The city gets stranger the farther Randy goes and he wears a scowl to ward off potential hostilities. The mood on the street is like a spreading bruise and the faces of passing strangers bear the strains of dark struggles. He walks beneath a sullen haze that roughly complements the worn skin of the old apartment blocks. The nation’s malaise seems to have settled on everything like a fine dust.
Continue reading “One Way Street by Chris Carrel”
We’d always egg one another on, seeing who’d be first to set her off. Every kid I knew did it. It was just a game. Her mind had long gone. She didn’t remember that it’d been done before. Each time she was teased was like the first. We’d wind her up and the payoff was one of her screams. Major horror screams! And then we’d leg it, pissing ourselves laughing! Like I say: just a game.
Continue reading “Bully Boys and Navvy Boots by Pam Knapp”
Night falls black and starless. His eye is drawn to the cemetery. A chill runs through him. Young sees his breath in the porch light. He takes the air into account—the change. Things will have to be shut off soon and covered, other things will have to be turned on. He hears footsteps and the slamming of cabinet doors. Young thinks, are those snowflakes? I hope not. Trinity’s rusty black Chevy Cavalier has the trunk lid standing open.
Continue reading “Girl on a Trampoline by Christopher Ananias”
Sam doesn’t like sunsets. Sunsets for Sam are a daily reminder that death is just over the horizon. Sunrises aren’t much better for Sam either because they just start the clock running again, marking time until the next sunset. Even now, as he stands outside his mother’s house smoking a cigarette while the hospice nurse tends to his dying mother, Sam is unpersuaded by the light of one of those sunsets in which people swear they see Jesus’s outstretched arms in the iridescent rays that beam between clouds. Sam just shakes his head in disgust, then turns and walks inside.
Continue reading “The Weight of Nothing by Kip Knott”
Swordfish laid out in the supermarket, next to tuna steaks and mackerel. Marlin, the guy behind the counter offers, wiping bloody hands on his white jacket. Mussels laid on a bed of samphire. You can almost taste the salt. Call me Ishmael. A wide Sargasso Sea. Wind over waves. Barnacles on the hulls of schooners, where a man could be keelhauled. As it happens, I’m shopping for other things. Breakfast cereal, yoghurt, pineapple, white wine. The list written out on a scrap of cardboard torn from a tissue box. So, yes, move on.
Continue reading “Swordfish by Graham Mort”
After his anxiety attack in the barely cold sea water, Barry walked to the outside European-style tiki bar where a woman with a roiling accent was singing Sinatra, with just a stand-up bass and conga player accompanying her.
Continue reading “Love Handles by Susan DeFelice”
Sometime this spring will mark my fourth anniversary of sharing the weekend wrap duties. It was either in April or May 2021, I think, although I could look it up.
Continue reading “Week 522: Dope Show 2025”
There’s a man in my home.
He’s staring out of the large windows, the ones that I sit by and read my books because they’re the only source of natural light on this side of the apartment. The light from the moon almost gives him a glow, making him look vaguely angelic. It’s almost comedic how ironic that is, considering the fact that he’s broken into my home.
Continue reading “Everyone Dies by Danni Meek”When they brought him home that night, the lid was strewn canted off the wooden lip and jacks and queens ornamented astray around the box like a ring of fire. Someone- I do not remember who- had loaded coal into the fireplace and after some poking it begun to lick its flame at the iron grate. Ma was cold and Paul and Jane huddled around the hearth for they were cold but I suppose not as cold as him. Still, it only felt right to keep him warm.
Continue reading “The Night They Brought Him Home by Jake Bristow”
The four giraffes walked through the city, their metal limbs and their pulleys, gears and crankshafts clanking and whirring as they delicately placed one foot in front of another, and another and another and another.
Continue reading “Four Giraffes by Alex Faulkner”
literally stories 