His wife Millicent had cheated on him and she would pay, but to Everett Harley it was much deeper than being unfaithful; she had constantly touched, with ridicule, what she thought was the most fragile element of his being, poetry; so, he made up his mind that he’d not allow her any pardon for her perils; no rhythm in leniency, no white space in the matter, no alliteration at all, at all.
Continue reading “Hence the Half-way House and the Poet by Tom Sheehan”
Daniel sat clutching a coffee, staring into the blur of humanity. He wasn’t far from his parents’ home and had no need of a rest, he was here to put off the meeting.
He had read somewhere that the guns of HMS Belfast were trained on Watford Gap. He had no idea why, perhaps it symbolised those attempting to escape the capital. Still, he was not attempting an escape, he was heading towards his conflict, though that conflict was an escape of sorts.
Continue reading “The Naming of the Beasts by Matthew Roy Davey”
10:30, Sunday morning, 21 February 1970
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It was one of those little lost lamb spring days that sometimes wander into the dead of a Pacific Northwest winter. The sky was as clear as the devil’s conscience, and the temperature would reach well into the sixties by mid-afternoon. By and by, almost everyone in Charleston would go out to grab a piece of that little lost lamb spring day; for everyone knew it wouldn’t be long until another dreary storm blew in off Philo Bay.
Continue reading “A Condition of Absolute Reality by Leila Allison”
Silence is the color
in a blind man’s eyes
Leo wondered if it was some kind of contest, if it smacked of more than what it seemed. He had heard the poem a hundred times, Chornby always walking around with the book in his shirt pocket or back pocket suddenly reading it to him, again and again, and Leo, the Blind Man of North Saugus, let the words sink in and become part of him, part of his sightless brain. Just like Chornby had become part of him. Chornby’s face he could not picture, nor eyes, nor beard, nor jut of chin, but settled on the imagination of Chornby’s hands and could only do so when he felt his own slim unworked hands, the thin fingers, the soft palms, the frail knuckles, how the fingers wanted to touch a piano but couldn’t, or a woman, but who wants a blind man?
Continue reading “Chornby and Leo the Blind Man by Tom Sheehan”
He was a shit junky, a shit shoplifter and a shit human being.
Those were his words. Nobody else bothered enough to comment.
Then the cloud of confusion left her face. I never felt the same about her afterward. It was as though I was a ghost, she saw and heard me even responded to me, but I seemed nothing more than a passing breeze to her.
You’re alone hurrying by under cloudy night skies.
I’m lost in the shadows on the lips of the fetid alley. I’m feverish, near fainting, fading, fading away. You catch a glimpse of me, spy me, eye me, wonder, imagine me. You race away to lock your doors, check your windows.
In your simple underwear you slip between smooth, clean, cotton sheets and dream me, dream me tall, slender, strong.
Carrie tilts her head on the back of the vinyl seat on Bus 109 and breathes deeply for the first time in two weeks. The collar of her pressed white uniform is smudged with day old makeup and tears. Her shifts at Memorial Hospital are becoming longer and her patience shorter for the everyday cold and flu vaccinations. She lets her head roll until the tip of her nose touches frosted glass. Her eyes flutter open to see a man in his seventies, draped in loose cotton, stare back at her and wave. The man gives a one-toothed grin and turns his back, shielding whatever sits behind his tall frame. She allows her eyelids to become heavy and falls asleep to the soft lull of the bus’s engine as it trucks through Louisville, Kentucky.
She hated her job. All day she read and reworked words that didn’t satisfy, words dry, tasteless, and underripe — words like rectifier and microprocessor and power semiconductor. Their heaviness left paste in her mouth.
Continue reading “The Literal Gourmand — A Fable by Daun Daemon”
“Brisling!” yelled his boss Marquis, “if you don’t get out of the way, I’ll kick your ass for good.” And Marquis, darker but plump himself, wearing an atrocious suit with orange lines in it, smiled that puffy-cheeked grin he’d always use, like it was punctuation itself. I’m the boss and you’re the slob, it said. It was nothing less than a tongue speaking right at Brisling’s ear. Even commas and periods were in place, the exclamation points by the fingers. If there were question marks, he’d know them. He bet he could quote him verbatim, all the ways the boss man moved. All of it was catalogued, scored, filed away in his mind.
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