Category: All Stories

All Stories, Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 567- Superfluous Quotation Marks

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The Introduction

This is my first wrap of 2026. A few weeks away have made me flabby because I am unnaturally lazy. Therefore, like an athlete gone to seed, I will pull on the sweats and attempt to get in shape by writing about small pointless items and work my way into good enough form to intelligently write about this week’s group of stories. All within a few paragraphs. I aim to put a point on pointless, to sharpen its, well, pointy, or at least pointier end, then use it to etch profound wisdom on the corbomite* walls of public inanity. (*Extremely hard and potentially explosive fictional mass invented by Captain James T. Kirk, known associate of Hardcourt Fenton Mudd, a suspected interstellar Jeffrey Epstein of the 23rd Century.)

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Pennsylvania Man by Tony Godino

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It’s nighttime, and- look, I won’t get into what’s gone on. I won’t get into Jenny or into what’s happening with the kids or any of it. I think it’s simpler than all that. And- it’s terrible. I don’t mean to say it isn’t. I’m just focusing on what I can change. There are people in terrible trouble and something’s gotta be done. Nothing can be done about Jenny. And the kids, I don’t know. I just don’t know. Anyway. It’s nighttime, which isn’t unusual. I am having dinner at the diner again. I sit in the booth across from the windows into the St. Pat’s rec hall. I watch him. This is the third night in a row after a few weeks waiting. I know something is coming because I’ve spent good time with thinking about it. I can feel it as if it were mine.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Sun Rose in the West by Stephen J Kimber

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The sun rose in the west and coloured the hills. Velvet dark, not quite black… Then burnt umber. Orange-red, limpid platinum. Light gathering.

The hills became distinct; hard, dry mounds the sun reached from, taking hold of the day, making it hard and brittle too.

A party of men came back into the landscape, carrying something wrapped in canvas. They stopped at a freshly dug hole. They laid the canvas bundle down, not too gently, and unwrapped it.

It was a corpse, bones really, hard white chalky bones, dead a fair while. These the men put into the hole, one or two at a time. Then, using shovels and a mattock, they refilled the hole. It looked hard work. The last blows were struck with the mattock by the smallest, oldest man – an Aborigine – and the other men stood about, talking. They were white men.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Installation, by Geraint Jonathan

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According to the man at the agency, half a meter’s rainfall over two days was all it took to so loosen the soil the local cemetery gave up its coffins.  Dozens of them, he said, dozens of coffins bobbing along half submerged amid the general flow of debris – tables, wardrobes, phone boxes, and so on . . .

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All Stories, General Fiction

Missing by Kayla Cain

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As Molly pushed her dolls’ faces together and danced them around her bedroom window sill, she could see Mr. and Mrs. Green in their house next door. Molly named her favorite boy doll Bill and her prettiest girl doll Jill – last name Green, but no one else knew that.

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All Stories, sunday whatever

Sunday Whatever – Roadhouse Blues an Essay by Dale Williams Barrigar

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“Keep your eyes on the road, your hand upon the wheel…”
 – The Doors

“This land is your land…” – Woody Guthrie

“Superman never made any money / savin’ the world from Solomon
Grundy / and sometimes I despair / the world will never see another
man like him.” – “Superman’s Song,” Crash Test Dummies, from

The Ghosts that Haunt Me

I used to leave in the middle of the night, solo, mostly.  

It was the 1990s. I was in my 20s. My procedure for road trips in those days was simple.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Night Sounds by Tom Koperwas

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Content that some readers may find upsetting – refer to the tags on the bottom of the page

Small towns are quiet places at night, especially the town of Hush. That’s what made it the ideal place for eight-year-old Sammy Keen to live in. The skinny boy with piercing dark eyes, a towering forehead, and large, floppy ears looked forward to bedtime every night, unlike his friends at school, who cherished the day and its fun activities under the bright sun. Changing into his pajamas, he’d jump into bed and turn off the lights. A smile would form on his face as he gazed at the open window and began to listen to the sounds outside, for Sammy was a gifted child with a wholly unique talent and the intelligence to utilize it.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour

Market Place by Hugh Cron – Adult Content

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“Hey there pretty lady, lookin’ good!”

“Hi Chris, didn’t expect to see you here. Alone and on a school night!!”

“What the fuck, I needed a drink! And I really don’t give a shit about the job, so, so what if I go in half-mangled…What about you? Waiting for someone?”

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

Channel 7 by Gareth Vieira

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There are many Declans in this story, but let’s begin with ours.

Declan sits on the edge of his bed, absently sweeping his hands under the crumpled sheets in search of the remote. When that fails, he reaches beneath the bed without bothering to look, hoping his fingers brush against salvation.

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All Stories, Frederick K Foote week, General Fiction

The Keys to the Highway by Frederick K Foote: Number 100!!!

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(Editors’ Note: It’s a hell of an accomplishment to land one story for publication, but it takes special talent and courage to do this many–and we are only a small part of Fred’s overall canon. Congratulations Fred! You earned every word and sentence of this achievement–Leila, Diane, Hugh, Nik at LS)

Back in the day, when I was a snot-nosed little rascal growing up in the country, the old folks used to say stuff like, “Homer Hall, how you let all these kids keep up so much ruckus? Where’s your mind, boy?”

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