Category: General Fiction

All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

A Particular Kind of Scumbag by David Henson

literallystories2014

Harold Marold was confident his new discovery was going to be big. Really big. Sure, his previous inventions hadn’t all turned out as he hoped. The periscoping contact lenses caused vertigo and motion sickness. His electro-socks to eliminate foot sweat were “shocking” — as he’d found out the hard way. And his chainsaw-equipped drone for trimming high tree limbs had its drawbacks. But his current project couldn’t miss. It was going to bring about world peace.

Continue reading “A Particular Kind of Scumbag by David Henson” →

All Stories, General Fiction

Vestigial by Thomas Elson

literallystories2014

What can loosen a bond of thirty years?

What can strengthen what can no longer be made strong?

David felt as if he were living inside his recurring fear begun decades earlier inside a chanked and abandoned farm building off a path hidden by overhanging branches surrounded by unproductive land more than fifty yards from a gravel county road when he sat on the wooded floor with the tip of a rifle barrel stuffed in his mouth.

Continue reading “Vestigial by Thomas Elson” →

All Stories, General Fiction

Garuka – Please Come Back by Ernest O. Ogunyemi

literallystories2014

Verse 1 – days of innocence.

 Those days are still fresh, they’re all that remain of that time, like bombshells after an explosion, or the remains of a decomposed dead animal. Those days when we chased grasshoppers in the small bush in our backyard. There were basically three types: one had intricate patterns on its body: yellow and black stripes, dotted with white; another had the skin of lush grasses, and it was why we found it on rare occasions. The last appeared only during the dry seasons. It had the body of scorched grasses, dusty brown. We would watch them jump from blade grass to blade grass, leaning the thin grasses. And we would crouch whenever we came close enough to any – I would put my finger across my lips to tell you to be quiet, like they could hear our voices and flee –  and cup our palms closed on them. We didn’t want them to die. We would tie ropes around their legs and watch them jump, making creepy sounds, as far as the rope could get them.

Continue reading “Garuka – Please Come Back by Ernest O. Ogunyemi” →

All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Pulling Strings by Tom Sheehan

literallystories2014

He had awakened with the itch on his face, from a lone and long hair floating across one eye and one lip, or was it a cob web, a remnant, a silver runner of aerial flight? It definitely was cob-web thin, a filament, a gossamer streamer, light as thought, but not the thought of a spider like the one he had seen eye to eye above his camp bed as a kid. That one hung on such a silken, thin, lone strand that almost wasn’t there. He had always believed he had smashed that black-eyed spider into space with the magazine he had been reading earlier.

Continue reading “Pulling Strings by Tom Sheehan” →

All Stories, General Fiction

Prisoners By Chad Plunk

literallystories2014

The German was nineteen or twenty and had bright blue eyes. He’d taken some grenade shrapnel in the stomach and he kept moaning, rolling around like it was the end of the world. It wasn’t a mortal wound, or even a bad one. Just bloody. The German spoke some English and between moans he kept looking at one or the other of the Americans.

Continue reading “Prisoners By Chad Plunk” →

All Stories, General Fiction

The Garbage Man by Rachael Peralez

literallystories2014

The note reads:

‘Dear Garbage man, Please make sure you get ALL the trash out of the can.

Thanks! The Brewsters’

I stand there just holding the damp piece of paper. The A-L-L scrawled in all capital letters and underlined. The exclamation mark after the ‘Thanks.’  I look over at the white house nestled among the pruned Spanish oaks and ball the note up. The bathwater rain makes rivulets of space between the white maggots humping up my arms as I hoist the cans in the back of the truck. They feel muscular and clean inching their way under the cuffs of my gloves. My back burns, and the smell of cat urine puffs out of a half-tied bag as it smacks the bottom of the compactor.  I grind my teeth and think about how Mrs. Brewster’s wrists must be so silky and warm. About how her perfume would just touch the air around my nostrils as I bit into her heavy breast. A drop of my sweat would fall in the deep divot between her collar bones and how she would moan about how strong I am. How powerful my arms are.  I pound the side of the truck and give my driver the thumbs up. Next house.

Continue reading “The Garbage Man by Rachael Peralez” →

All Stories, General Fiction

The Town Without Butter by Tom Sheehan

literallystories2014

It happened in the town that had no butter, a town where little popcorn was sold and nearly every person was thin. Most people living there liked to run. On a snappy dawn some of them ran marathon distances without breaking a sweat, climbing often into the lower ranges of the Smokies. If butter was in town, the butter packers brought it, illegally.

Continue reading “The Town Without Butter by Tom Sheehan” →

All Stories, General Fiction

The Charm of a Razor by Joshua Scofield

literallystories2014

He often told his wife about his twenty-first birthday. He and his father had sat under a bright red canopy on a dark, starless night. They were at some nameless Chinese restaurant in one of the metropolitan corners of Atlanta, just a few blocks south of Terminal Parkway, where commercial airplanes stitched long blinking lines across the sky. A half block away, he remembered, a street cleaner inched across the asphalt, brushes spinning in a lopsided, broken rhythm.

Continue reading “The Charm of a Razor by Joshua Scofield” →