Zayde died last Saturday. This afternoon we gathered to attend a service over a plain pine coffin and to remember him over cold cuts on rye. I remembered my grandfather chiefly as a madman.
“He died happy,” said my mother. “That’s all that matters.”
Continue reading “The Man Who Lost Everything by Erica Verillo”
He hadn’t meant to do it. As his muscles strained against their tendons, sweat pouring from his brow, reality blurred like the trees standing behind rain-covered windows. Adrenaline coursed though his veins, filled his mouth with a metallic taste- He wondered if she’d tasted it too, in those few brief moments of chaos.
He hadn’t meant to do it. Really. But, in the moment, it was the only choice he had.
~
Jason Mattis was old. Not in the physical sense — though a few gray hairs had begun to work their way into his shadow of a beard — but in what he’d experienced over his 26 years of life. Growing up, Jason had watched his mother deteriorate in a mess of tubes and needles and medication, the whirring machines sucking the life from her as fuel for their colorful blinking lights. Sunken eyes, sagging skin, and the shadowy shapes of bones resting just beneath the surface. Smaller and smaller upon that white bed, until one day, she simply wasn’t there anymore.
In a large detached house surrounded by high privet hedges at the foot of a low hill range there is a room filled with books. Some of them date from the 19th century. There are books about geology and Greek mythology, there are books about the flora and fauna of far off lands. There are books about subjects that no longer exist. Phrenology, mediumship, gruesome racial theories. There are books whose pages have crumbled to dust. There are books that have not been looked at since the day they were pushed into place on the high shelves that surround the walls.
No shit, there I was watering my flowers. Orchestration or habit bent on outcomes, I do it daily, making sure I can get back from all my Elsewheres in time to do so before the day is gone with the moon. I am faithful to that compulsion, and when this chick comes along, made nice in a certain way, yet points out dismal little failures in the front garden or the narrow plot beside the driveway to an occasional walking companion, it pisses me off no end. I’ve heard her through an open window say things like, “Wouldn’t you think someone would know better than to plant the short ones in the back.” Or, “Don’t you agree that his color scheme is a bit off base? Needs a little more imagination?” Or, like one totally elliptical occasion when she said, “Who does he thinks likes so much orange?”
Continue reading “Notes Pinned on a Returnable Container by Tom Sheehan”
…It was the beginning of a new term. There was a volatile mix of the noisy, frantic new starts, in amongst the typical surly teenagers. A man stood staring at his new charges. If you didn’t know otherwise you‘d never have taken him for a teacher, he looked like a yeti. He eyed them up and down and tried to spot the ‘Wee fudds.’ He had tolerance and intolerance in compassion with sarcasm. There was also a mix of shyness with confidence but this would never be shown to the kids. His intelligence was well-known amongst his work-mates and friends. He kept it hidden though, his brains were covert. He was a person of opposites. He was by no means atypical, more unique.
Continue reading “United Forever by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
I’ll have to tell the story because I’m the one most at fault here. I should have known better, I’m the new generation type. Even on the way home from the cemetery, going back to the house with my mother, my two younger brothers and my sister, it was me who should have known better. Lots of things should have tipped me off; instead of being bigger, having more room with a body gone from it, the house appeared smaller, at least to me. It felt smaller, smelled smaller, corners were tighter, the air cooler. I swore, after spending my first twenty-two years in it, it didn’t have its hand out for me, “Not a touch in the tally,” as my father used to say about things found useless, unproductive, too much emptiness to expend much-courted energy on.
Continue reading “Evan Stalworth’s Wealth of Words by Tom Sheehan”
I look at my scars and I know why I am the way that I am. You stood by me more than you ever should and I will always love you for giving me that chance. I blew it. Lifting my hands was the biggest mistake of my life and I am eternally sorry. I am glad that you left and are out of harm’s way. You are out of my way. The medication I am on I am not proud of. The therapy sessions that I have been ordered to take don’t help. I know why I am the way I am. I know that I can’t handle the things that I saw. I have night terrors. I don’t understand why I can’t look at the wounds as I would an operation scar and only be thankful that I am still here. The mark on my neck especially scares me. I am paranoid. Hateful. I am terrified. I wish I could resent as that would be a more understandable thought but I can’t. I don’t know how to focus anymore. I only feel anger and terror and hate. I can’t control any emotion and more importantly, I can’t focus my hate on who deserves it. I am dangerous and I am only too aware what I am capable of. I look at the world as a rabid dog. Head down, eyes up and then I snap.
For a pure moment trucker Gene Denport had felt above it all, above dawn at its tatters, above the voice coming at him from day’s edge. King of the throne he was, king of the hill, the road having slammed under him all night long. The 455 horses loose in the Volvo 670’s D-13 truck engine sounded their endless music, hummed under his seat bottom, talked lightly to his wrists; the way a woman might have it, he’d often thought, when the road took the edge off his mind. (Controlled rampage, the voice had said long before he used to think about owning a rig like this Volvo, Earth-mover, star-hauler, space traveler. Piling the superlatives on top of each other would be done at endless ease.)
House-big, highly modified for cruising, like a humdinger Lincoln Town Car in a sense, the Volvo 670 went over the crown of the hill.
He froze on the edge of the seat.
Continue reading “Long Haul Driver by Tom Sheehan – Adult Content”
He’d burned the titles of his hit songs into the planks that formed the stall where he kept his favorite horse, a high-stepping Paso Fino of no particular value beyond the curiosity of its unusual four-gaited step. A short length of pine tacked on the half-door of the stall bore the horse’s name in brass letters, Dominus.
Colin looked about. The stalls and tack seemed unfamiliar. He took a deep breath and smelled sweet feed and hay mixed with the sharper scents of leather and manure.
“What the hell?”
A horse whinnied somewhere across the corral and Dominus stirred.
I stop explaining aloud to my children that I am not lonely.
I used to tell them these things as if they would understand automatically. I’m not lonely when I lie down at night and fall asleep with five fluffy pillows surrounding my head. Or when I wake up, make my way to the kitchen—the red and white tile floor cold under my feet—and stare out across the green lawn and watch the birds eat from the feeder and sing into the morning light. Even when I eat almost every meal alone, I do not yearn for someone to sit beside me. Instead, I enjoy my breakfast, lunch and dinner outside on the patio and throw the remains of my meals in the lawn and look forward to watching the deer find the hidden treasures.
I give my children the simple answer now when they ponder and poke. “You know what the doctors said. I should spend this time how I want and that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
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