“Turn that off!”
The dog nudged his elbow for a little attention
“You don’t like NY1?”
“Of course I do, but we are still in pre-game mode”
“Oh yeah?” she replied playfully.
Continue reading “Iced Coffee by Adam Kluger”“Turn that off!”
The dog nudged his elbow for a little attention
“You don’t like NY1?”
“Of course I do, but we are still in pre-game mode”
“Oh yeah?” she replied playfully.
Continue reading “Iced Coffee by Adam Kluger”“Is that all?” she asks.
He offers her the strap of woven hessian. She runs it through her fingers feeling the soft weave.
“All natural materials,” he says, “natural colouring, as strong as steel and 98% recyclable.”
“What about the buckle bit?”
“The ratchet.”
He hands her the item. She turns it and lifts the bar. The click is sharp and staccato in the over stuffed office.
Continue reading “A New World by Peter O’Connor”Frank noticed the couple when the Antique Collective shop doorbell clanged. Even to this day, he expected to see his wife June pass through that door as the bell reverberated. The couple came inside. She a bit mousy and dressed with some expense to look like she shopped at thrift stores; he was in expensive clothes meant to look expensive with a smartphone glued to his ear. They were the kind of patrons the collective needed to survive. They were the kind to admire his craftsmanship, while still needing furniture and having the revenue to purchase.
Continue reading “A Left-Handed Woman by Ann Harper Reed”Lana Jardine always told me she’d be taken in the rapture, when God would gather up true Christians just before the apocalypse. She accepted Jesus as her Lord and Saviour, so she’d never burn in hell. “I confessed my sins,” she said. “And he saved me.”
Continue reading “The Music of Lana Jardine by Harrison Kim”To whoever has the misfortune to find and listen to this recording, this is not a hoax, joke, or the results of delirium, hallucination, or a fevered drug dream. My name is Oslo Jennings, and I’m a 64-year-old victim of a fatal heart attack while driving. My medical records at the San Juan Medical Center document I was dead for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
Continue reading “A Hell of a Story Part 2 by Frederick K Foote”NYC 1978. Just got here from Ohio, to be an actor.
Confession. To be a movie star.
I get a single room on West 22nd st. It’s 15 by 8.
So I put the bed in the basement and get a mattress that stands against the wall. A folding table and chairs
Voila. It’s roomy.
Continue reading “The Village by Gene Bray”Dimac looked again and the white house at the end of the lane was pale yellow. He tried to find a simile, then a metaphor, and was lost in the miracle before him. The change had happened in the blink of his eyes, and it unnerved him so that he closed his eyes, waited for the white shingles to settle back into place, become their proper selves, as if he could say that about shingles, and opened his eyes.
Continue reading “The White House at the End of the Lane by Tom Sheehan”I’m in Southside Park sitting on a bench at 7 am Saturday watching five Southeast Asians fishing in the pond that we locals have promoted with the title of “Southside Lake.”
Continue reading “A Hell of a Story by Frederick K Foote“
“Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the grave.”
A while back, I was reading an account, by the poet and journalist James Fenton, of the fall of Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975*. In the middle of the despairing mob outside the US Embassy, begging to be evacuated, as the last of the helicopters departed, Fenton came across one man simply shouting over again, ‘I’m a professor, I’m professor.’ Poor guy, he was well behind the times, we university professors get dumped on nowadays just like any other employee. The trick is to spot when the shit-shower is imminent.
Continue reading “An Historical Fotnate by Michael Bloor”