If she hadn’t looked at her phone at the exact moment she was crossing the road she would have…
Continue reading “A Game of Consequences by Sandra Arnold”
Category: All Stories
The Souvenir by Nick Satnik
The dusky light had gone out. The blinds lay beige and dull with no sky behind them. Only the phone screen remained, and the quiet waves, and the suckling embrace of a hotel mattress. He shifted and pressed send.
Continue reading “The Souvenir by Nick Satnik”
The Mess for the Sages by Tom Sheehan
The wind came up the river joyous as a boy riding a new bicycle and Harry Guahagan hustled to get his paint ready, the pale blue in the gallon can looking exceptionally good to his trained eye as he stared at the expanse of blue overhead from one horizon point to the other, the Saugus River running beside his house being the axis of the whole circumference of his existence. He was giddy at the thought of carefully applying a new coat of paint on his house; for god’s sake the insects had made a mess of his most recent paint job, the pale blue besmirched in so many places, but unbelievably in his mind the damned birds jamming the river were probably more at fault than other creatures; rabbits and skunks and an odd dog or two, he knew, had no responsibility in creating this new mess. It was nearly choking him.
Continue reading “The Mess for the Sages by Tom Sheehan”
Literally Reruns – Time and Chance Happeneth to All Gods by Leila Allison
Long-time friend of the site and excellent writer David Henson has sent us a submission for the Sunday Feature – thank you David. The lovely Leila has been the mainstay of this feature for such a long time that it is brilliant to see her with her own Literally Rerun.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Time and Chance Happeneth to All Gods by Leila Allison”
Week 397 – Winging It, Truss’s Truss And I Didn’t Have Time To Look At Religion.
I never plan these. I never know what I’m going to write. I will look up a reference if for some reason one comes to me but I don’t start out with a plan.
Sometimes there are some things that happen on the site or in the news that I make a mental note to saying something. (Today is an example as I knew that there was something!!)
Continue reading “Week 397 – Winging It, Truss’s Truss And I Didn’t Have Time To Look At Religion.”
The Caretaker’s Cottage by Leila Allison
-Prologue-
Ineffable Is As Ineffable Does
With a peaked roof topped by a small brass eagle, the “Caretaker’s Cottage” in New Town Cemetery is a seven-by-nine rectangle that stands long side up. A few years back the City of Charleston had money left over in the Parks Department budget; two thousand dollars was allotted for the creation of ten incomprehensibly cheap signs to mark various “historical sites” throughout town. It was one of those mystifying expenditures that governments make to discourage the expectation of competence. One of the signs stands in front of the rectangle. It says: “Former Caretaker’s Cottage.”
Outside being the ancestral home to untold generations of Grey Squirrels, the building is a tool shed added decades after the cemetery was founded in 1902. New Town did have a live-in caretaker once, but he dwelled in a long since razed house that stood at the foot of the hill in which the cemetery is seated. But the extremely typical Charleston city employee tasked with the sign job had to put something on the one set aside for the cemetery–so she pulled a fiction from where the sun never rises and literally engaged a sign maker (her fiance–who reaped a thousand percent profit). In fact, nine of the ten signs placed throughout Charleston are similarly procured fictions–with the other being only true about Hartsville, Tennessee–the boyfriend sign maker’s hometown.
Continue reading “The Caretaker’s Cottage by Leila Allison”
Bravado by Hugh Cron
Fuck me Ah’m pished!!
…How much shite can Ah talk tae myself?
Dae ye ken, Ah pride mysel’ oan it!
Ah look at this photo of you ma auld gran and Ah ken Ah can tell you things. Ah fuckin loved ye and ye spoilt me rotten!
Continue reading “Bravado by Hugh Cron”
We’ll Both Forget The Breeze by Michael Tyler
Emma was lying in the park between my dorm and mid-afternoon lecture and if it hadn’t been for the fact she was feeding birds with the grin of the manic and magnificent I may have continued my stride.
Continue reading “We’ll Both Forget The Breeze by Michael Tyler”
Mriya by George Nevgodovskyy
Mriya
To the boy it looks like a ravaged animal. Its head ripped-off, body torn apart with stringy guts hanging out. Scattered chunks of flesh strewn around the barren hangar.
“Thank God your grandfather is not here to see this,” the boy’s mother says. “He wanted to watch it take off one last time.”
Continue reading “Mriya by George Nevgodovskyy”
It was really a love story in the end by Adam Kluger
It was really a love story in the end.
The noise outside was consistent. Traffic, construction, and wandering conversations as New Yorkers enjoyed the relative peace of Memorial Day Weekend in the city. But for Steve, the owner of the New Amity Restaurant, it was the end.
Continue reading “It was really a love story in the end by Adam Kluger”
literally stories 