Yeah, I live on Scarlet Street all right, near the corner of Agamemnon and Chintz. You know it? There is a pool hall on the corner, where there was a stabbing last year. 1732 to be exact, apartment 2C, in the back. I used to have a Plymouth Valiant but now I drive a Malibu. I just finished a box of crackers and a hunk of Swiss. I’m all out of dough. Cashed my pension over a week ago, paid some bills, and haven’t a dime to my name.
Continue reading “They Shot the Beave by David Lohrey”
The day I find the box, Sam jumps the fence and I go looking for him. Dad calls Sam“A Repeat Offender,” but here we are, six months since Sam’s last escape and Dad still hasn’t fixed the fence.
Continue reading “Law and Order by Phebe Jewell”
My cubical is in a row along the east wall of the building. Windows provide ample light on a sunny day, filtered through a bank of trees ringing the parking lot outside. The wind in the trees create moving shadows on my desk, and I follow them as my mind wanders. I gaze at the ceiling ignoring my work. Reading is time-consuming, time I need for maintaining appearances and impressing others with skills and abilities always needing attention. Skills and abilities are my life’s work. I know what people look like when they have such skills, I know how they act. I try to act the same way so people will assume I have the same abilities. My goal is to learn how to engage effortlessly in small talk and put others at ease with humorous anecdotes. I search for anecdotes whenever I can, I sprinkle them throughout my conversation. But it is hopeless, I know I have no social skills. One has to learn how to get along with people, it isn’t an innate skill.
Continue reading “Otter by Tim Hildebrandt”
One day, you look for money in your sister’s drawers and you discover something else completely. You started out the day Nick Botkin, sister of Nancy, son of Penelope. Now Penelope’s your grandmother and Nancy’s your mother.
Continue reading “Sister Mother by Yash Seyedbagheri”
We could tell something had Leila all riled up. We could hear her howling at the moon. We turned the music up and hoped for the best. This is what we found next morning on the steps outside the LS dungeons.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – So Are They All by Mitchell Toews”
I always thought that when it rains that means someone died. Funerals need rain like they need flowers or a priest or a rabbi or an imam.
It rained a lot that summer.
Continue reading “The Dying Disease by Elad Haber”
A clutter of stray cats roams the streets at night, eating corpses. Least that’s what they say. The clutter don’t make the corpses neither; they just sort of clean them up for us. Course, technically speaking, they’re a destruction of cats, seeing as how they’re wild. But clutter sounds better. Besides, all cats are wild no matter how fat and lazy and orange they might pretend to be. Cats are more like us than we care to admit. Only two animals who regularly practice sadism are us and the kitty cats. Hell, they even domesticated themselves just like we did. But even after all these thousands of years, they’re still creatures of the night. Just like us. Just like that Laura Branigan song. And just like the world.
Continue reading “Kitty Cat Man by Erik Sorensen”
Hoors!
Dirty fucking hoors!!
Hoor-maisters…Dirty fucking hoor-maisters.
Clatty bastards the lot of them.
Continue reading “Do The Right Thing by Hugh Cron – Warning – Strong Adult Content”
“Time and tide wait for no man, buddy. You got to get up and get back on track.”
Coach Leif is kneeling beside me with a grin morphing into a smirk. I’m flat on my back courtesy of a blindside hit that has me seeing stars, hearing bells, and wondering if I’m paralyzed.
“Track? Was I on a track? What the fuck? I thought I got hit by a truck. What’s a truck doing on our track?”
“Come on. Get on up and shake it off, Urban.”
Continue reading “Urban Violence by Frederick K Foote”
Philosophy 101 saved my life. A weird thing to say, I know, but it’s mostly true. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that my sleazy professor taught me how to stay alive. Of course, that knowledge was passed on accidentally. Professor Tomlinson’s teaching methods consisted of smoking dope and trying to screw his female students, me included. Any actual learning was purely circumstantial.
Continue reading “Brought Down by Y by Marco Etheridge”
literally stories 