Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

There is a Forest Here by dm gillis

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There is only one way to satisfy those who want you sober, and that is by walking away from the comfort of alcohol, and into a room of uncushioned, dark-hearted truths, an act that defies all layers of logical self-defense.

Virginia Quipp had just entered that room, leaving behind the vodka, and the splendid but unwholesome hush of 4 a.m. It was her second day in that room. Her hands didn’t shake and her nausea was only slight, but at eight in the evening, she sat at her desk facing another night of hateful abstinence. What was it about sobriety that zealots found so alluring?

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All Stories, General Fiction

Paperback Summer by Embe Charpentier

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A reputable librarian knows how to tell a story. My eleven year-old grandniece, reader extraordinaire, inquires about my days as Cabbagetown’s librarian. Our rockers creak on the covered porch, a steady rain patters all about us. “Best story you got, Auntie Claire. And I better not be able to see the end comin’.”

I sip my sweet tea. She leans toward me as I begin. “This story is true, more or less.”

1980

Reading success; the number one predictor of a successful future. The research said children who chose books read more. Yet every summer, I rarely saw a child more than once or twice.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour

Overthinking by Hugh Cron – Adult Content

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“Well as big Rod once sang, ‘Tonight’s The Night!”

“It’s tomorrow.”

“I know but the joke wouldn’t work! So tonight is the last night of you being alone. I think that was a Heart song. Did you like the one about her picking up a guy for a shag cause her hubby was a jaffa? There is a shit line in it about planting a tree!”

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction, Story of the Week

Table for Four by Louis Hunter

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‘A judge tells a condemned man he’s going to hang next week, but he won’t know when until the hangman comes a-knockin’. The judge only says one thing, that it’ll be a surprise.’ The man with dark rimmed spectacles pauses to smoke, his hair is black and slick with Brylcreem.

‘So, when he’s locked up and waiting to be hung, this guy thinks to himself: “This shit ain’t fair, they have to tell me when I’m going to die. I’ve got rights.” So he decides to work it out. He figures if hasn’t been hung by Thursday, he can’t be killed on Friday because it wouldn’t be a surprise, he’d know it was coming.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Counselor by Tobias Haglund

Tobias Haglund

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I walk down the three steps, step out onto the sidewalk outside her house and lean my head back to the sky. Raindrops land on my face, neither warm nor cold. No breezes, but I hear the wind in the leaves on the trees along the avenue. Few people are up, light from maybe one or two windows. The street lamps light my way down the avenue. The asphalt is wet, which gives the city a fresh smell of concrete and cars. I like the smell of both; cars and concrete. It must have rained harder an hour ago. Streams run along the sidewalk picking up dirt in a slow pace and pouring it down the sewer.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Driving on the Sausage Run by Tom Sheehan

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(Une tranche de vie, inbound)

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This morning D’Espirito “Dez” Carmine knew that one of his passengers was in trouble.
Dez shifted gears of the twelve-seat bus as he came out of Revere onto the highway north, his eyes, as ever, studying the dozen passengers on their way to work, determining a snarl, a scowl or grimace, as a straight-out give-away. Oh, they were splendid facial characters, make-up aficionados, the mostly imperturbable cast for his play-going. Each one of them he knew almost intimately, their habits, likes and dislikes, their temperaments; how they showed impatience or worry. The lip biters were evident and the knee tappers, the finger squeezers and the puckered, silent whistlers. Who slept around, who was prone to wander come of an evening after work, he knew. Evidence of it came from eye flight or hair disarrangement, an early exhaustion showing itself off or a head yet rolling in a kind of rhythm. The morning body electric, he heard a voice say in the back of his head.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour, Story of the Week

Pow Wow Travels by Darlene P. Campos

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“This truck is so old, Chief Sitting Bull drove it to his senior prom,” I said to Larry Kicking Bird as he got onto Highway 18.

“Quit your bad mouthin’ on my truck, James Eagle. How on earth do I get to Sioux Plains from here?” Larry asked.

“Easy, easy. Sioux Plains is pretty close to where Sitting Bull grew up. Put your truck on cruise control and it’ll remember where Sitting Bull’s senior prom was.” Larry sped up to about 80 miles an hour, but not long after, a cop tailed us.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour

A Miracle on Granville Street by dm gillis

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It was said that the Grove Café was so cheap that the Health Department had to bring its own cockroaches. It occupied an abandoned Bank of BC storefront on Denman Street in the west end of Vancouver, a mixed neighbourhood of the snotty middle class and the grubby poor. The café is gone now. The lease ran out, the landlord raised the rent and the Grove ceased to exist. The storefront sits empty now, and though he’d never admit it, the greedy landlord laments the loss.

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All Stories, General Fiction

River Water Larceny by Tom Sheehan

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English Wells fought the Pumquich River for forty years, moving his will ever by degrees at it. “By God, Miriam,” he often said to his wife, “I’ll go at it until I drop, most likely. What you work for, you get. You get what you work for.” English, lacking funds or worldly promise, wanted to steal more land from this side of the river, to push his small estate out over the river’s run, to claim energy’s due.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Romance

Still Working by Tobias Haglund

Tobias Haglund

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December sweeps her dead hand around my throat. My capuche swooshes open and I come to life in the morning hour rush. A beggar scratches the furrows between the cobblestones outside the metro station. When I get close to him, the automatic doors open and the warm breath of the subway hits me. He looks up at me, then back down again to the cobblestones.

I walk out on to the escalator, a boy runs past me, then a girl, then another boy. The latter boy shoves the girl when he rushes by her, down the escalator. She yells, but keeps going. Yesterday the fungus to the right was green, but today it’s covered in white foam.

The subway train comes in and I get on. It’s full, so I stand. I can always tell which state the country is in by looking at the adverts. Education, insurances, job seminars and cheap groceries. I’m reminded of what the prime minister said; the lowest unemployment rate in Europe by 2020.

Promises aren’t worth much to the poor. That’s why the adverts look the way they do, and why the beggar scratches the furrows of the cobblestone.

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