His voice was exceedingly obnoxious.
Annoying.
Incessant.
“We’ll be seeking damages for all compensable losses suffered, of course. This Judge is a real prick, though.”
A Quiet Place by Adam Kluger
Category: General Fiction
Chicagogh by Dave Louden
You can rent Van Gogh’s bedroom on Air BnB for ten dollars a night. We were on the final leg of our cross-country expedition when we ran into Chicago and out of money. When we left Venice West we were intertwined in one-another firmer than the Treaty Oak’s roots, somewhere around Lincoln Nebraska we suffered our own poisoning. By the windy city it was more than just a cold shoulder. We checked our pockets. Seventy-two dollars in change and we still needed to get to New York where our flights home were waiting on us.
Skipping by Hugh Cron
The two of them laughed as they skipped into the woods.
“You are rubbish!”
“I know sweet cheeks, my coordination is terrible.”
“It’s step forward, pause, step forward other foot, pause, step forward only quickly. Sing ‘Mary Mary, Quite Contrary…And You’ll get it.”
He tried.
They both bent over laughing.
Sweet Boy by Matthew Lyons – Adult Content
When they can’t ignore the stink coming from his room anymore, Mom and Dad break the lock on Jeff’s door and go in, prepared, they think, for whatever happens next. It’s not like they don’t have an idea anyway, they still do all his laundry. There’s not a sock in his hamper that isn’t stiff and crusty and yellowed. Mom doesn’t even gag about it anymore it happens so much, she just makes sure to wear latex gloves when she does the whites.
The only thing that doesn’t make sense is why they always smell like sugar.
Continue reading “Sweet Boy by Matthew Lyons – Adult Content”
Thirteen by Rebecca Young
Your first kiss wants to play make-believe. You be the wife and I’ll be the husband, he says during recess. You’re in 3rd grade and love make-believe. He kisses you on the cheek and asks what’s for dinner. You will be whoever he wants you to be.
A Hero of Sorts by Martyn Clayton
There’d be silence in the seconds before the explosion. Even the crash and roar, the shifting of the sand and silt above would momentarily cease. Then you’d sit there crouched in the dark wondering what had happened to your breath. You’d count it in as somewhere ahead there’d be the movement of a body in scurrying retreat.
Deceptive by James Hanna
Those who say the truth will set you free have probably never been polygraphed. I had the experience in my early thirties during a campaign of self-renewal, leading inevitably to the West Coast. After spending a decade as a counselor at the Indiana Penal Farm, a provincial Midwest prison, I felt like a bastard at a family reunion. Was it because I built on my education instead of boozing with good ol’ boy guards? I had attended a nearby state university under a blind assumption: the patented belief that a master’s degree would open the door to promotions. Sadly, the reverse proved true. Organizations will stigmatize overachievers as surely as they flag the fuckups. (If you doubt this, watch any season of Survivor.) And so I was deemed overqualified when I faced the promotion boards. One of the inmates summed it up well when I told him I was leaving. “Sounds like a plan,” he said. “Do it soon. You don’t need to be hanging around Podunk, Indiana.”
A Start by David Henson
“Here. We’ve got to get some sleep.” Bob hands his wife a pill and takes one himself.
Elaine pretends to put it in her mouth.
Under Cypresses by Karen Shepherd
With a beard the color of November clouds, the man came in most mornings at seven o’clock sharp when the gas station’s convenience store opened. The electric door chime sounded and he shuffled through in his tufty shoes, schlepping his plastic bag bounteous with empty bottles. The smells of earth, sweat and cypress clung to him.
Don’t Look Back by Frederick K Foote
I’m deep in the blues, down in the Bottom, bottom of the Bucket of Blood, the bottoms of beer bottles, consumed by rotgut, roiled by raw, ripping, crosscut blues.
A heavy left-handed boogie on the piano.
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