Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

The First Symptom is Death (Part II) By Leila Allison

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Keeper’s eternal eye opens in the sleeper’s mind, and the two become a selfless one. This doesn’t mean a lack of selfishness–the meaning is literal–no sense of I is present; no sense of Other intrudes. There are no assessing thoughts affected by personal prejudice; nor questions; nor judgements; nor reactions; nor guesswork. Only a pure stream of information passes across the stage of the sleeper’s mental theatre. The players, though strangers, are known to the sleeper, and the recent past returns to its former place in the now.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The First Symptom is Death (Part I) by Leila Allison

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“Attribute neither the magnificent nor the malign to the mysterious mind of a magic god as an excuse to stop thinking about what has happened.”–Czsminoothe, circa 1800 b.c.e.

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“You will remember everything.”–Eternity

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All Stories, General Fiction

At a Loss for Words by Tom Sheehan

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An athletic-looking man, late 30s, tall, long legs spilled at seating but signifying comfort, unmindful of the mass of traffic from all corners of the world marking the Bean Pot City as a current center of international traffic, reads a soft-bound book amid the jet-setting hustle and bustle of Boston’s Logan Airport. Some of the world’s movement flows clearly past his interest in the printed, still word held in hand, taking his mind to another location, another setting, other personalities as alive as those flowing about him, queries, demands, exclamations and greetings in the order of the day.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Boy at the Bus Stop by Nick Sweeney

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The eve of All Souls’ Day, and the dead to be visited, provided with light, the all-weather candles of the graveyard, the living visitors to be catered-for with bread and beer. It all meant shopping, the carrying of things, and of all-weather people, in and out of the darkness brought down by November. The eleventh month announced the onslaught of the winter, a drain on the spirits, a greying of the skin, the miniscule tightening of arteries, the dimming of the vision, the only clear thing in sight the glimmer of the wrongs done and not righted, a time of ghosts.

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All Stories, General Fiction

From One War to Another without Choice by Tom Sheehan

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I’d lost a brother and remember the headlines, newsreels, songs of bond-selling, gas-griping, and movies too true to hate, the settings of World War II. Those days found the whole Earth bent inwards, imploding bombs, bullets, blood, shrieking terrible bird cries in my ears only deepest sleep could lose if it ventured close.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Step by Step by Step by Deva Mari

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 Out there, it was a storm rioting, the type that Marion faced when arriving at the Bates Motel, and I was sitting in this stranger’s freshly vacuumed Mitsubishi with my muddy, turn-out-not-to-be-waterproof hiking boots, him telling me how he hadn’t been home in nearly two decades. That, back there, he had a wife still mourning his death. That his daughter wasn’t the little princess she used to be, but married recently and was pregnant now with two little princesses herself. His voice a warm drone against the rain that was drumming against the Mitsubishi’s metal frame. I was just happy that I was in there, and not stuck at the last lonely gas station, biding my time with overpriced Cheetos and overweight truck drivers.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Callback by Jack Coey

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Willard got a call back. He was surprised, his knees shook, and his voice trembled, but they must have seen something. The only thing he could think of was they must have thought his nervousness was a character choice instead of him. He told Flo about it, and she shook her head. He auditioned in the banquet room at the E.F. Lane Hotel in Keene for Foster and Lewis, two producers from Concord, who were casting a play called I Did It for Love, a three-act comedy around same-sex marriage. The stage manager was named Leon, and he came into the supermarket where Willard worked, and told him about the call back.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Authentic by David Lohrey

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We sat at the desert inn, at the window which afforded a magnificent view onto Monument Valley, awaiting our luncheon orders. She sipped desert mint tea sweetened by hummingbird saliva and I lapped pomegranate wine, a divine concoction of pine sap sweetened by cactus rind and desert rosehips with a drizzle of wild honey, harvested not from the hive but from the beaks of mountain owl.

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