Category: All Stories

All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Loch Ness Monster by Steven French

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He loved the drive up to Inverness: leaving Edinburgh on the motorway, crossing the Firth of Forth and looking across to the old railway bridge, wondering, each time, if it really was true that when they finished painting it they had to start all over again … Even the inevitable congestion around Perth he didn’t mind so much because once he’d got through all that it was the A9 and a free run all the way up to the Highlands. On a beautiful autumn day like today it was just unbeatable. He felt so good in fact that with only an hour or so still to go he decided to pull off the road into Aviemore and grab a bite. There was a wonderful ice cream store there that also sold cannoli and he picked up a box for the trip home. That put him behind schedule a little but he reckoned he still had plenty of time to do what he’d come for and get to the bed-and-breakfast by a reasonable hour. 

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Soul Under Siege by Kindaka Sanders – adult content

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Something wicked this way comes as the bloody moon fills the room with the foul scent of red rum.  I didn’t say my prayers before I passed out.  I’m living in this grand dragon’s layer protected by a glasshouse.  Now, as I’m creeping into these stages of sleeping, this drinking got me numb, and I’m hearing sounds like Vietnam.  We weren’t warned about the shit that would follow.  I woke up scareder than that nigga Ichabob Crane in Sleepy Hollow.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Trailer Parks and Sagebrush by Rachel Sievers

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The old woman in front of me is dead, this is an absolute, something I cannot change regardless of the power I have. She has been dead for quite some time, but she flutters around the broken-down trailer house like she has just been reborn, and in a way,  I guess she has. It is my job to facilitate these things but she seems not to need me and moves in a busy rhythm to a beat only she can hear. 

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All Stories, Science Fiction

A Dose of the Glitters by Cataldo Carroll

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‘Çoè-àòk!?’ blurted officer Gargles.

‘Çoè-àòk!?!?’ he repeated with a bemused look. ‘How the feck am I supposed to pronounce this? Christ but these alien names would wreck your head. Why can’t they just be John or Bob for feck’s sake!?’

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Fair and Dear Damsel in Distress by Tom Sheehan – Adult Content

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Cookie Simms loved a single piece of furniture in her home, the two-foot wide, seven-foot-tall mirror in her bedroom, away from all the other fuss and bother in the house. She found it easy to favor the mirror because it favored her ass, her breasts, the elegance of timid nipples, the unnerving black clutch of hair highlighting her pubic area, after her ass or nipples, that dark and mysterious claim to feminine wares was knockout number one in the man-parade of gazers, she was ultimately sure. It had begun when she was a mere 15-year-old sophomore in high school and often heard the boys saying, supposedly in private, what was so good about the privates that roamed around them all day in school and much of the balance of day rushing to midnight, where new and nightly dreams about hidden female treasures flooded dark hours as well as supposedly sleep-like twists and turns of growing boys. Those secret hours were loaded with ideas of how all such goodness would soon be theirs, by hook or by crook.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

The Ancient Wisdom by Crispen Lish

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Two of the three fish tanks were ok. Only, where were the large angel fish in the third? My daughter, Sam, walked around to the side. She was standing on tippy toes and still her nose only came up to the sandy bottom of the aquarium. Nevertheless, it was she who found the fish lying flat on their sides gasping. I couldn’t understand it. We had used the same filtration, the same water in all three tanks. What had happened? Five year old Jo, on the other hand, was busy running in and out of the spacious rooms. Finally, at last, our flat was finished. The pictures were hung, the antique carpets were laid and looked luxurious in the mahogany sitting room. It looked like home. Home away from home. Home now in Japan.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Aunt Sarah by Jeff Hill

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Everyone showed up to the funeral.  They grieved, they said nice things, they ate a nice meal, and then they left.  And moved on.  Or at least tried to.  But then it happened again, just a few days later, and they were back at the same church, the same cemetery, saying the same nice things and eating leftovers from the same nice meal.  And this time, they were afraid to leave.  Because the important questions aren’t usually asked this close to the grieving process.  The important answers aren’t usually as necessary.  One death is sad, but two, and so similar in nature, is alarming.  Were they both accidents?  Or were they linked?  And if they weren’t accidents and they were linked, the questions that came to mind among the grieving townspeople were as follows: Who killed them?  Why did they kill them?  And am I next?

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All Stories, General Fiction, Romance

The Impeccable Diver at the Pond by Tom Sheehan

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In a bathing suit, of a most direct design, Shelly Kearns was gorgeous and desirable all the way past dreams and, in the water, a sylph of the first order, and with every dive she took, explored the bottom of our pond for odd treasures of any sort, reclaimable for new duties or positive salvage. She kept her treasure of such objects on two shelves and a corner table in her home left by her husband Steve, dead from a high dive onto a half-sunken log that we assume made the trip on the river from the forest thirty miles upstream.

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All Stories, Fantasy, Science Fiction

(At) The End of the World by David Sebesta

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Simon arrived at the end of the world. This was the end of the world in both space and time: the very edge of a universe that would collapse in about an hour. It was a beach that merged into a desert, nothing on it but a pair of loungers and a figure in one of those. The scene seemed wholly unimpressive—however, Simon knew appearances tended to deceive.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Veil by A E Rocher

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It was a beautiful wedding. I knew it would be. After all, I planned it.

Held outdoors, next to a crisp, perfect stream in the Great Smoky Mountains where we loved to hike. Gorgeous fall morning, with blue mist gently rising, the crop of massive boulders on the bank looking quiet yet colossal, like waiting, sleeping giants.

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