Fred Furk is mowing the grass when all asudden KABOOM! Next thing he knows, he’s spread out on his back clean across the yard. Lucky Girl, his Black Lab, is licking his face, and Doris is standing over him. She’s moving her lips, but he don’t hear a thing. Then it all goes dark again.
Continue reading “The Lightning King and Lucky Girl by David Henson”
This story was inspired by Rosa Amelia Zilkie
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My friend Leonard Gerbrandt was wiry and tall for his age and he had big dimples and a giant Adam’s apple. His mom worked for my parents at our little bakery and she was an elegant beauty reminiscent of the movie star, Hedy Lamarr. She was dark haired and slender with high, rouged cheekbones and large brown eyes. I was just a little kid, but I felt weak when she was near; the scent of her perfume confusing me through a kind of permeating intoxication, although I would never reveal it. Especially to Lenny, who was as tough and unyielding as a Manitoba March storm.
The Gerbrandts were made of stern stuff. Lenny’s older brother was gaunt and menacing – his unblinking stare was like a violent shove. Their dad was an ex-cop. Mr Gerbrandt had been a good baseball player and was a big rugged guy, like a young Robert Mitchum. Mitchum married Lamarr and they begat sons and daughters, including Lenny, who, in later years, taught me how to roll a corn silk cigarette and do a catwalk on my bike. Lenny’s dad was the town cop but then joined the army and when he came back, he was not the same anymore. He had run out of whatever it was that made him Robert Mitchum, the big raw-boned cop who got Hedy Lamarr. Instead, he sat alone in the Hartplatz men-only beer parlour and got quietly loaded every day.
Her name was Aika and Christian had been obsessed with her the moment she transferred to Willowbrook High. In the first week, he managed to hear every hint and rumour there was to know: her second name was Hisama, people were sure she’d moved straight from Japan, and she hadn’t spoken a word to anyone. In the beginning, students thought maybe Aika wasn’t great with English, but those looking to cheat in class saw she wrote fluently. In fact, she appeared to be some form of prodigy, always having the correct answers. During lunch hours Aika spent her time in the library with her head ducked down over a Japanese language novel, and she made a point of being in the classroom before anybody else. Her physical appearance only served to magnify these oddities; her skin was pale, and her long hair hung down to her waist. Kids took to calling her Samara like the girl from that creepy horror film, The Ring. Except never to her face. Strangely, in a school notorious for its bullies, Aika maintained a wall around herself.
Hopeless, my father said, taking another bite out of the meatball sandwich Mom had made him.
What is? I asked him.
You. He put the food down. You’ll say whatever garbage comes to mind, regardless of who’s around, won’t you? To get a cheap laugh. You’ve got no filter between your brain and your big mouth.
“You could eat off her floor,” Miriam often said in a half envious way, if Dora was present, and in a half mocking way when she was not. “I drove her home that day when her car wouldn’t start and honest to God, you’d think that floor had never been stepped on. I mean, it was like a mirror it was so shiny!” But what Miriam and her coworkers did not know was that Dora actually did eat off her floor.
The truth is I’m still haunted by them, even though it’s been months since they left the Royal Bargains Dollar Store.
Continue reading “This Land of Milk and Honey by Mary J. Breen “
Cliff’s grandfather built Hook Run Farm on forty-two acres thirty miles east of the city, a half-hour’s easy drive most days. Now, when dirty winds shifted at night to flee the west, Cliff lay beneath beige-gray sheets and sniffed a once forgotten childhood memory: a decaying mouse he’d found inside a discarded soda pop bottle. Borne atop the newly bloating stink of Grandpa’s barn and paddocks, this recollected scent visited every evening. Rich, sweet, corrupt, ageless.
Continue reading “The Grave Digger’s Lemonade by Michael Grant Smith”
She knew why he hung himself.
Holly had just returned home when she heard her her mother’s screams. She ran upstairs and into her brother’s room.
Long before the birth of God, the Torqwamni People crossed the land bridge that connected Asia to North America and glacier-surfed south to the Puget Sound Region. They eventually settled in an area known today as Philo Bay, which became home to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS) and its attending city of Charleston, Washington, toward the end of the nineteenth-century.
I wish my older self could go back and speak to me as a kid. Don’t we all? What to say though? I suppose some people would think about what wisdom and advice they could pass on. How many would be able to tell about specific people or situations to avoid? This would all make their younger self happier and more comfortable. A warming hug from a ‘Drop Dead Fred’ scene.
Continue reading “Leo Sayre And Librium by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
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