Though the supermarket stayed open twenty-four hours a day, the photo counter closed at ten. Most people, Kroger believed, did not need rolls of film urgently developed in the middle of the night.
Continue reading “A Candid Exchange by Brian Hawkins”
I don’t know why she says what she says but I know she’s crazy and that’s why she keeps a locked chain across the refrigerator door. I pick the lock, same trick every morning. Grab butter. Eggs. Spinach. Tomatoes. Whip up the ingredients. Fry the oozing mess in a pan. Slap the omelet on a plastic plate. The kind of dish that won’t shatter when Mother slams it against the kitchen floor, when her blurred eyes widen at the biting rats that make her panic and scream and clamp down tighter to save the pieces of her scattered life.
Continue reading “Once Bitten by Renee Coloman”
I write about Jeanie just to keep her alive, her memory is a ghost in these pages. Though it hurts to remember, the pain is easier to bear than the emptiness. So I return again and again to the image of her face which at first was burned into my mind but now begins to fade – the lines once sharp and vivid are loose and blurred.
Continue reading “Her Ghost in These Pages by Daniel Joseph Day”
As regular visitors will know, we sometimes receive submissions that don’t fit into the usual scheme of things but we want to publish because of the quality of the writing, or the message, or sometimes something special about the author. This is one of those. We thought this deserved a moment in the sun:
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – Him Her Them Us by Victor Kreuiter”
The sun rose in the west and coloured the hills. Velvet dark, not quite black… Then burnt umber. Orange-red, limpid platinum. Light gathering.
The hills became distinct; hard, dry mounds the sun reached from, taking hold of the day, making it hard and brittle too.
A party of men came back into the landscape, carrying something wrapped in canvas. They stopped at a freshly dug hole. They laid the canvas bundle down, not too gently, and unwrapped it.
It was a corpse, bones really, hard white chalky bones, dead a fair while. These the men put into the hole, one or two at a time. Then, using shovels and a mattock, they refilled the hole. It looked hard work. The last blows were struck with the mattock by the smallest, oldest man – an Aborigine – and the other men stood about, talking. They were white men.
Continue reading “The Sun Rose in the West by Stephen J Kimber”
According to the man at the agency, half a meter’s rainfall over two days was all it took to so loosen the soil the local cemetery gave up its coffins. Dozens of them, he said, dozens of coffins bobbing along half submerged amid the general flow of debris – tables, wardrobes, phone boxes, and so on . . .
Continue reading “Installation, by Geraint Jonathan”
As Molly pushed her dolls’ faces together and danced them around her bedroom window sill, she could see Mr. and Mrs. Green in their house next door. Molly named her favorite boy doll Bill and her prettiest girl doll Jill – last name Green, but no one else knew that.
Continue reading “Missing by Kayla Cain”
Weekends are for my brother. I try to see him on Saturdays, but sometimes it’s Sunday. He doesn’t know one day from the next, so I don’t guess it matters. They limit his time with the other patients. I wish they wouldn’t. Even if he doesn’t talk, he might like listening.
Continue reading “It Happened on Wednesday by Foster Trecost”
“Hey there pretty lady, lookin’ good!”
“Hi Chris, didn’t expect to see you here. Alone and on a school night!!”
“What the fuck, I needed a drink! And I really don’t give a shit about the job, so, so what if I go in half-mangled…What about you? Waiting for someone?”
Continue reading “Market Place by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
There are many Declans in this story, but let’s begin with ours.
Declan sits on the edge of his bed, absently sweeping his hands under the crumpled sheets in search of the remote. When that fails, he reaches beneath the bed without bothering to look, hoping his fingers brush against salvation.
Continue reading “Channel 7 by Gareth Vieira”
literally stories 