Part One
Gwen Cooper, the volunteer Weekend Caretaker at New Town Cemetery, was raking leaves one fine autumnal Saturday morn’, singing a groovy song first heard on The Brady Bunch called Sunshine Day:
“I just can’t stay inside all day
I gotta get out, get me some of those rays
Everybody’s smilin’ (sunshine day!)
Everybody’s laughin’ (sunshine day!)”
Continue reading “Small God Syndrome by Leila Allison”
I’d actually been warned about the mountain years before, in the days when we were still in the Bronx, when all we’d climbed were the stairs on Bailey Avenue. Back then the ascent was no less tricky, with the steps that crumbled and the men who sat at the top, like goats, watching until we got close and then following us through the neighborhood. In the winter there was nothing extraordinary about the cold, more dirt than snow, just enough ice to make you doubt the ground.
Continue reading “Thorong-La by Jessica Hutter”
The Good was the worst. The Bad was worthless. The Zombie, at least, was willing.
Life is so energy intensive. Though the Zombie held few thoughts in its putrefying head, this one stuck as flies buzzed feverishly around, attracted by the kill on the street. The Good had done it. Savagely struck down the child and then walked on fingering his rosary beads as if he’d just blessed the poor little soul.
Continue reading “The Good, the Bad, and the Zombie by Matt King”
Ahh, there you are, you little pervert. Shame on you for peeking between the cracks in my blinds. Go away voyeur before what you don’t see blinds you, cracks your mind wide open, drives you stone crazy. Go away, you bright-eyed bungler, you have given yourself away. There is nothing here for you to see.
Continue reading “The Influencer by Frederick K Foote – Warning – Adult content”
“Kausalya Supraja Rama Purva Sandhya Pravarthathe …” – the mobile phone whirred to life, blaring the famous verses of Guru Vishwamitra, scaring the wits out of the guileless night. Murthy shifted in his bed, extending an arm out to silence the phone. It was 4:30 am, a.m. brahma muhurtham, the time deemed ideal for meditation and yoga by the Hindu scriptures. In all of his sixty plus years, he had, without fail, adhered to the strict regimen of starting his day at the brahma muhurtham. However, the last few months were only making him increasingly aware of his growing age. What was once a disciplined routine, now required all his resolve to keep its tag.
Continue reading “Daddy by Naga Vydyanathan”
Bubba is such a fat pussy. The bulk of her belly drags along the floor when she walks with her four short legs.
We describe Bubba with all the words we are no longer allowed to use on people.
But Bubba doesn’t care for semantics.
She circles around my legs and demands more snacks. Her soft hair tickles my skin and gives me a kinky mix of annoyance and comfort.
‘Bubba, I’m working.’
If you say so, she jumps on my desk and curls up on the laptop in front of me. She’s very fond of laptops; the electrical warmth comforts her tushy.
Continue reading “Fat Pussy by Midori P. Yeung”
Her nose took the impact, it canted left and snapped perfectly at the bridge. Her mascaraed eyes watered until her vision became a myopic smudge. She staggered, tripping on the raised step between lounge and diner. (A design feature she always hated but he insisted on.) ‘It will define the individual spaces’, he’d said. Another blow staggered her. She remembered her Interior Design professor screaming ‘NEVER BREAK THE FUCKING SPACE,’ as he came in, on, or often just around her slut of a best-friend flatmate. That exalted mantra had stuck, her friendship hadn’t. Her fingers skittered along the edge of the kitchen top, too cold, too polished, nothing to cling to, to hold, to grasp. Her father’s words came to her, ‘you can’t trust stainless steel,’ he’d say, ‘unnatural stuff, use wood, wood has an inherent trust, copper an earned one, stone, who the hell uses stone nowadays?’ He always chuckled at himself when he said that. He also warned her. “Look for the comfortable, the homely, ‘hugge,’ as the Dutch say. No cold marble, no hard granite, no slippery steel and definitely no injection moulded impervious shiny plastic. An interior, my gorgeous girl, is a mirror of soul.”
Continue reading “Seeds by Peter O’Connor“
Today it all came back. Once again, on another brilliant dawning, the Western Yetness still calling me, I woke with a toothache. A stupendous one! In half an hour, despite quick brushing, the stimulator poked here and there, gargling, all proving useless, the ache remained in force. It was, without a doubt, the chocolate again, or the mere thought of chocolate. I knew I was weak to most any candy, and to chocolate in particular, right from the beginning.
Continue reading “The Young Man Who Said He’d Never Eat Chocolate Again by Tom Sheehan”
These are the last days and unfinished pages of a dissertation on Pragmatics and Features of Sex, 1998—Beth says—expected by her committee members in two weeks, or at-most, a month. Her defense is in three weeks, but she doesn’t think she’ll finish. She says she’d happily quit and work in a bank or in a mall selling perfume behind shiny counters—spritzing the stuff on eligible men who will buy it from her with hopes of getting laid. She says even if she quits, she will continue her work, untethered and uncriticized and make her own study of the language of love, its features through natural conversations, speech acts, implicatures, while managing the flow of reference and the theories of the mind. Then, Beth pauses. But it’s still too big, she says. It’s always too big.
Continue reading “Generative/ Iterative/Evaluative by J. Bradley Minnick “
When I started putting the words on the page, I didn’t know what it was. An exercise in letting go. A reflection of memories. A way to make myself understand what it was, what I had been through. I never thought of the consequences, of letting anyone else read what I had written.
Continue reading “The Memoir.by Kristen A. Schmitt”
literally stories 