Category: All Stories

All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Killer Killer by Doug Hawley

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I had been hoping to be invited into The Posse for some time.

If you are too young to remember, or have been asleep for many years, here’s how we came to this.  The world has always had serious divisions, not the least the USA, but disintegration here accelerated with the ravings of a former president whose name I don’t use.  He died of a heart attack screaming “I’m the president’ while being questioned during his 2022 trial for various and sundry financial crimes.  Soon thereafter, led by his sons and daughters, true believers were convinced he didn’t die and would soon return to save the country.  Cult 45, as it became known, began to plague politicians at all levels of government with arson, death threats and kidnapping.  Politicians aligning with Cult 45 were treated likewise by the enemies of Cult 45.  Those opposed Cult 45 were called Anti45 by their supporters, and spelled derisively Auntie45 by Cult 45.  The country was further divided by an Endemic, worsened by many variants.  Mask or not, vaccine or not, the country was violently divided.  As government was forced to protect itself, the business of governing the masses was left behind.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Psychic Promise by Yash Seyedbagheri

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My father seeks help from the psychics, their names a litany, a liturgy. Padre, Maria, Esmerelda, Christin. They promise good fortune, alignments of the planets. They promise to vanquish his opponents. To vanquish bad luck. And he has so much, at least in his opinion. There’s the divorce from years ago, something that still simmers. I, his only son, didn’t become a lawyer. I up and left. I became a writer, a marker that to him conjured garrets and begging for food, and not victory, conquest. He tried to amass a coterie of girlfriends from abroad, each one coming in from distant lands, snatching a green card and the possibility of things. They called him prophet, valiant lord, but those were only obsequious platitudes.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Mess for the Sages by Tom Sheehan

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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.

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All Stories, Literally Reruns

Literally Reruns – Time and Chance Happeneth to All Gods by Leila Allison

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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.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 397 – Winging It, Truss’s Truss And I Didn’t Have Time To Look At Religion.

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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!!)

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All Stories, Fantasy, Humour, Romance, Short Fiction

The Caretaker’s Cottage by Leila Allison

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-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.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Bravado by Hugh Cron

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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!

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All Stories, Romance

We’ll Both Forget The Breeze by Michael Tyler

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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.

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