Sometime this spring will mark my fourth anniversary of sharing the weekend wrap duties. It was either in April or May 2021, I think, although I could look it up.
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Category: All Stories
Woman With Jigsaw Puzzle by Tom Bentley-Fisher
“I am the Seven Wonders of the World … I am the Endless Ocean and the Garden of Eden … I am the Mountains and Valleys and a Great Desert.”
Gabriella has a complex system for organizing the loose pieces. What might look like a haphazard pile of small cardboard shapes is a clearly thought-out symmetrical pattern waiting to be employed in a system of elimination “far too sophisticated for even the Venezuelan postal service to figure out”, she used to tell her little boy when they sat together day after day working on a new puzzle, waiting for him to die. “It’s like DNA,” she’d say, “every piece unique onto itself.”
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Shakespeare: Made Man by Geraint Jonathan
In the year 1588, twenty-four-year-old Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza, fearing for his limbs at the hands of the Inquisition, fled his native Sicily for the sceptred shores of England.
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Everyone Dies by Danni Meek
There’s a man in my home.
He’s staring out of the large windows, the ones that I sit by and read my books because they’re the only source of natural light on this side of the apartment. The light from the moon almost gives him a glow, making him look vaguely angelic. It’s almost comedic how ironic that is, considering the fact that he’s broken into my home.
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The Time Machine That Was and Wasn’t at the Same Time by Jonah Jones.
Several years ago or yet to be, Frank Fullie had written on a whiteboard in his garage:
“You can jump forward in time by falling asleep.”
“You can jump backward in time by looking at old photographs.”
“Sideways in time by having empathy with another.”
“Outside time by dying.”
As an afterthought he’d written “Does the Higgs field come into it?”
Continue reading “The Time Machine That Was and Wasn’t at the Same Time by Jonah Jones.”The Night They Brought Him Home by Jake Bristow
When they brought him home that night, the lid was strewn canted off the wooden lip and jacks and queens ornamented astray around the box like a ring of fire. Someone- I do not remember who- had loaded coal into the fireplace and after some poking it begun to lick its flame at the iron grate. Ma was cold and Paul and Jane huddled around the hearth for they were cold but I suppose not as cold as him. Still, it only felt right to keep him warm.
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Four Giraffes by Alex Faulkner
The four giraffes walked through the city, their metal limbs and their pulleys, gears and crankshafts clanking and whirring as they delicately placed one foot in front of another, and another and another and another.
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At Spences Bridge by Harrison Kim
Cody uploads the video of his day from his phone to the computer and does a voice-over.
“Other people try to draw us into their nightmares,” he states, “My video will show you what it’s like to travel alone.”
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Gordo by Ashley Earls Davis
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His eyes are fixed to the street, staring blankly at the late sunlit cars queuing over the cross. Like he’s thinking. Or perhaps he’s pissed. He lifts a full ten of stout to his pouted lips and takes two long gulps, spine arched tautly at the dust-strewn pane. Is it Rod? Or that bloke we called Doggo? I scratch my neck and try to remember his name. He lowers his glass and digs out some chips from a bowl in front of him. Dips them in tomato sauce and shoves them in his gob. Reaches for his cold one again. I grin at him. His hand movements are overly cautious. Like those of an old codger’s. Well I suppose we are both over the hill now aren’t we? Poor us bastards.
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Sunday Whatever – John the Revelator by Dale Williams Barrigar
John Lennon in his Pickwick glasses is like a character from a Charles Dickens novel, or much like Dickens himself in his concern for social justice and his endless sympathy for the literal, and figurative, orphan, outsider, and underdog. Lennon can also fruitfully be compared to perhaps the only other English writer of the nineteenth century who rivals Dickens in staying power and popularity. Like Lewis Carroll and his beloved, living Alice, Lennon’s life was all about expanding the mind, and through the mind, the heart.
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