Category: All Stories

All Stories, Fantasy, Short Fiction

The Raccoon and the Personal Trainer: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical by Leila Allison

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It had been a good summer. A little too good. Tony sat atop an obviously forgotten Frito Lay delivery behind the 7-11 and stood watch as the others in the pack looted the short pallet and took its contents to their “clubhouse” down by the creek. Raccoons do not normally have sophisticated criminal minds–pretty much smash (actually tip) and grab is their way–but that wasn’t the case with Tony. He was an abnormally intelligent Raccoon who had the soul of a bandit. Tony loved beer and food, but he got a bigger kick out of stealing.

Maybe so, and although it is never the object of a Feeble Fable to cast body shame, the plain fact that Tony was beginning to resemble a chubby zoo Panda instead of a reasonably in shape wild Raccoon didn’t weigh on him as much as maybe it should have. And the other members of his crew were getting just as tubby. Just a month ago they would have had the pallet stripped in under two minutes; now, with all the dragging bellies and the huge butts smacking into one another, it was taking twice as long. If Tony had been aware of television, he might have seen the similarity between his gang and that on the Sopranos.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The City, the World by Tim Frank

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There are forces in the city greater than the stream of cars and buses charging through the streets day and night, greater than the parades of pedestrians and rows of skyscrapers towering like giant chess pieces at war, and these forces combined are nothing less than the world wrapped into a fist, lodged just beneath the surface of the earth, ready to explode.

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All Stories, Fantasy

It’s our 7th Birthday. Thank you all for your support. More to follow. Come back on Saturday!!

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A Given by Aishwarya Srivastava

The winter always belonged to the writers but the writers never belonged to anyone. That is why a 60-year-old Mr. Shaw sat in his two-story bungalow all alone eating flatbread with a new jar of ‘grandma’s homemade pickle’ that he had bought from the grocery store seven kilometers away. He lead a life of passion and compassion. Passion for his hobbies and compassion for… himself. But Mr. Shaw’s life, contrary to the belief of all the forest rangers who passed his ‘haunted’ house, was not empty. A murder of porcelain and granite along with the ominous howling of distant hungry wolves filled his nights like winds filled windmills. He just loved buying sculptures.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

The Bridge at Drochaisling by Anthony Billinghurst

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Georgia was being difficult before we landed in Dublin, which was nothing new. She changed and became assertive the second she was promoted to Deputy Head at her primary school; she even adopted a power walk. It’s true the flame of our marriage no longer burns like a log fire, but it does glow like anthracite when fanned enough. My friends who noticed told me I’m hen pecked but as Georgia said, I needn’t wonder if I’m hen pecked, she’ll tell me when I am.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Anne: Office Monster by Michael W. Clark

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She shouldn’t have red hair.  Also, it shouldn’t be the red that it is.  It is a dye job, a bad dye job.  She should act her age, but it’s not clear what that age might be.  She has too much energy for her skin.  Her skin has the pale of age, old age, too many years, is the phrase I would use.  Her skin had too many years on it for the energy she had.  Her thin pale epidermis indicated she should be slow moving, if not immobile, bed ridden maybe, but not walking faster than all the other employees.  People so much younger, so much stronger, should have so much more life than she had.  Her energy and her fire engine red hair, they just weren’t right. 

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 350- An Antisocial Experiment, Five Magi, A Special Announcement and Hell’s Jukebox: The Love Songs

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An Antisocial Experiment

There are endless social movements dedicated to improving people by requiring them not to be like people. Depending on your point of view this activity lies somewhere between education and brainwashing. I am old fashioned to the degree that I believe a person is influenced by both her upbringing and whatever chemistry is peculiar to her. You do your best to raise a child and if she grows up to be a doctor or a teacher you share in the credit, if she turns out to be a Josephine Mengela or the incarnation of Lizzie Borden, you shoulder some of the blame.

A person can improve. But people, as a whole, seldom do because there are “leaders” who want you to do as they command and will reward “good behavior” with letting you spend your life gazing into your phone and punish “bad thoughts” with unsupported accusations and placing you under the spotlight on the scaffold for a good old fashioned cyberstoning. This has been going on in one form or another since the invention of the third person–the first child who decides that her parents should be severely sanctioned for bringing her into this overlighted, loud and dreary existence, as well as not allowing her to have a phone until she can use one responsibly.

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All Stories, General Fiction

As If He Still Drives a Capri

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In the lull between my husband’s condemnations, I reminded our daughters that each Sunday is a Christmas. This way of thinking is Karen’s idea. She does Fridays and Saturdays in the shop with me.

She said when sorting citrus, ‘When life serves you lemons–’ and I held up my hand and asked, ‘Is there a cliché for grapefruit?’

Karen couldn’t think of one.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Hacienda of Love by Monika R Martyn.

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The weather app on my phone lies and says there’s only a 10% chance of rain; it’s raining. I listen to the sound of the soft rain as it mingles with the stillness evaporating with the rising sun. The world sleeps, and only the doves are awake with me. Humidity is 96%. Maybe it isn’t raining after all, and the sky is merely sweating. It’s hot in Mexico.

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