My older sister Nan makes promises. Promises to visit, promises to talk soon. Drops “luv yas” in, hasty afterthoughts. Texts that she’s proud of me too, even if they’re in sentence fragments.
But the promises keep rising and rising. Talk tomorrow, visit next month, two months. Promises are splayed across my consciousness.
Continue reading “Promise by Yash Seyedbagheri”
I think about amputation, a lot. Not the sort carried out by a scalpel but by the jagged blade of fate, leaving me immobilised, an inmate in my own home and haunted by a phantom limb I didn’t know I had. And so here I am, full of emptiness, tired by inactivity and blinded by a porthole to another self. A self that isn’t me.
Continue reading “Breathe by Leon Coleman”
We spoke on the phone for a couple of weeks before we met. It was nice talking to a woman again, calling someone on my ride home from work. I knew it wouldn’t really be going anywhere; she lived 3 hours way and had a 12-year-old to boot. Still. It was nice talking to a woman again.
Continue reading “Sarah by Yancarlo Rivera”
This author doesn’t have a huge number of stories on the site the quality is stunning. Different and intriguing. This is what Leila said about this one:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns -Killing Frost by Sharon Frame Gay”
There was a dog on the road. A mangy thing with grey fur falling out in tufts showing its wrecked body. I saw him one night limping up the road as I smoked my cigarette and did nothing. I watched it limp towards the side of the road snout burrowing deep into the dewy grass looking for anything to eat. He found the mouse whose body I had thrown there earlier in the day. I didn’t kill the mouse. Something else did. The mangy thing found the mouse and eyed it suspiciously for a moment, natural suspicion overriding starvation for an instant, and then ate the mouse. The mangy thing limped away just as I finished my cigarette and went inside.
Continue reading “Dying Things by Yancarlo”
She shrieks, and the noise echoes through the vast space and up towards the high, glass roof. She is half running, half tottering through Glasgow Central Station wearing a pair of siren blue stilettos. They clatter. A huddle of lads, all pastel shirted up for a night in the town, look over and stare. She throws her arms around me as if it’s a feckin lover’s reunion. ‘Bernadette. Oh My God,’ she squeals. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’
Continue reading “One Treacherous Evening by Claire Deans”
“Hey, don’t you worry. I got your back. I will always be here for you.”
That’s my brother, Medgar, named after Medgar Evers, talking to his twelve-year-old daughter, Shirley, named after Shirley Chisholm.
Continue reading “A Good Person by Frederick K Foote”
Two dollar bills lie on an empty table in the coffee shop. It’s a corner table, away from the world, a space no one seems to notice. I’ve sat there many a day, hoping they wouldn’t ask me to buy something.
I make sure no one’s looking. Pick up the bills. I run fingers through crispness. Pretend to peel them, relishing the crinkle of ownership and small power.
Continue reading “Bills by Yashar Seyedbaghari”
I caught her eye. Recognised a kindred spirit. Her head then converted into cruor popcorn. Colour of grey nail varnish, millet porridge. Scarlet white and woeful.
I feared I’d lose my lonesome bench for good.
Continue reading “All My Darlings Waiting by Antony Osgood”
Leila has brought out a piece by our most published author and he needs no introductions to regular visitors to the site:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – The Story of My Home Town Saugus, Massachusetts by Tom Sheehan”
literally stories 