Category: All Stories

All Stories, General Fiction

Indian Summer by Mike Lee

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There was a sense of peace, anticipation, and of place when I arrived at the Krispy Kremes that cool October morning; autumn leaves turning and the sun bright over the roofs of Asheville and the surrounding mountains. It was a Friday, before school, and coffee and glazed donuts beckoned while waiting for Mariah, my girlfriend, and walking on to the bus stop. Suppressed an urge to talk her into skipping school; we had fifth-period English together, and it was our chance to read our story assignments.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction, Short Fiction, Writers Reading, Writing

Dirty Glass by Hugh Cron – Adult Content

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“Dirty glass…Fuck!”

…The first time that Martin had really focused on a dirty glass was decades back, in another one of his lifetimes. He’d had a few lifetimes and each had caused him a different level of grief.

Martin thought back to that morning at 8.00am, when he had been told that he had to check on a property. He found that depressing, fuck all was said about checking on the resident, no, he had to check on the property.

He pulled up beside the row of Maisonettes and sighed as he saw that the main entrance door was hanging off its hinges. He headed into the building. It always made him laugh that this was a building that you had to go inside, to go upstairs, to then go outside to get to the front door. He rattled the door. He could hear some mumbling and drunken giggles, “I hope that’s a lovely lady with nice tits!!”

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All Stories, Fantasy

Lunalae By Robert Reece

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The first thing to disappear was the dull, half-moon circle on the fingernail of his left index finger. He’d never considered that spot in his life except for the day that he noticed it was gone. Then he remembered that he had thought about it once before. He smashed his fingernail with a mallet when he was a kid. He was trying to nail a novelty license plate that said “Future” to the back of his soapbox derby car. He made the license plate a carnival in Idaho for 1 dollar, and he made the soap box derby car in his garage one summer because he wanted to feel like he was living in the 1950s while every other kid was atrophying into gelatinous blobs playing video games. He didn’t want his dad to scream at him for using his special rosewood mallet he’d received at a Toastmasters convention instead of the old hammer in the toolbox, so he never mentioned that he took it to nail that license plate from Idaho. Even when his fingernail turned greenish purple and eventually fell off, he kept that hand hidden from his parents.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Poem That Changed His Life by Michael Bloor

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I was reading James Fenton’s ‘Selected Poems’* and was very taken by one called ‘The Skip,’ in which the poet decides to take his life and throw it in a builder’s skip, parked outside the next-door neighbours’ house. Then he goes down to the pub. And coming back home, half-pissed, he’s surprised to see that his life was no longer there – some bugger had nicked it. The next morning he wakes up, checks, and sees that there is in fact a life lying in the skip, but it’s not his: someone must’ve spotted the poet’s old life lying in there and decided to swop. So the poet takes in the other life, sodden from last night’s rain, dries it on the stove and finds it fits him like a glove.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Spared by a Sign by Matias Travieso-Diaz

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He gave their crops to the grasshopper, their produce to the locust.
Psalm 78:46

Once, in a remote corner of the world, two tribes dwelt in nearby settlements along a plain that opened beneath towering mountains. The land was fertile but its expanse was narrow, and the tribes were ceaselessly at war with each other, jockeying for control of one strip of terrain or another. After countless deaths and great devastation, both sides remained bloodied but resolute in their determination to overwhelm, and if possibly annihilate, each other.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, Short Fiction

Week 589: Blessed Benedictines and Bad Celery

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We should keep the past closer than we do our enemies. There is much ago worth remembering, and not just in what George Santayana had to say.

For example, nearly a hundred years ago, the great Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) penned a bit of advice that, upon my finding it some seven decades down the road, has stayed with me and is one of the few guide stars in my life (I live in one of the cloudiest places in the world, so my guide stars are often metaphorical and/or flat out imaginary). Regardless, in her “Constant Reader” book review column, published by the New Yorker on Saturday, 28 January 1928 Mrs. Parker wisely warned readers against the perils of assumedly healthy eating and at the same time averred a particular form of hydration that has always been superior to simple and extremely boring H2O. (As it goes with natural items found in abundance, drinking water when choices are plentiful is as dull as dentist office decor.)

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Recurring Donor: It Started with a Kidney by Jack Powers

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I mean, crazy, right? My kidney in America’s greatest president? The only one to care about the little guy? And the one who still might, if she comes out of her coma, lead us out of the Killer Vaccine Apocalypse.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Bomb Defuser Barbie by Calla Gold

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The rainbow-colored, balloon-patterned gift-wrapped box sat like an invitation atop the cement stoop. The ticking sound could be heard from the sidewalk. Barbie spied the thin wire paralleling the red ribbon, rising into the frothy, rosette bow on top. Barbie’s little plastic hand followed the wire to a fold in the paper, eased the wrapping open, sawed with care through the ribbon, and cut away the paper to reveal an edge-dinged box proclaiming the presence of a Spirograph Drawing Set. I really wanted one of those.

Barbie had spent enough time in the toy store to know the weight was all wrong. It was too heavy. She fearlessly sawed a hole into the side of the box, revealing wires, a wind-up alarm clock, and a small brick of tan, clay-like material. Enough to blow the whole city block sky high. With her steady fingers, she cut the green wires and, finally, the red wire to the detonator. She then flopped back into a sitting position and told me, “That was close.”

That was the first story I told Dolores, but you haven’t met her yet.

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All Stories, Horror

Bon Appétit by Nicholas Starr Kellogg

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I never liked the women that my father chased around like a puppy who’d lost his mother. Fat, short, abrasive, somehow saying more about the way he thought about himself. To me, my father was always a rock, stoic, a giving tree whose branches had been nearly hacked away by the axe of my self-indulgent, capricious, drug riddled mother. But once she went away— and I mean really went away. Locked away for so long that she’d be old and grey the next time she saw the light of day and breathed the air of the free. I’d always assumed my father would find someone that shared the same familial values as he. Not that my father was a religious fanatic, but rather he had a keen understanding that when a man becomes a father it’s that man’s responsibility to put his family first. Whether it was taking me to my grandmother’s house on Christmas Eve to open presents and eat cookies in the comfort of her love or holding my hand whenever I was sick and never leaving my side no matter how deep into the twilight we drifted. Perhaps that’s where his image of women came from, his mother. My grandmother, a woman who would wake up at 2am to get ice cream from the freezer and of course, offer me a bowl. A woman who sounded like a grizzly as she rumbled down the hallway towards her favorite closet— the fridge. Who’s that famous guy who said that all men only want to marry their mothers? I don’t know, but I think he may’ve been on to something.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Time Was by David Calcutt

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Time was you could walk the whole length of the world going from island to island across the bridges raised high above oceans and mountains, deserts and forests, sometimes alone, or with a single companion, sometimes one among thronging multitudes, of merchants and hunters, explorers and sightseers, the clamour of whose voices drowned out even the howling of the winds and the screeching of the giant eagles.

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