Category: All Stories

All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Short Fiction

The Rules of Love by Arjun Shah

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“You are not here to become a man, because to become a man you must first learn the rules of love,” Vikram Paya, the best of us, began on the first day of the Dhoon School Weekly Newspaper class. “No, my old sons of Bombay, my riotous banchods of Delhi, you fish-eating Bengalis, and the rest of you celestial bodies, suburbanites, the few villagers—you are here to go to better places, because, after all, The Dhoon School is but a waiting-place for Cambridge, for Oxford… for the lucky few of you—here, you will not learn to be great men but exemplary boys…”

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All Stories, Writers Reading

Writers Read. A Most Unfortunate Incident by Geraint Jonathan

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Apparently, in the Russian original, Dostoevsky is a very funny writer, his novels rich in comic turns, witty wordplay and, not infrequently, downright farce. That this may be lost in translation is often all too evident from the many English translations to date. (For some reason, as David Foster Wallace somewhere points out, Dostoevsky’s characters are still made to say things like “The devil take it!”, rather than, say, “To hell with it!”; such archaic expressions abound, lending a stiffnecked quality to even the most anarchic of situations described.) That said, however, there’s barely an English translation of Dostoevsky’s 1862 novella, A Most Unfortunate Incident, that does not carry at least some of the tale’s comic heft; other translations are titled, variously, An Unpleasant Predicament, A Sordid Story, A Nasty Anecdote, A Disgraceful Affair;  but for my money, it’s Ivy Litvinoff’s translation from 1971 carries the day.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Another Way to Do It by Stephen Silvester

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Punch – the professor only used the honorific Mr when trying to seize the butterfly attention of excited children – woke up one morning and decided enough was enough. From his random dangling position it so happened that he was looking at – it could hardly be into – one of the glazed eyes of his unlawfully wedded. He didn’t know whether she was awake or not; he was only ever fairly confident that she was when she was on the other end of the tug of war with the baby and had already assumed the professor’s rather camp baritone. Punch sniffed the air and wondered if being upside down was making his sense of smell more acute.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Shadow by T H White

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Tom Mitchell had lived alone for longer than he could remember. His wife, Lily, had passed away a decade ago, and their children had long since moved away, caught in lives of their own. The house, once filled with laughter and warmth, now echoed with a quiet, unrelenting stillness. Even the walls seemed to breathe differently, like they were holding their breath, waiting for something – or someone.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Tiny Dancers by P A Farrell

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In her nursing home bed, petite Margaret, just four feet tall, stared at the ceiling under the dim glow of fluorescent lights, her face devoid of the vibrancy it once held. Legs that had leapt across a sound stage lay thin and mottled with brown age spots. Feet that had slid into dainty slippers now stood as small, rigid reminders of long ago. 

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Please, Varanasi by Arjun Shah

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Looking out over the bridge, you can see widows in their sarees and gold bangles and solemn, painted faces. Above them, the sun emits a last, romantic orange which blends with the blue of the previous sky, creating stripes of pink which bring the two colors together. The air smells of death.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 538: The Mind of the STM

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Despite an amount of booster shots I can no longer recall (five, I think), I again came down with covid (thrice so far that I know of), a week ago Wednesday. This is by far the strongest one I have endured, and even though it has ruled the last week and a half, it certainly is not a killer. It spared me the last three days of my work career and has gotten retirement off to a somewhat foggy start.

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All Stories, Fantasy

A Whale of a Time by Kelly Hossaini

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The parking lot was empty.  But that wasn’t unusual, partly because it was midnight and partly because, since the sparkling new Saver General came to town, Dan Burns’s General Merchandiser rarely had any customers anymore.  Dan learned with dread the coming of the Saver General and he knew that, slow or fast, the death of his store was probably imminent.  Before he had closed up earlier that evening, he stood looking out the front door onto the empty lot.  It was getting cold.  Winter was certainly coming and in a high desert climate it would be dry and cold for months.  Dan didn’t mind that too much.  In the not-so-distant past, the chill would keep the townspeople coming in for heaters, batteries, warm socks, and hatchets to break icy ponds so livestock could drink.  Now the cold seemed to make things more desolate and hopeless.  Dan turned from the front door and left out the back to his truck.  At least the truck was paid for.  That would help him survive a bit longer.  Probably.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Night, Out by Jessica Nilsson 

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It wasn’t until he was on the bus that his hangover started to kick in. Until then he hadn’t had time to feel anything – he hadn’t set his alarm (couldn’t even remember getting into bed in fact), and when his eyes had snapped open suddenly and he’d seen the time, adrenaline had taken over.  He was up, dressed and running for the departing bus before the panic subsided and the nausea thundered in.

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