Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

Who Knows Who Lived in My House, Built in 1742, or Your House by Tom Sheehan

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For history and legend sakes, certain attributes, character traits if you will, have to be appointed here at the beginning of This old house (B. 1742), home for more than half a century of my life, and This old room, dressed with computer by me for the last 28 years. Yet I swear thick-cut Edgeworth pipe tobacco bears its welcome as strong as my grandfather’s creaking chair, diminutive Johnny Igoe’s chair. This most memorable compartment was also his room for 20 years of literate cheer, storied good will, the pleasantries of expansive noun and excitable verb, and his ever-lingering poems, each one a repeated resonance, a victory of sound and meaning and the magic of words. Yet be of stout spirit, for the chair mocks time only in the clutch of darkness thick as the eternal void, and the tobacco’s no longer threatening in its gulp.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Elon by Olivia Parkinson

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The day she left me, she left the fish. The gloopy, dead-brained goldfish sitting in our room. My room now, fuck her. I don’t miss her. She used to ask her if I missed her when she went away in the summer- not really I’d say, she’d come back in three weeks. That made her cry. Why do people cry when you tell the truth?

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All Stories, General Fiction

Mushrooms and Trolley Cars (Amanita Colyptraderma and Electric Street Cars) by Tom Sheehan

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A friend of mine for many years, Eric Peavy, lived on the third floor of a tenement house right near the center of the town square graced by a circular green holding two huge elm trees with grand columns and huge umbrella limbs that spread for the season at hand. He was apt to break into an on-going conversation with a connecting remark based on his third–floor view of the square and what had come into his mind.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Customer is Never Right by Leila Allison

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A few nights ago, Jim identified the great, distant sun Naazar in the autumnal sky, and then attempted to sell me tales of its splendor and glory. This had caused an old memory to trip my inner As If Alarm. Some claim my inner As If Alarm underscores the ever-suspicious side of my personality; all things considered, I find it a useful and necessary device.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Sniper by Frederick K Foote

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Congratulations Mr Foote on your 50th story published by Literally Stories.

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The New Springfield 7.62×51mm sniper, SO, with Inversion Camera Scope has perfect balance, elegantly carved walnut stocks, precision parts, outstanding reliability, and incredible accuracy. It fits hands, shoulder, face, and eyes like an extension of the body. It’s an exceptionally fine tool for killing people at long range.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Thousand Little Benjies by Mohammad Sadegh Sadeghi

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I

A thousand little Benjies constantly talk in my head. A thousand little creatures speaking, some in subdued almost suppressed and some in apprehensive yet hollow tones, somewhere in my head. They all talk, all of them, together, simultaneously. Shut up, shut up, shut up. They keep repeating those words. Like parrots on cocaine, they keep repeating those words. Blah, Blah, Blah. Tickets please, sir. I was sitting, and the clock went one, then two, then three, then she came picked me up and then we were here and I was sitting again but we were moving. And we are moving, and they are moving, and those are moving, and maybe it was a bicycle and not a bike. Maybe we’re not moving at all, and it’s just my head horsing around. I have liquid memories and container moods, the latter follows shape and the former follows suit. I press my eyes against my palms, and I melt right through. They won’t let me forget. These bastards won’t let me forget.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Farewell Persephone by Virginia Revel

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“I see her always as she was then, lit with lucent yellow from a jagged tear in the eternal cloud cover, eyes locked with mine, mutely but unmistakably saying farewell.”

            This is the first sentence of the novel ‘Farewell Persephone’ by my uncle Marcus Carradine. Below the title he inserted a quotation:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats

 

I found the manuscript of ‘Persephone’ in my uncle’s house three weeks after he died. ‘Manuscript’ is a literal term in this instance; Marcus despised word processors and wrote his book in longhand. He used to tell me that the movements of his hand and arm made the creative juices flow. Literary composition was a physical thing. He said, too, that his aim was to ‘possess the world and make it gravid.’

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Winter by Wm. Brett Hill

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When I was seven the world blew up.

I was in the depths of a nightmare when my mother, tears streaming down her face and her voice raspy like torn cardboard, shook me awake and dragged me from bed.  I was in the air before I knew what was happening, my favorite friend Fitzy hanging from my frightened grip as we bounded down the stairs and headed out the back door.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Corpse Flower by A. Elizabeth Herting

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The Corpse Flower clutched its hidden treasure tightly, leaves interlocking in a steely grip. The flower would bloom in its own time. It would not be rushed or stopped in this biological imperative, any and all obstacles would be overcome. The evolution of hundreds of thousands of years had brought it this far, there would be no turning back.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Dark Return by Tom Sheehan

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Wonder had him in its grip and worked him over, tossing him into past years as clean as a pistol shot. More than half a century flipped through his movie mind, stopping whenever he wanted, at whatever spot and breaking loose the sounds, the smells, the fingers touching, the skin knowing again, rocking him with total recall. He saw again the older woman who paraded nude behind a window, who finally beckoned when he was on the way to school one day, calling him on to manhood, and to silence and war, and to the eternal draw.

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