Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

Minute by Robert Reece

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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.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

When the Railroad Comes by Leila Allison

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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.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Humour, Short Fiction

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

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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.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Kicking It by James Blindell

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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?

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Attic Room by Cris Aboobaker

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In the dim twilight of Charlie’s bar an old man sat at the counter muttering about the weather. Outside, night winds blew up from the sea, salving the day’s heat still rising from baked pavements. It was too hot the old man said, it was too dry; his bones ached, his bowels didn’t move; John, the barman nodded, wiping glasses with a small towel. The barking laughs of other regulars, the clinking of the pool table, the air conditioner’s hum and Bob Montgomery’s measured voice on the TV lamenting another Red Sox loss mixed with the old man’s mutters.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

Bangkok, If You’re Listening by Prin Sairungsri

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I wake up face-down on cold vinyl tile, my sweaty cheek glued to the gray-specked floor. My mouth tastes like someone juiced a cigarette, poured it into a rotten durian, and forced it all down my throat. For a second, I think I’ve died in a stranger’s apartment. Then I see my crusty Jordan 1’s stuck on the ceiling fan.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction

I Don’t Like to Complain by Russell Dupont

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I don’t like to complain.

When you live in a neighborhood, side-by-side with other home owners, there’s a little give-and-take that has to go on. On one side of us there’s the Cummings. The Cummings are in their fifties and almost every Sunday they have a little family barbecue, their two sons and their families come over and the kids, they’re still kids, and they make a little noise but Fred Cummings is a good guy and I don’t mind the smoke from his grill because what he’s cooking usually smells good. By seven o’clock, they’re long gone.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Amelia in Waiting by Leila Allison

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The cataract sky saw not, yet watched; the wind moved not, yet listened; God spoke not, yet instructed. The day simply was and would be until the last mind stopped thinking about it. A low slung blotch of scuzzy radiance, which Amy assumed was the sun, slouched west within the ashes.

Amy gazed out the living room window. Only a double thickness of glass lay between her lungs and the poisons of an imagined alien atmosphere

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All Stories, General Fiction

What is Offered by Chris Klassen

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When the storms end and the first rays of the sun finally penetrate through and around the dark clouds and the temperatures rise, that means new potential has returned.  For the last while, it has been impossible to really do anything other than exhaust existing provisions and rest and stay as warm and dry as reality allowed, and usually that meant not so warm and only moderately dry, but that didn’t mean it was bad because it wasn’t.  It was fine.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Wrong Road by Cris Aboobaker

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The train rattled through the trench of the tracks, rocking Bill and Lon like children on a carnival ride. With each stop, the Christmas crowd leaked away, clusters of homes seen out the windows dwindled to an isolated few until they were flying past banks of leafless trees and brown fields fissured by frozen marshes, their view widening to the glow of the evening skyline.

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