English Wells fought the Pumquich River for forty years, moving his will ever by degrees at it. “By God, Miriam,” he often said to his wife, “I’ll go at it until I drop, most likely. What you work for, you get. You get what you work for.” English, lacking funds or worldly promise, wanted to steal more land from this side of the river, to push his small estate out over the river’s run, to claim energy’s due.
December sweeps her dead hand around my throat. My capuche swooshes open and I come to life in the morning hour rush. A beggar scratches the furrows between the cobblestones outside the metro station. When I get close to him, the automatic doors open and the warm breath of the subway hits me. He looks up at me, then back down again to the cobblestones.
I walk out on to the escalator, a boy runs past me, then a girl, then another boy. The latter boy shoves the girl when he rushes by her, down the escalator. She yells, but keeps going. Yesterday the fungus to the right was green, but today it’s covered in white foam.
The subway train comes in and I get on. It’s full, so I stand. I can always tell which state the country is in by looking at the adverts. Education, insurances, job seminars and cheap groceries. I’m reminded of what the prime minister said; the lowest unemployment rate in Europe by 2020.
Promises aren’t worth much to the poor. That’s why the adverts look the way they do, and why the beggar scratches the furrows of the cobblestone.
I gave him what was left of my hand because he asked for it with such a kindness; he even called me miss. It was the kindness you forget about when you run out of family and end up in a home off the soggy edge of the Everglades. Rosecliff, they called it, to make it sound less like swamp muck. I didn’t know how well I could stand anymore until that man, the father of the head doctor, told me we were leaving for somewhere better. You don’t get feet to disintegrate like mine unless you traveled, and traveled I did, and travel I would. All that man had to say was please, you know, before I remembered how to walk again.
Today I know this face. I stare into the mirror and I know this face. It is me, not the me that it was when we bought my mirror all those years ago. Down in the antique market, Martin and I trawling for treasures to make our home and we found it dusty and forlorn, how pleased we were. No it doesn’t show me that person, but it is the me of now and of just yesterday.
It’s now three feet farther to hell for persons who’d jump off the Warren Avenue Bridge. The City of Bremerton has recently installed an eighteen-inch extension to the span’s rail. In my opinion, the city has wasted its money. The Warren goes up to a fatal height almost immediately, and at its middle it stands better than ten stories above the churning and hungry Port Washington Narrows. Only Serious Persons go over the Warren; less than serious persons, those who need just a little attention to feel better inside, never go to the Warren to perform on the off-chance that they might fall off. No, I don’t see a foot-and-a-half—in both directions—getting in the way of a well prepared and dedicated serious person.
The two men nodded and shook hands.
“Please sit. What do I call you?”
“Dymphna.”
“I’m Terry.”
“Pleased to finally meet you.”
Terry wondered about the grin, “…Has everything been done to your satisfaction?”
Dymphna looked around the empty office and nodded.
tulations! You have successfully traveled backwards in time!
Do you have qualms about killing a rare and mystical beast? Do you fear the DMV and other institutions like it? If so, read no further; if not, read on. Throughout the course of this guide you will learn the secrets of time travel. To travel back in time it is necessary to collect your supplies, construct your machine, and then, finally, to make your jump. This is no easy process. Many men and women far smarter than you have failed while attempting to turn back the hands of the clock.
Continue reading “How to Have Broken Her Heart by Nate Rush”
”Hello, sir.”
”Yea?”
”Uhm. I’m here to see Pam.”
“My daughter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You the kid?”
“Uhm…”
“I mean the kid she’s been sneaking off with. The … No, let me think. The Williams boy, right?”
Chester McNaughton Connaughton, aptly named for both sides of the family, landowner in the new world, squeezer of pennies and nickels at the very corpulence of coin, embarrassed at times by his own good fortune where his roots had once been controlled and ordained by potatoes and turnips or the lack thereof, gazed over the latest acquisition of a two-acre parcel abutting his prime abode and wondered how he could best utilize it. Mere coinage, he had early assessed, would apply the jimmy bar under Carlton Smithers and separate him from the land in their town of Saxon, not far from Boston. Carlton was old, alone, susceptible. It would be a piece of cake. It was, subsequently and as he had forecast, a swift steal, and papers and proper process moved the property under the shield of his name.
Marie first noticed the butterfly outside her window while writing in her diary.
She’d just written, This room is like my own cocoon these days, though I wish it weren’t, when she happened to turn her head to see the butterfly perched on a bough of the oak tree just beyond the sill. She briefly returned her attention to the opened book before her, but then set her pen on the crease of the pages and stared from the window again.
literally stories 