A black and green lamppost, tall with chipped paint, across from Bryant Park, in front of a classic brown and gold twelve storied building, the wind reeking of the park’s dead yellow grass, cigarette smoke, automobile exhaust and blood. Hanging from the lamppost is a half-skinned, large white male wearing only trousers, supported by ropes about his torso, legs and arms. In agony, still alive but barely. New York City is some kind of town these days. He will be dead in less than a day.
And so the night sparked the beginning of something reckless and dangerous.
He wanted to show me the city after a drink or two. Shotgun, wondering why I dated a policeman. I sat cozily in his car as he drove around in the moonlight. I had the time of my life and he seemed to notice that. It’s a pity I had to kill him before sunrise. He perceived almost everything about me just by looking into my eyes. He spent the whole night explaining to me everything he saw in me. And he was right – mostly – which is creepy if you consider it was only our first date.
When you’re crawling in the dark towards a desperate destination you can’t drink or drug, you can’t play the guitar, the goal is to duck under the barbed wire fence, under the surveillance and arrive undetected to attain your purpose. You’re crawling with a swede saw round your neck, and you’ve driven all the way from the Rockies, a giant circle travel to this vineyard once again. To exact vengeance. You’ve filled five weeks pruning grapes for nothing, with an oral contract signed by two voices, yours and the owners. And the owner won’t pay. After three weeks, he said the job wasn’t complete. You knew it was. But you wanted the cash. So you did the extra work. Pruning the vines down to the nubs. You laboured two weeks more. And afterwards the owner sighed and said “the field must be weeded and the debris hauled away,” and you said “No. That wasn’t in the contract. I don’t have a pickup to do that”
Continue reading “In The Hills Of The Okanagan by Harrison Kim”
The Bannions, from every direction and for as many reasons, pushed things their way, until all targets or causes fit the one corridor of family wishes. The power and might of their numbers, of their attitudes and abilities, made them a most pernicious band of unity tight as closed fists already past the knock-out punch and on for the kill, no matter the added punishment often unneeded.
I was somewhere I had no business being, doing something that I shouldn’t, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
Continue reading “Speak No Evil by Hugh Cron – Warning – Adult Content”
Stomach is a damn hard taste to forget. Even before the bile claws its way up your throat, you can taste it—hot metal and candy aspirin. Then you can smell it, too. Sharp and noxious, the promise of chewed food and belly acid to come. I hate to even think about it, but memory’s a certain breed of sadist, and it knows what we dread the most.
When four mythological heroes from the Celtic Otherworld travel to modern day Wales in search of a powerful magical text, things are a little different to how they remember.
Darby was born flying, and I was born hating her for it. Our house was just across the river from Darby’s family’s, our backyard and theirs stretching warlike to the banks. Their house was smaller than ours but more forceful; it was three stories tall and white and wide and had grand glass double-doors that looked out toward our back porch. We were born the same year, and our mothers would stand on either bank rubbing their bellies and swelling in the June heat.
I try not to attract attention. I breathe better incognito. On a particular hot Sunday in July I parked about four blocks from Dollarton Beach. I slung my two pairs of binoculars across my neck, and carefully wandered down a wide asphalt path. My mission: to lay low behind some logs and scan across the shoreline, make a few notes. I’d be perceived as a bird watcher. I sat on the sand observing through each one of the binoculars and sucking on a pure cane sugar Kombucha drink. I was rudely interrupted when a lanky, curly haired lifeguard with “Ben Acker” marked on a large name tag on his pants asked me “Where did you get that T shirt?”
Continue reading “My Investigation into the Disappearance of Kyle Amito by Harrison Kim”
Damaged.
It’s written in the lines of her face. The mottled flesh scrawled across her cheeks, the tangle of scar tissue weighing on her eyelid. Battle scars? A robbery gone wrong? In any case, she’s seen some shit. And the story’s not finished.
literally stories 