“I apologize,” Professor Plotnik said, a compact man with thinning hair and patience. “You’re not an imbecile but naive.”
Jane Birk bit her lip and clutched her tablet to her chest. The professor might fire her for insubordination. She couldn’t imagine life outside the Clusterings Institute and never completing her research. With her thesis two and a half years overdue, Birk knew she’d crossed the line, again.
Living in a mouth is precisely what you’d think living in a mouth would be: wet, aromatic, and exhilarating. It’s cozy and rent-free in here. She’s not a big talker, so it stays as dark as Anchorage, Alaska during a typical winter. I sleep well. I bathe in her saliva. I nibble on specks of food that dangle from the roof like edible stalactites. When she’s wrecked and raging on a Friday night, getting blitzed on gas station wine, blaring Linda Ronstadt, we both stumble into el diablo’s embrace. When she peeks at the mirror while applying lipstick, or washing her face, I pop out and wave hello.
Mount Carmel Road was a quiet dead-end in the north of town. In the middle of the night when the war in the Far East was over and the radios blared the news, all lights went on in all the houses on that blind street, except where the card game was played. Many of the neighbors were solidly indignant about that turn of events on VJ Night, two Mount Carmel boys would not be coming back from the mad Pacific, which most of us only saw in Saturday newsreels at the theater.
This house was a dark house on a dark street in my town that, with some lesions and scars, hangs on to a place in my memory and will not let go. Tenants and landlords hardly leave scribed notations of a dwelling, thinking all things will ferment, dissipate, and eventually pass on. Fifty years or more of recall usually get dulled, terribly pockmarked, or fade into the twilight the way one ages, dimming of the eyes, bending of the knees, slow turns at mortality. But this one rides endlessly in place, a benchmark, a mooring place. It resides as a point of time, a small moment of history colored up by characterization of one incident.
Tobias: Welcome fellow editors to the Literally Stories Autumn summit.
Diane: Where is my drink?
Tobias: Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t bring any alcohol.
Hugh: PISH!
Diane: Oh deary… I thought for sure there would be a few bottles of wine. And some for you guys as well.
Continue reading “Literally Stories In Conversation with each other by Tobias Haglund”
The Lake Huron sunset looked unnatural, as though painted by a child. The tremendous orb hung low in the sky, its colour so deep, so vivid that it no longer qualified as orange. As it slunk below the horizon, wide swaths of the same indescribable colour settled on the water’s rippled surface, then streamed through the trees to the screened-in porch. My mother was cast in an ethereal glow. The copper hair of her youth reappeared, framing her pale skin and the spray of freckles around her nose. For a moment, she was young again. Sensing my gaze, she put down her book. “Did you send the driving instructions to the girls, dear?” she asked—again.
Continue reading “The Lunch by Jennifer MacKenzie-Hutchison”
I’m Saga and I live in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. I have a disease. It’s not fatal, but I am going blind. My doctor told me that I was slowly going blind. My mother said that my eyes were only losing their clarity. It’s true. Before it gets dark it will first become blurry. It already has.
I rewrote that intro several times and finally ended up with that one. I don’t want my disease to define me, but it is the only reason I’m slightly interesting. I was seventeen years old and I went to a public school in a county that had almost no public schools. I wore large glasses – still do – which I had to change batteries on every week. A function inside the lenses automatically adjusted to the daylight. When I started my first year of high school we were supposed to stand up in class and tell the others a little bit about ourselves. I told them I enjoyed reading, knitting and playing the piano. My teacher laughed and asked why I used past tense. She was right though. I could still enjoy most of those things, the piano made a sound and I could feel the fabric when I knitted, but I couldn’t read as well. I can still read to this day, but it takes longer, much longer. I lose patience.
Mary wanders home and dreams of television. She has all her favourite shows recorded, ready and waiting to be watched. She passes a sign for fried chicken. It flickers overhead, metal shutters pulled up, open for business. At home, Mary knows, there are jacket potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge.
She is more than Fahrenheit, she is electric, not the lightning kind that will blast you hither and yon, but wired, the connections to all of me, my eyes bright and seeing the stars mirrored in the river, almost where they belong, bucket-spilled or tossed across the sky above Vinegar Hill, above all of Saugus… above old Scotts Mill directly across the street from my house, above the Iron Works from 1636 leaving figures and ideas larger than fossils on the land (like the 300 year-old remnant of the slag pile), above Rippon’s Mushroom House where I’m bound to work in a few years like most of my older pals, above Stackpole Field, where I’m bound to play with some of the same pals… and me on top of Theda Burton’s back side and she is bumping and bouncing and being electrically delightful as we are on a Flexible Flyer sled rushing down Bridge Street toward the bridge, halfway fallen into the Saugus River, and provides but a dangerous and narrow passage across one side of it.
Continue reading “Fahrenheit, Electricity and a Flexible Flyer by Tom Sheehan”
On the morning of my ninth birthday, there were voices I didn’t recognize in the hallway outside my bedroom door. Most of the voices were from men, and I thought I could also hear Mrs. Crider’s voice. She was a neighbor who sometimes babysat us, my three-year-old sister and me.
Derrick stared at the red button. Jagged pieces of melted plastic stuck out at odd angles from the surface and sides. The button sat under a clear case, cut from some discarded item, the purpose long forgotten, which was tied down with a piece of old copper wire. Smudges of grease and dirt dotted the cover. Behind him, a clock on the wall with bright red numbers counted down from ten minutes. At zero, Derrick would have a ninety-second window to press the button. Ninety seconds to go home.
Continue reading “Corporate Property by George Allen Miller”
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