth century.
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By the Beautiful Pond by Harrison Kim
Dan Bonner used his right hand to toss two keys to the moss-covered forest floor of Happy Valley Forest. The keys lay there glinting among the twigs and dead leaves. The throw sealed his purpose, to set his mind and body free from chance. He stood naked, one foot and one wrist handcuffed to a birch trunk. The forest stood so thick here, he could barely see the sky. That was the way he liked it, all the empty blue blocked so he could focus on the shade around him.
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A Door with a Thousand Locks by Ed Dearnley
The usual doubts arrive as I cross the street, heading for the corner of Abbeville Road. This seemed like the right thing to do an hour ago, sitting in a pub on the South Bank, toasting our anniversary with a third glass of wine. But now I’m here, all I can imagine is another rejection.
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How Soul-Globing Works by Dino Alfier
When you die, you find yourself on a sandy beach strewn with sacks, some old, some in tatters, still others weathered almost beyond recognition. All your orifices have been stitched shut. First you encounter the Bookkeeper, who opens the Ledger on your double spread and pores over the left-hand page to total all the times you have hurt others and yourself, what here they call your hurtlings.
In the Beginning by Lee Stoddart
Nothing.
Nothing to see. Nothing to feel. Nothing to smell. Nothing to hear. No sense of orientation.
Nothing.
Not just the lack of anything tangible, but the absence of even the concepts to describe the lack of senses beyond the externality of… what?
Me.
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Burning Away Sin by J.J. van Schaaijk
The town’s children were eager to help. They would gather sticks and small logs from the forest to add upon the pile. It gave them purpose, a role to play in what was to happen. The town’s folk had long been gathered. Many held small crucifixes close to their hearts, whilst memorized prayers left their lips. Others stood patiently, echoing silent whispers of what was to come.
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Beards by Ann Marie Potter
Wanda missed the bars that had surrounded her since she was fourteen. They weren’t really meant to imprison her, of course. They were meant to add to her mystique, to convince the carnival customers that she was wild and dangerous, that the fur on her face made her kin to the wolf that had eaten grandma. Turns out, she’d needed those bars to protect herself. Full-grown men, probably deacons in their churches, had growled and laughed and rattled the bars to get a rise out of her. Her mother had trained her not to respond. Middle America was full of idiots who stroked their shotguns like they stroked themselves in darkened movie theatres. Although she was on display, in truth she was the one who had a front-row seat. She’d sat behind those bars for nearly forty years watching a parade of men who grinned like fools when their crops came in and snarled at their families when they didn’t. She was there when young men started coming through with empty shirt-sleeves and even emptier eyes. She’d heard the grumbling when the law said that Blacks could come to the show “right alongside the upstanding White folks” of rural Atlanta. Two-years-ago, she’d reveled in the South’s dumbstruck disbelief when a Black man took a seat behind the desk in the Oval Office.
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Eggshells by Amy Rains – Includes references some readers may find distressing – see tags.
Sitting forward on the hard plastic cushions of what some might call a couch, you remember your sister once told you death is an ocean: waves crashing and receding again into the watery stuff from whence they came. You remember how you used to find that image comforting, the oneness of it all, and shake your head now at the thought of it. The sterile smell of the room around you isn’t quite sharp enough to cut through a wandering mind, so you press your hand against the looming incubator to your left and hum some tune from your childhood loud enough to drown out the CPAP machine—the one that whirrs and hisses in the unmistakable timbre of crashing waves.
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