To supplement my pension, I had taken a summer job: crewman and ticket-collector on the Small Isles (Rousay, Wyre and Egilsay) ferry in Orkney – I was the full extent of the extra staff required to meet the demands of the enhanced summer timetable. It’s a fact that when you collect tickets you look at hands, not faces. So I didn’t notice him when he boarded. No car, no luggage, no band, no guitar.
Continue reading ” The Ferryman’s Tale by Mick Bloor”
The spring sea lapped upon the shore of Yokohama. In the city a familiar New Year tune played over a radio. It had been ten years since I heard that song. I mouthed along the words half-remembered from nights when, in drunken stupor, my friend, the poet Sunokaze Heki, would recite tanka alongside the music.
Continue reading “Rosa Rugosa by Thomas J Daly”
I tried to eat an apple whole the other day. I spit it up on the tile, watching as my saliva bubbled atop the cracked checkers. Vince and I laughed hard at this: my attempt, the fall, the wet sound of bruised apple flesh. We stopped only after Vince sat on the wicker chair so hard it splintered. I put a blanket over it and Vince biked home, using his jacket sleeve to gather my spit-stained apple and throw it outside – for the squirrels, he said. Three days later, Mom took the blanket to wash and when she screamed, I told her that Hurricane Nancy must’ve done it. Mom said that wasn’t funny; last month’s hurricane had taken Grandpa’s beloved chicken coop and now he had to buy the factory-farmed eggs they sold at the grocery. I said, “Wow, what an inconvenience!” and was grounded for a week.
Continue reading “I Tried to Eat an Apple by Billie Chang”
To locate this Holiday Rerun, I had to go way the hell back in the vault to find this wonderful little piece by our own Diane M Dickson. Mary, Joseph and the Baby is truer to the spirit of the occasion than anything you can buy at Amazon and the dialect is musical. Unique but it gets across.
It’s an old story in many ways, but blessed are the poor and meek no matter what the corporations say.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Mary, Joseph and the Baby by Diane M Dickson”
The saga of site co-founder Nik Eveleigh’s Storm Crow series remains to this day excellent reading. A sort of forlorn hero, whose humanity is commingled with humour and despair. And good old Stormcrow appeared in a Christmas tale seven years ago. Seven years is a magic number as far as time goes, and rest assured that readers new to Nik’s character will agree that the old crow has aged well.
Continue reading “Christmas Rerun – A Crow in a Pear Tree by Nik Eveleigh”
Tatiana Tomljanovic takes a look at Christmas through the eyes of a child and scores in our Fifth Rerun of Christmas. And yet these perceptions are both childlike and cynical. Even the “Christmas Miracle” can take Isla away from the funny smell in her grandparent’s house–that and her belief that God was the thing you say when you don’t know what to say.
Continue reading “Christmas Rerun – Black and White Christmas by T L Tomljanovic”
Today’s Rerun is brought to you by the darkside of life. It ain’t aimable Frosty awaiting these children, but during this season it would be an error to omit the truth about the many lives around us in which misery is pretty much a full time experience. David Henson has a way of injecting some light into the darkest of places, which should be a quality found in Christmas.
Continue reading “Christmas Rerun – The Real Bad Snowman by David Henson”
Since it is Christmas Day itself, we add a bonus story by our own Hugh Cron. It is not our object to deride those who have faith or get sentimental about the holiday. And Hugh’s The Perfect Personification of Religion states the true meaning of Christmas better than a fleet of Rudolphs. It is a tale of common decency and a priest who made himself holy through his dedication.
Continue reading “Bonus Christmas Rerun – The Perfect Personification of Religion by Hugh Cron”
Warm tones hit the mahogany bed posts, struck by the sudden light entering the room. The French door moaned as the veil curtain swelled, and a leaf spiralled onto the crochet bed cover, the terracotta tiles, the dresser table.
Frida held a deep breath, albeit restrained inside the cast, until her ribs complained. As if she could capture the light within her lungs, the gap of blue that she envisioned open in the sky. Something inside her had changed; the narrowest ray of light had filtered through the fill of her darkness.
Continue reading “Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress by Ximena Escobar”
With most first dates, I knew within seconds that we wouldn’t meet again. I didn’t feel that with Janet. Except for a few wrinkles, she could have been years younger than me. Maybe her eyes were too far apart and her mouth too narrow, but when she smiled all her features worked together. That said, getting her to smile was a challenge. We exchanged questions about each other, learning nothing more than in our online profiles. I couldn’t help studying her again as she walked to the toilet – her bright floral dress showed off her figure (was she rolling her hips?) and her long hair was jet-black. Waiting for her to come back, I decided to raise the topic that the dating site matched us up with.
Continue reading “It’s Never Too Late by Tim Love”
literally stories 