I just want to get to my flat up the road, hoping I don’t bump into any of my neighbours, but they’re all loitering out front, sweat trickling into their eyes, swaying slightly in the raging sunshine. The road is long and straight with oak trees lining the pavement, creating circles of hot shade. Birds perch on branches and shit on BMW’s. Everyone wants the trees cut down.
Continue reading “A Guide to Walking Down My Street by Tim Frank”
Hung: It would be wrong to say it was her favourite expression. Her favourite expression, my Mam, was “Hell’s Bells!”, which was short for “Hell’s bells and buckets of blood”. That was her idea of swearing. A jingle: just enough to keep a real swear word at bay.
When the real ones came, they were Dar’s, and they were like my brother, Davie, you know – thick, short, and fast.
So, no, “Be hung for a sheep as a lamb” was not her favourite phrase, but Mam said it a lot. It was shortened, but we somehow knew what she meant. Maybe the long of it had been explained to us once, or maybe we explained it to each other.
The sentiment was that if you are going to be hanged for stealing a small lamb, then you may as well steal a whole sheep. A jingle of wisdom passed down, like a pair of shoes. It was what families did then. They’d pass old sayings down the line, the blood line. They would settle, acting like silt, determining your depth.
It was hard to picture though. Where we lived there were no sheep. A lamb chop from the butcher’s maybe, that could be stolen, but I’d not have the courage. The butcher was a big man. Blood and blades were nothing to him.
No one ever corrected Mam’s grammar, not that I can recall. Hung it was.
Continue reading “some words ending in a sentence by Phill Doran”
Sterling Redmond Calico lay sprawled out on his stain-covered recliner, his limbs heavy and lethargic. The poison was snaking its way through his body, he could see with an artist’s imagination its slow and determined march through his veins. Thick, black and ominous, destroying him cell by cell as Red caressed his cheek on the cool salvation of a half-empty beer can. He could see the snow falling fast through the single cracked window in his rent controlled, shitty third floor walk-up. The flakes made neon-white streaks, flying in rapid succession like a warp-speed trip on the Millennium Falcon.
Continue reading “End by A. Elizabeth Herting”
First time I laid eyes on Alanna, I thought, There’s a woman I want to saw in half.
She was in the audience, one leg in plaster stuck out into the aisle. After the show I watched her leave, expecting her to walk like a pair of compasses, but somehow she moved so gracefully everyone else looked awkward. I sent my assistant to catch her at front of house but she claimed she missed her, ha ha. And that’s where I should have left it. Stopped thinking about her. I keep going over it, how I might have escaped this God-awful mess, financial and . . . yes, yes, all right, all the rest.
Continue reading “Love? Don’t Make Me Laugh by Alex Barr”
Harper Gillespie, newly fourteen, rode up to a place locals called Baby’s Bush to meet two of his friends: Dave Erich and Robinson Pike, both of whom were several years older. The bush stood in the middle of a field between two lines of pines. Almost as big as a house, they said every time someone tried to cut the bush down, they would have to stop because they heard a baby crying.
Continue reading “A Strange Way to say I Love You by Matthew Senn”
Her forehead stretched and arced into a pale rainbow and her hair lengthened into a dark mane. Her eyes and nose shimmered, while her mouth melted towards her sagging chest. Her clothes were random brushstrokes of ruby red and deep green. And then in a warped flash, she was gone.
Continue reading “The Peephole by Tim Frank”
Port Fairy, Victoria 1859
I am grown now; and the sperm whales and the southern rights that brought the ships here seeking their precious oil and the bones which make corsets for ladies in far-away places no longer visit. But still the people come, and the farming settlement thrives. Port Fairy, named for a sea captain who landed in this spot, part of the Port Phillip District in the great southern land.
Continue reading “The Seventh Wave by AJ Lyndon”
“It’s hot enough to taste the air and eat the summer,” Nana said. She settled herself onto the stoop’s top step. “Don’t worry child, he’ll be here soon enough.”
Continue reading “Waiting for Daddy by Serenity Marshall”
He was in the sparse land between shifting sands of the great desert and the last tree bearing green when he saw the vultures descending from their high flight. Breward Chandler, “Brew” to friends back in the mountains where breathing was much easier than here in the midst of little life, sat bareback on an Indian pony he had freed from a natural corral behind a blow-down. Chandler had learned that the horse would obey pulls on his mane and in this manner he had escaped from sure capture by heading into the desert, with his pistols loaded and a lariat and a canteen he had grabbed on the run. He was not sure who was after him, either renegade Indians or renegade whites out for the kill, looking for guns, clothes, saddles, anything for free. He was hoping that they’d measure the little he might have against the rigors of a chase in the desert. Perhaps, he also hoped, they were smarter than he thought they were.
Continue reading “A Saddle in the Desert by Tom Sheehan”
Roscoe was a three-year-old Dachshund who had a problem: his “Associate Human” (A.H.)–though in most other ways acceptable–had a thing for dressing poor Roscoe in ridiculous costumes and posting the result on her YouTube channel. Dachshunds are uncommonly dignified, and things like being forced into wearing a “Frankfurter” outfit for the sole purpose of the A.H. gaining likes and subscriptions hurt Roscoe’s pride.
Continue reading “Roscoe and the Lightning Glory: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical”
literally stories 