Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

In A Place Far Away by Dianne Willems

literallystories2014

I was looking for a place to die; somebody recommended Brooklyn.

 Man that’s a good first sentence, John reveled. Maybe the best. Definitely one of the few that had stuck by him all these years, resting in his subconscious. Although I can still recall by heart, he thought, the following: I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Chirstian because of Owen Meany.

Continue reading “In A Place Far Away by Dianne Willems” →
All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Sunday Lunch  by Samyuktha Kannan

literallystories2014

It was around twelve forty on a Sunday afternoon when the dispute acquired the peculiar density of all apartment controversies, having swollen far beyond its obscure beginnings into something at once intimate and abstract. It was no longer a matter of mere lunch. It was no longer of mere smells but of religion, caste and civilisations itself, and so when the green WhatsApp notification bubbles accumulated with urgency in the Residents’ Association Group, it carried with itself prophetic revelations, accusations, clarifications, corrections, screenshots, invocations of tradition, appeals to tolerance, references to bylaws nobody remembered drafting and precedents nobody could locate.

Continue reading “Sunday Lunch  by Samyuktha Kannan” →
General Fiction, All Stories

Ministry of Other People’s Sons by Susmita Mukherjee

literallystories2014

Every respectable nation has a Ministry of Something Important. The Republic of Grand Intentions had a Ministry of Agriculture, although its farmers regularly demonstrated outside it with empty sacks; a Ministry of Labour, where very few people had ever laboured; a Ministry of Health, which advised citizens to remain healthy while hospitals ran short of beds; and, naturally, a Ministry of Peace, housed in the largest government building in the capital and consulted mainly on ceremonial occasions. It also had a Department of Necessary Sacrifices, an institution so indispensable that nobody could remember when it had been established. Its official responsibility was to explain why sons had been sent to distant borders, daughters were working in factories producing military supplies, villages had been reduced to rubble, and bread had become a luxury. Above the entrance, in letters of gold, was the departmental motto: YOUR SUFFERING IS PROOF OF YOUR PATRIOTISM.

Continue reading “Ministry of Other People’s Sons by Susmita Mukherjee” →
All Stories, General Fiction

Bolt by James W. Morris

literallystories2014

Lightning strikes kill about two thousand people per year. The bolt itself is only the width of your thumb, yet it carries 100 million volts of electricity, and runs hot—around 54,000 degrees, which, by the way, is five times greater than the temperature of the sun.

Continue reading “Bolt by James W. Morris” →
General Fiction, Short Fiction

Little Swimmers or Kleine Schwimmer  by SJ Butler

literallystories2014

The stillness of a dimly lit swimming pool. Rays of light pouring down from the garland wrapped windows above like searchlights seeking out shipwrecked sailors. The 1930s decor of women triumphantly holding blazing torches reminds her of the Nazis. Briefly gazing up at their determined faces she wonders if they ever had doubts – the stupid Nazis that is. A whiff of chlorine makes her eyes stream. She wipes them childlike with milk-white forearms.

Continue reading “Little Swimmers or Kleine Schwimmer  by SJ Butler” →
General Fiction, Short Fiction

Bird by Danielle Burke

literallystories2014

We are gathered here. Waiting for the opportunity. The younger one thinks we are loathsome, ignorant creatures, but the old woman knows better. 

***

Ava Nash finally possessed almost everything she knew she deserved. 

She thought back to the winter, to the morning her landlord, Philip, had accosted her. 

“Don’t think I’m going to be persuaded once again by you blinking those pretty blue eyes at me, unless there’s going to be more to follow,” he leered. “Rent’s due by tomorrow at 3:00. If it’s not in my hand by then, we’re going to have to work out another arrangement.” 

Continue reading “Bird by Danielle Burke” →
All Stories, General Fiction

Minute by Robert Reece

literallystories2014

That goddamn Buick screamed around the corner with its rusted chrome hubcaps shooting off like flying saucers from Plan 9 from Outer Space. Talia’s face and her yellow whiskey eyes came to me in that frozen millisecond like an old 3D image in a ViewMaster. I can’t remember what she said when she left me the night before, but there were those eyes from the day we met four years ago, and that’s what I saw as the tires smoked skidwild across the asphalt, and the cracked tri-shield hood ornament narrowed down as a laser reticle focused on its target, which was me. But I was late because Talia took the alarm with her when she left, and I had to take the commuter train, which was delayed that morning by a single minute due to a signal malfunction.

Continue reading “Minute by Robert Reece” →
General Fiction, Short Fiction

When the Railroad Comes by Leila Allison

ireneallison12

1985

There comes a moment when God stops everything and shines the Big Light on you. You’re presented with a problem that has no solution, and doing nothing isn’t possible. When that first happened to me in 1985, I learned the truth: the closer you get to God, the further you are from your humanity. I have yet to decide if that’s sarcasm, irony, or the wages of being holy. But none of it mattered at that moment. It was up to me to select the least shitty course of action, and I had to choose now.

Continue reading “When the Railroad Comes by Leila Allison” →
All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Humour, Short Fiction

Week 605: Never too Late, Hitler Found Love at 56

ireneallison12

I will open with a stupid “duh” remark: Lots of things have changed in writing in the past fifty years. I’ve been at it that long, but the first ten I was a songwriter. That began with dreamy eyed teen minor chord ditties about things I knew nothing about and eventually devolved into writing drunken snatches of genius (i.e. drunk shite, as they say in Scotland) on anything that would take a pen (I hate pencils, they feel like dirt and their smell makes me sneeze). Then, later, when not too shitty they were matched to a number of beats and a chord pattern. I have probably written two hundred songs in my life and not one of them exists on one sheet of paper. Some were recorded on a demo that someone somewhere probably recorded over a long time ago.

Continue reading “Week 605: Never too Late, Hitler Found Love at 56” →
All Stories, General Fiction

Kicking It by James Blindell

literallystories2014

The match is in full flow, 22 teenagers running around the frozen pitch, a few desperate to get the ball and some desperately hiding from it.   To absolutely nobody’s surprise, we are 2-0 down after ten minutes.  I’m not arsed about the score, though.  It’s the ten minutes thing that’s doing my head in.  80 more bastard minutes of him.  In actual fact, the match will be stopped and an ambulance frantically called before halftime, but who’s to know at this point?

Continue reading “Kicking It by James Blindell” →