Stomach is a damn hard taste to forget. Even before the bile claws its way up your throat, you can taste it—hot metal and candy aspirin. Then you can smell it, too. Sharp and noxious, the promise of chewed food and belly acid to come. I hate to even think about it, but memory’s a certain breed of sadist, and it knows what we dread the most.
8 am, Wednesday, and Chris waited for his mother. If only there was some way to stop her. Just because she had borne him nine long months, gotten up to him in the middle of the night in the years directly after, suffered his tantrums in the years after that, sent him off to school with a fresh packed lunch each and every day, saw to him as a teenager with his sullen silences and raging hormones, and helped him get a job and out into the world, she thought she could still intrude.
Continue reading “When People do Bad Things by James Hannan”
After a year of high adventure, its time for one young woman to return home.
And so, it had come to this… nothing would ever take him from his steely promise to extract, once and for all, total redemption from his old pal and teammate, Greg Lumbada, payment of the highest order, Amontillado on the instant air. So be it.
When I was about seventeen years old I met myself in a downtown park sitting alone on a concrete bench in a small amphitheater. I was not skipping school—I did not do that kind of thing. And anyway, it was summertime. It was an ordinary summer day with oxygen blue sky vibrant behind the office towers with revivifying sunlight. The few trees were green, the leaves glossy and stiff with chlorophyll-rich fibers respiring life. Either side the park, steady sparse traffic rolled by in opposite directions on one-way streets. When I came upon him there, I did not recognize the man life had made of me. I was about thirty years old in that malingering guise. My seventeen-year-old self was with a friend and nor did he recognize me. But I may be forgetting, I am grown older … Even I, who saw so clearly, have become confused about what is what and contradict myself at every turn; at every remove, remove myself further from myself. Soon I will be unable to return to who or what I always was, and my dissolution will be complete, as is the way of all flesh; as is the way of all that may be said to exist. Do not believe me, see for yourself. It’s more miraculous than ever you might imagine. What is more miraculous than anybody could ever imagine? What is? Exactly!
Leila has strayed a little into the upper layers of the manuscript mines with this one. This is what she said:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – A Major Error in Judgement by Harrison Kim.”
Another week over – It’s so sad.
No matter what the size of the story, plots can be complex but it is very off putting when we consider a story to be contrived.
Acceptable complex to contrived is separated by a bit of insecurity. Trust your readers, you do not need to baby them. Have the confidence to reveal without having to leave clues. Clues are a different medium, they are for being spotted, not read.
I think it’s all to do with flow. If you’re writing and your plot unravels naturally, then you have got it right. If you constantly change a story to fit the plot then that is maybe what comes across as contrived.
Gerald glanced at the hitchhiker staring out the passenger side of his truck. “Did ya’ hear me, son?”
“What?”
“I said, if you’re looking for mercy out that window, you won’t find it there. This world ain’t for giving mercy and when it does, it comes with a price.”
Slouched against the worn leather seat, the hitchhiker pulled his gaze away from the barren landscape, eyes drawn to the anomaly marring the desert sky. He inhaled a sharp breath and slid further into his seat, hands grasping the dashboard.
“It’s getting bigger,” he mumbled.
He often walked in the place where it ended. Thoughtlessly. Invariably without point or purpose. He felt like a ghost reflecting on a past life each time he retraced his steps, divorced from all sense of who he was.
The wind shifted slightly to the northwest, and Bill “Lone Dog” Bevans smelled horse traces in the air. He supposed that the horse smell came first on the air (there were other signs) because he hadn’t ridden a horse in a year, since about mid 1840 he thought at a guess. But he caught awed aromas riding on those same air waves … and a variety of sounds placing him on alert.
Continue reading “Lone Dog amid Apple Seeding by Tom Sheehan”
literally stories 