I sterilize an empty room. Wipe away scents of lavender perfume and kisses. Curse kids speeding on golf carts, runners pushing limits, horns blaring.
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Category: All Stories
Strutting Hog by James Hanna
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
-Bob Dylan
You are alive to the moment—nothing more. And the moment is not alive to you. The shrunken path you walk, the fogbanks swirling around you, the overgrown forest that slows your stride offer neither cheer nor condolence. Rather they make you feel perishable, as though you have stumbled here in your sleep.
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Counting Leaves by Tim Frank
“I want you to go out into the street today, Lionel, and stand there, for maybe an hour or so, then come back and tell me what you’ve seen. I want you to be real descriptive, make it all come alive. Don’t let me down because I’m really getting fed up sitting here, not even able to see a leaf on a tree. You’ve got your problems, but you still have your sight so please treasure it and share it with me.”
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Scratch by Tom Sheehan
In the whole of Riverside Cemetery this was the one stone that had slipped its mooring, leaned not forward into the new millennium, but backward, into the one passed by mere years ago, as if saying it was tired of all the holding on. In one instant the scribed name was home with me: Dumont Pulsifier, an old pal from my neighborhood, but everybody, including his mother and his dead father while he was here, had called him “Scratch.”
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Band of Barnyarders by Leila Allison
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22 August. According to my Writer’s Calendar it was Dorothy Parker’s birthday. Mrs. Parker was famous for her wit, light verse, stories, book and theatre reviews, A Star is Born, dogs, as well as alcoholism, suicide attempts, failed romances and a hodge-podge of emotional problems of varying severity. She was the sort of human who was aware that she was human and desperately wished to surrender and join the other side. Although she already knew that such a thing was tantamount to squaring the circle, it didn’t keep her from trying.
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Summer Nightsweats by Shane O’Neill
Three months have passed since the death of my wife. It has been a long summer, hot and unbearable. My only solace is knowing that it will be my last. I sweat incessantly. Others thrive in the sickly heat. Oh, that the rain would rinse the smiles from their faces. I keep my ghastly body hidden from the outside. Sometimes I cough. Recently more and more. But I rarely dwell on this. Hacking out a thick wad I get on with my business of living and dying. It is all I know.
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Cheap Tricks by Alex Sinclair – Warning Adult Content
“Thanks love,” the red-faced punter wheezed, tossing over a tenner, as Charity Proudfoot wiped away the spunk he had dispensed on her lip with the back of a frayed coat sleeve.
She didn’t reciprocate with a banal pleasantry of her own, as per usual, she just took the dishonest twenty and climbed out the motor, which is how she knew a monster of a rattle was on the way if she didn’t hurry up and get her shit together. Normally you couldn’t shut her up.
Charity the chatterbox had been her school moniker, or as her mam preferred, a right mouthy little pain in the arse.
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Once Screamed to Drunks at the Vets Bar, Memorial Day Evening by Tom Sheehan
Sixty-six years now and they come at me, in Chicago, Crown Point, Indiana, by phone from Las Vegas.
I tell them how it happened, long after parting, one night when I was in a bar, thinking of them all.
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A Better Mousetrap by syndie allen
Chairs splintered. Egg yolk dripping off the ceiling. A gash here, a bruise there and he was tired. He was more than tired. The lumps and blame he had taken over the years finally put him over his line and as he sat nursing the latest wound, carefully devising another excuse to avoid punishment, a little place in his feline brain began expanding. Instead of the inevitable excuse, instead of the blood dripping down his paw, the brain space began to grow. It began to focus on his blood.
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Literally Reruns – Overpowered by Diane M Dickson
Leila has brought a big grin to my face by choosing this piece for a Rerun. I read it over again, it’s a while since I wrote it and – though I freely admit it has glitches it did make me smile. This is what she said:-
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literally stories 