There is something about the feel of a coin. It’s that cool heavy feeling. I had a year’s worth of Alcoholics Anonymous coins in my pocket, and I jingled them as I walked down this country road.
The concrete road was cracked and unmarked, and the sky was darkening. A few hundred meters ahead stood what looked like an old-timey photo booth.
Continue reading “Insert Coin by Ari Derin”
Jenny stood at the dingy laundromat’s bulletin board. She wore a bright red Indiana University shirt and jeans. The crude flyer showed five or six stick figures holding hands in a circle. Two suspiciously looked like they had a penis or almost three legs. She smiled and thought, Maybe that’s what I want to see. They danced in bright green crayon slashes of grass in some pagan ritual around a blue gazing-ball. The smiley-face sun, shining from the top right corner, looked sneaky and somehow hateful. Like it was holding its middle sun-finger up just off the page. Black words cut across the lightly shaded blue sky. FORTUNES READ by Sue at Backwaters Salon $50. No Refunds.
Continue reading “The Backwaters by Christopher J. Ananias”
In our city, the floodgates are kept shut by a machine powered on human breath. We call it the regulator. It listens to the lungs the same way a metronome listens to music. If rhythm breaks, the gates slip. Then the river takes everything.
Continue reading “They Say It’s Wonderful by Prin Sairungsri”
I’m Lloyd Landover (aka Low), and this is the first day of high school for my twin sister Linda (aka Falling Down Girl) and me.
Our Mom is Lidia Landover, and she works with numbers for the federal government. She’s not a mathematician, statistician, physicist, astronomer, actuary, or accountant.
Mom doesn’t solve math problems. She doesn’t create theories based on math. She plays very intently with every level of math, and somewhere in the results are stuff the government really wants. She calls her work “math doodling.”
Continue reading “The Landovers by Frederick K Foote”
A moment before the horror begins.
Imagine two ruthless creatures, each a child’s worst—and often last—nightmare. The first fiend
is a shape-shifting monster. He terrorizes and devours children in the guise of Pennywise, an evil clown. Pennywise gained public attention in a book by a famous American author. The book is purported to be fiction, but this was a ruse to hide the author’s desperate fear of the main character, Pennywise. Alas, the child-eating clown is all too real.
Our second nightmare is the officially sanctioned kidnapper and imprisoner of children, the notorious Child Catcher. This greasy villain from the land of Vulgaria came to notoriety in the documentary film Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.
An ocean separates these two terrors, and we must be grateful for this small blessing. For if these monsters should ever meet… No! It is too horrible to contemplate!
Continue reading “Penny Catch by Marco Etheridge”
The line of people stretched all the way around the block. It was 1983, it was Rome, and Mr. Castano’s sculpture work was in high demand for movie sets, fashionistas, and pranksters. The artist also reserved a certain amount of his time to help the injured or disabled with realistic or artistic prosthetics. I was a customer close to this latter category, though the only person I wanted to look right for was myself.
Continue reading “Pinocchio’s Puppet by L.A. Fields (Adult content)”
Considered objectively, Alan wasn’t really one of the bad guys. Provided it didn’t cost him significant quantities of time and/or cash, he was okay about helping out unfortunate relatives, friends, or neighbours. He had a soft spot for rough sleepers, as long as they weren’t hallucinating. He claimed, with some justice, that when he was working he’d worn a hole in the arse of a perfectly good suit sitting on committees, but he remained willing to do the odd shift of volunteering here and there.
Continue reading “The Lingering Regrets by Michael Bloor”
Diane tilted her head back to find the top of the slide, one hand shading her eyes, and thought: that’s very high up for an eight-year-old alone.
“Mom, can I go?”
Her eyes followed the slide’s downward arc, its twists and loops. Bodies zipped through the tube. Muffled cries reverberated outward to the ground. Her chest tightened.
Continue reading “In a Flash by Marcus Delmont”
The prisoner woke up in his cell on the edge of the sea early in the morning. He was to die this day, as planned. The sun was white as it rose over the water, and the sky was empty, and the horizon was a pale rind speckled with distant ships. Today there was a white stone on the sill of the barred window that had not been there before; an old beggar who’d been walking by, shouting nonsense about the end of the world, had put it there. The prisoner, a young man who did not want to die and believed he was justified in the murder he committed, did nothing with the stone and thought nothing of it until the early afternoon, when it grew hot in the cell and when he knew his hour of death was nigh. He was to be hanged with three other criminals who were way worse men than he. The guard dropped off a pot of delicious beef stew and a loaf of wheat bread, which he devoured, and then he began to pace the stone floor back and forth. “It can’t be,” he said, and screamed. “I am an innocent man! An innocent man!”
Continue reading “The Beggar’s Stone by Peter Biles”
The knock came just as she was serving dessert.
Actually, the knock came after she had navigated the one step down to the dining room from the Vrbo’s kitchen, a tray of warm crème brûlées balanced in her hands. She had just cleared the table— two large dinner plates awash with steak drippings, stained red globs of uneaten mashed potatoes— and had given them a quick rinse before moving on to the final course. Tony had remained at the table, leaning back and scratching his belly. He had even let out a soft belch, which made her smile. She pulled the tray out of the refrigerator, but not before checking the freezer for her emergency stash, her “just in case” stores. Then she had gotten to work torching the custard with her little portable blow torch. When she finished, she paused for just a second to admire the crusty layer of toasted sugar, then hoisted the tray and headed for the dining room. She went deliberately, putting one foot in front of the other. When she reached the table she set the ramekins down at their places, and that’s when the rapping had started.
Continue reading “Judy Triton by Brian Stumbaugh”
