You could say I’m an unhappy guy. I just want to blot out the days, smoke away the nights and dump my beloved books into the ocean. Books used to be my everything, but now they simply bore me – I can hardly read a paragraph my senses are so dulled. I have better days, it’s true, because I’m essentially free. I can choose when I wake – I have no alarms, no commitments, but sleeping in my car, that I’ve called home since the divorce, can be a real drag.
Continue reading “Sanctuary by Tim Frank “
Seeking Inspiration
The human ability to whine at any level of existence may be the crowning glory in the evolution of our species. The aged, the sick, the poor, the abused, the cheated all have plenty to rightfully complain about; yet even when we are young, healthy, rich, safe and on the winning team, we are still able to find something wrong with our lots. That is the point when rightful complaining turns into cry-baby whining.
Continue reading “Week 394: Seeking Inspiration; Five Inspired Tales and Must See Comic Strips”
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If you can imagine a realm that is both infinite and a place where nothing is farther than a mile from anything else, then you can imagine my land of make believe. You see, I failed High School Geometry and have no sense of scientific proportion. I went every day, but it was the first period, and I fell asleep with my eyes open. I wound up with four A’s and one F on that report card. I got my high marks in History, Drama, Music and Sociology. But the world is run by Slide Rule Supremacists who’d rather have kids bomb out in those and score big successes in the ometries.
I had to take an extremely remedial math class (which was as intellectually demanding as “Celebrity Jeopardy”) to gain my diploma. My crowning glory there was the creation of a coordinate graph. When connected, the numbered points revealed the face of Fred Flinstone with dollar signs in his eyes and the caption “Bedrock Lotto.” Although giving up on a freshly minted adult and releasing her into a high tech society armed with no fancier arithmetic in her head than how to arrange a Fred Flintsone graph is probably immoral, that’s just the way the old hypotenuse bounces. Besides, it continues to give me the freedom to create scientifically impossible vistas. Hooray for the armor of ignorance.
According to the 70’s band America, “Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man that he didn’t, didn’t already have.” Well, the Wiz was hardly Great and Powerful then, now was he? For I, the ruling Penname in my little metaverse, have endowed all my Fictional Characters (FC’s) with unretractable Free Will, which they most definitely did not already, already have going in. The person who employs me (whose experiences, skills, shames and lacks are identical to mine) did the same for me; alas, you don’t need a head full of logarithms to conceptualize the vicious circle.
Continue reading “Where Have All The billigits Gone by Leila Allison”
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Alarms blare. It is the end. David knows it as much as he knows anything else. Below, glorious golden clouds meld in a blue atmosphere. So much like Earth. But his family won’t see the light of this star system for twelve years. They will grow old and die, and if he ever makes it back all that will be waiting is a grave. Assuming, of course, there is a planet to return to, and a way home.
The ship falls, and David with it. McLonsky’s blood bubbles and flutters around the cockpit in globules that have minds of their own.
This is it. The end. David closes his eyes, and he waits for his Maker’s embrace.
Continue reading “Home Again by Keith LaFountaine”
He dreams he is a young Asian woman. Diminutive. Pretty not beautiful. Not distinctly of Indian or Pakistani heritage but notionally from that region of the world sometimes known as the Indian Subcontinent.
And yet in his dream he isn’t actually the young woman in question. Not as such. More, he is her in the third person.
Whilst the dream lacks structure he experiences a resonance throughout the day. An intangible notion of being someone else. It’s a novel experience but one that returns periodically.
Earlier in the day he had a fall.
Continue reading “Dreaming in the Third Person by Adam West”
He was uphill again, part way on the steep incline, where time, circumstance and opportunity had taken him. But time had crumbled, and with it the matter of circumstance. Only opportunity, sometimes a laggard, held on, fate deciding issues as it had decided his. Downhill he could see how difficult the climb could be to anyone determined to go top-side, as jagged rocks appeared, thick clumps of trees turning toward the awed colors of fall, now and then a formidable gorge in the way of quick ascension. At his backside lurked the sense-awakening pain and the phantom ache lingering in his legs, as if archived for history, remnants of another climb, on the real Hill 407, northwest Afghanistan, in the formidable quarter of activity in that distant country.
Continue reading “Hill 407 Reboot by Tom Sheehan”
Carol was so transformed by her wedding attire – swamped in her heavy bronze foundation, fake eyelashes fluttering like butterfly wings – that her three-year-old daughter, Allison, no longer recognised her.
Continue reading “Underwater Wedding by Tim Frank”
Lois let out a whoop. “I passed!”
I went to my wife, who was sitting cross-legged on the sofa. The laptop’s screen displayed an image of the certificate. “I knew you could do it, Honey.”
We were out of college five years and married three, but not making enough at the milk studio to feel comfortable starting a family. So soon after the veracity of Ouija Board spiritualism was scientifically validated, my wife enrolled at Alternate Realities Online University.
Continue reading “My Wife’s Short, Strange Career as a Certified Ouija Boardologist by Dave Henson”
Jackson’s silver hair glinted under the full moon. His boots crunched the gravel parking lot in front of the ramshackle apartment building, long ago a hotel, where I shared an apartment with my mother. Jackson shared our space a few nights a week. He cursed and cast a black trash bag into the bed of his truck. It landed with a soft thud. He hadn’t noticed me yet, standing on the sidewalk, but his presence allowed me to soften my grip on the house keys poking through my fingers. My white, work button-down was stained and reeked of the whiskey spill from an overserved guest at the Angler’s Inn.
Continue reading “Catch and Release by Heather Rutherford”
I’m drawn again to this little spit in the road about six miles outside of Tupelo, Mississippi on Road 1233 in the Town of Plantersville. I stand near a pasture across the road. Two hundred feet to the north, there’s an abandoned structure that’s falling in on itself. A weathered sign with faded lettering in the front reads “Unity Church.” It hangs awkwardly from a broken chain banging in the wind against a post. The roadside is littered with beer bottles and fast food wrappers. A car hubcap lies nearby.
Continue reading “Unity by Phil Temples”
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