“Killing a snake is the same as having a snake”
– Joan Didion
A large, clay and plaster likeness of Saint Patrick, holding a crook and pointing at writhing snakes on the statue’s base, dominated the right side of our church. He was wheeled in face up on a donkey-cart, wenched upright by strong men when St. Patrick’s Church on Ninety-Fifth Street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was built in 1847. “Black Forty-Seven” my dad called it.
Continue reading “Snakes in The Garden by Gerald Coleman”
Ginny was raised on violin lessons and minimal parental supervision. The combination very nearly landed her in a windowless room in the detention center in Brooklyn, and if Callum hadn’t gotten away with the dogs just when he did, even his street smarts might not have saved her.
She sat up, prim and proper, as if in counterpoint to her casually draped robes and the haphazardly pillowed sedan chair. Like for her previous sittings, she was artfully arranged in Laurent’s beautiful courtyard, the scent of flowers filling her nose. Her lover looked up from his canvas to offer a conspiratorial wink, as her loosely wrapped coverings rippled in the breeze and brushed against her skin. The slight movement of the cloth kept the glow of their lovemaking fresh, and the faint curve of her lips betrayed imperfectly hidden delight.
Continue reading “The Moment by Evan Hale”
Regular visitors to the site will be aware of Tom. He has had more stories published than any other author. Much of his work is republished writing but though he is now in his 97th year and struggling with vision loss he is still submitting new work. This is his latest submission to Literally Stories. Proof if it were needed that the soul of the writer burns brightly regardless of the passing years.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever: The Decoration by Tom Sheehan”
The day Didi realised her husband had curated a nice little world of half-naked digital women for himself, it was almost time for her to attend her weekly lunch with her girlfriends. She was unable to progress towards the front gate. Instead, she stared at her reflection on the surface of their garden pond, built by him and for ten years, her delusional confirmation he was happy. She looked at her liquid face and wondered what she’d done wrong.
Continue reading “What Matters by Shivani Sivagurunathan “
A short story by T.C. Barrera
from the on-going series yet-to-find-a-home,“Counting the Birds”
“Eli… Listen… Long as the vents blow cold and the wine stays colder, these motherfuckers don’t give a fuck, alright? How much are ya thinkin’?”
My brother parks the car opposite the house with the red door that used to be grey. The treeless street looks even grimmer than I recall. I glance at the rows of identical houses with the grey pebble-dash walls, trying to remember the neighbours who once occupied them. Women in pinnies and headscarves scrubbing their front steps. Sweeping their concrete paths. Men rolling drunk up those paths. Sound of yelling and slapping. Immaculately dressed children with polished shoes.
Continue reading “Colour Clash by Sandra Arnold”
The beetles live in the stump out back, festering beneath the rotting remnants of an old dule tree. I call them, and they rise—the black coil of death—thousands of them climbing up, up, up and over each other, hissing and clicking, putting her together like sentient fog. Black fog. Only sometimes, especially when they’re hungry, they don’t quite get her shape right; I appreciate their efforts and reward them dearly, but when they get her wrong, I want to scream.
Continue reading “Beetles by Brandon McWeeney”
“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…”
Continue reading “The Rules of Love by Arjun Shah”
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.
Continue reading “Writers Read. A Most Unfortunate Incident by Geraint Jonathan”
literally stories 