Category: All Stories

All Stories, Science Fiction

Mind Sweep by JJ de Melo

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Dad’s house reeks. Of bad coffee and cheap wine. My uncle talks at me through the odor. I barely hear him over the other mourners, rambling about how I look just like dad did at this age.

“If only you hadn’t got all these tattoos,” he says. He points at one in particular—a barcode from my favorite cereal brand over the left eyebrow.

I shrug at the comment. Stare at my wine glass. If I focus my consciousness on the swirling merlot, I’ll keep this bullshit conversation from recording onto my slate. That’s the trick these days—If you don’t want something damned into a forever memory, look away.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Mehico by Richard Hulse

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Emerson drove all through that warm afternoon. The three of them were quiet most of the way, but at one point Bobby looked over to Charlene in the back seat.

‘So, where’s you and your folks from?’

He felt a little awkward. He was just trying to make conversation. But she said nothing and perhaps she hadn’t even heard the question. She was frowningly immersed in Modern Screen. On the cover of the magazine was a picture of Bette Davis, blonde and alluring.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Memoir of a Fiction by Claudine Mussuto

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The abortion wasn’t the commencement or the culmination. The termination wasn’t the central event.

1.

It was a day when a more fanatical human placard did not carry a gun with which to shoot and kill the adult female receptionist. The procedure transpired in the summer of 1982 on Beacon Street in Brookline, an upscale suburban sister to Boston and, across the river, to academic Cambridge and its proletariat neighbor, Somerville, where I lived. Human billboards displayed the evolution of the species through its bloodied protozoan, bird, and fish forms at a proscribed distance from the clinic entrance. I and my volunteer escort were unmolested up the short flight of concrete stairs and into the locked steel and glass door of the health center brownstone.

The one-night stand wasn’t the inception or the finale. The encounter wasn’t the foremost incident.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Convert by Christopher Ananias

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I stood alone at my stepmother’s funeral, fondling a plant, watching rain bead down the fogged window. The funeral parlor’s black walls, and black curtains were heavy-handed leaning too much on the death knell. Ten lines of bright red chairs clashed with a maroon carpet. The organ music droned like it always did—my whole life.

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All Stories, Humour

See You Next Year by Mark Barlex

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Like all large things taken for granted, the North Atlantic Current knew the importance of what it did and thought long and hard before jacking it in.

An elemental system shifting oceans of warm water from Mexico to Europe slowed in protest at anthropogenic climate change then stopped altogether.

Nature’s last laugh. A landmass expecting to fry now pondered winters twenty degrees below average. No North Atlantic Current, no band of temperate air wrapping the Celtic fringe. Have another ice age, Nature seemed to be saying. Exactly what you didn’t order.

From Galway to Hamburg, people laboured through a winter of deadening snow and ice.

The next year, they stayed at home.

The year after that, they felt like staying in bed.

The year after that, they did.

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All Stories, sunday whatever

Sunday Whatever Escaping from Prison: A How-to Article By Dale Williams Barrigar

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When I attended graduate school for writing in the midwestern USA in the mid and late 1990s, all the best classes and writing workshops were held in bars, pubs, and-or saloons. A slight exaggeration, but only slightly. It was the tail end of an era when drinking and writing, at least in the USA, were still seen by many as activities that go hand in hand. And hand in hand with drinking goes smoking, so most of the drinking writers in the writing workshops were also smokers too, either heavy, medium, or light. The second-hand smoke that was consumed along with the first-hand smoke along with the beers along with the shots of whisky while writing was being discussed in the writing workshops that were happening in the bars, makes me not wonder why I already have Stage One Emphysema nor why I’ve already had a stroke. I’m healthy as a horse otherwise (yes this is possible) and I’ve already done what you need to do to slow emphysema down which is quit smoking. I stopped drinking twenty-one years ago and there is no doubt that I would be dead now if I had not stopped drinking. Three of my writing teachers from those days are dead from drinking and smoking even though, if alive, they would not yet be 80 years old. All three of them died from some combination of chain-smoking cigarettes and alcoholism, the functional, working variety of it, that is. These men never stopped working. But they also never stopped drinking or smoking. And it put them in an early grave, just as it promises to do for almost everyone who goes too far with any of these activities. My fellow students in the writing programs were also alcoholics. One of them I almost married, except that she turned out to be an even bigger alcoholic than I was. It’s sad to see a brilliant brain slowly bludgeon itself into submission right in front of your eyes when you yourself have already done the necessary work that is required to save yourself from a similar fate. Keith Richards quit heroin in the 1970s before it killed him and his girlfriend refused to do so which is why he had to tell her sayonara, beautiful lady.

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All Stories, Horror

Danny by David Henson

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After a groan of a day at work, Harmon Donovan riffles through the musty comic books he salvaged from his mother’s estate sale. He feels something under the stack. A beak? Of course—Danny. Harmon turns the toy over in his hands. About six inches tall, the wooden duck stands upright. Harmon traces his finger down the head where the blue-green paint is chipped and fading. The plaything transports him to simpler times. Before his boss, Mr. Murphy. Before—

“Harmon, are you going to mow the lawn or not?” His wife’s sharp voice from downstairs pops his daydream.

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All Stories, Fantasy, Science Fiction

Working Lunch with the Space Vultures by Joel Bryant

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The décor of the Hollywood Space Diner was a neon and chrome nightmare. Adding to the charmless ambience was an unavoidable aroma of hot garbage. It would not have been Dave’s choice of eating place, that was for sure. He could just about stomach the interior design; it was the vile food that was the real concern. He found himself battling the urge to run screaming from the establishment, clutching a super-sized sick bag.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Beware the Wild Geese by Michael Bloor

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June, 1971

Andy had messed up big-time in his final year at uni. He didn’t like his course. Economics, the ‘dismal science’ that ascribed a sovereign power to selfishness, thus scorning  as scientifically irrelevant altruism, paternal and maternal love, solidarity, charity, and every noble human impulse. He was repelled by his tutor, a posturing, pipe-smoking, bow-tie-wearing fraud. Andy had received an education there, but he had received it from his friends. He found Borges’ stories, Bergman’s films, Auden’s poems… You can fill-in the list for yourselves.

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