I’m a packrat from the word go, have been since I was a kid, even these days people see me in my daily walks, stop, retrieve some object from street or gutter, and stick it in my pocket.
Category: General Fiction
Distraction by Sharon Hajj
Distraction by Sharon HajjIn the morning, I like to bury my dreams under the pillow so I can immediately check my to-do list:
- Go to store for soy milk, oatmeal, and dog food
- Buy paint and stencils for bookshelf
- Make an appointment for a mammogram
- Call and wish Mom happy birthday
- Dump your belongings in the trash
Winter Solstice by Jon Beight
I sit in silence amid the scattered, worthless rubble of what were the symbols of your life’s bright flashes and triumphs that you hold so dear. These shattered remains lay in tribute to unbridled, hate-filled rage, spawned from the union of betrayal and deceit.
Stripped by Hugh Cron
Jane couldn’t keep her clothes on.
She’d been arrested a few times on public decency charges but when the authorities witnessed her prison togs repelling themselves from her, the charges were dropped.
She was referred to experts on everything but there were no experts on spontaneous clothing removal by the clothing itself.
Try, Try Again by L’Erin Ogle
The thing about parallel universes is that there might be somewhere where you exist where you are a better person. But then there has to be another place where you’re the worst version of yourself.
The Lost Notes of a Carpenter’s Song by Tom Sheehan
His name was Amos Clark, 75 years old if a day, and on one of those days at the little decrepit house where the dowser used to live, this kind-looking man with a beard came carrying all he owned on an A-frame on his back. He set his A-frame on the ground and looked at the small house needing much work on the outside and quickly imagined what the inside of the house looked like. Old muscles, in a twist of memory, began to move under his shirt.
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Random Acts by Sarah Bolmarcich
Mr. Blake was very excited. His performance review was today, and he was looking forward to it. Whistling, he knotted his tie and inspected himself in the mirror. He thought he looked good. Solid, mature, but with a twinkle in his eye—a guy you’d like to have a beer with, because he seemed like he knew how to kick back.
A Poet’s Conversation by Tom Sheehan
This conversation is with old red wine that brings you, brother, out of surging daylight to fill the doorway like a mailman with a bad letter or telegram. Specters leap out of this old mixture, the blood of grape, the fine chalk it paints teeth with, a whole day of sunlight collared in a tumbler, a red sunset too far away to tell where. You went off to that sunset once, around the corner of the barn tipping toward its knees and Sam Parker’s garden paving the ripe earth all way to the Lovett house sitting white as a pepper-mint down the lane.
Ghost Hats by Marco Etheridge
Grace Walsh stood on the platform of the train station, imagining the dead. The tracks and platforms of the Bahnhof were cut into a hillside. On the far side of the tracks, the earth was held back by a concrete wall fronted with rough concrete pillars. The wall was the height of two Irish women, more or less. A graveyard crowded the brink of the wall, almost spilling over onto the tracks below. Above the concrete edge, Grace could see headstones adorned with bright splotches of flowers. The Viennese tended their dead well. At least you could say that much for them.
The Novella of Jason Bendix by Penny Faircloth
Jason Bendix had finished writing his new novella the evening before. It was the first mature work that he had written. For nearly three years he had been trying to find his voice and to whet all artifice from his sentences. Thirteen, fourteen stories had been his apprentice work. First, he had written stories of two or three thousand words each. Then, he had managed a few five-thousand-word beasts of burden. The three ten-thousand worders had been monstrosities which cost him dearly.
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literally stories 