Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

(Sleep)Walking London by Akio Lê

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For two months of Summer, I spent my midnights wandering the streets of London with a sleepwalking girl. It wasn’t voluntary, to be honest. I was on my way home one night after my shift as a street cleaner: the pavement was empty of pedestrians, roads empty of cars; the night shift staff stirred the dim lighting of the dining rooms with their exhausted silhouettes; tumbleweeds of Gregg’s wrappers flew past my peripheral; pigeons strolled mindlessly over the large tiles of Trafalgar Square pecking for bits of croissant between the cracks; rats drunk on Aperol spritz bin-hopped in a chorus of squeaks; waltzing flies cast flecks of shadows beneath a streetlamp.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Boots and Cats by John Tregoning

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The music thumped up the stairs towards him in the queue. I’m way too old for this he thought, edging forwards. Much had changed since last time he had been to a night club; more remained the same. Ticket checked on his phone, driver’s license scanned. Why? No one in their right mind could possibly think he was 18, his age telling in the wrinkles on his face, the receding, greying hair, the middle-aged spread. But also in invisible ways: twinges, aches, sadness.

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All Stories, General Fiction

 The Crying Story by T. A. Young

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Boo-hoo, as we say in Staten Island, New York City, New York.

Ornella Splice is crying. She sobs and wails and moans and heaves with the weight of her sadness. She is soaked in her tears. There are traces – bubbles – of saliva in the corners of her mouth. She tries to utter words, but she is incoherent: all she seems to say is, “mwah mwah mwah,” or the subtle variant, “mwaw, mwaw, mwaw.” The former is reminiscent of the Staten Island  dialect; the latter more common in the midwest. The subtle alteration in endings moving west is attributed by D. M. Pollard to the shift from crop farming to cattle herding during the middle and late seventeenth century. Pollard does note that Staten Island, itself, had no agriculture to speak of, shifting inexplicably from a foraging culture to a labour-union-kickback-and-freeloader-dependant culture, probably explained by the reluctance to become literate.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Prayers Do Not Always Reach the One Prayed To Geraint Jonathan

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Many a truer word was said, certainly, but, as unpalatable truths go, none less welcome. Or put another way: You prayed for it: You got it. Took no notice of the world’s oldest adage. Be careful what you. Etcetera.  Wishing’s one thing, praying’s quite another. You went for the latter. The result is your current predicament. Circumstances cannot be reversed, annoying as that is. No telling how a prayer turns out; most are lost in the void. But the consistency of your desperation accounted for something, I suppose. You were out of sorts. The car was due its MOT. The sheer Jimmy Dean of it all. Similar stretch of road, late afternoon, early autumn. You’d not been drinking, you were simply in a foul mood. The sun was in your face and you’d forgotten your shades. How often over the years had you forgotten your shades? Approximately never. Shades and you went back a long way. Just as you and juiced up transit vans went back a long way. Back in fact to those days with Mariella, dreams on your sleeves the pair of you, worlds to conquer, the glitz of showtime sure to follow. How did it go, that repartee? One of you’d say ‘See you at the movies’, the other would reply ‘Third row from the back’, both of you knowing of course that neither of you was destined to be a lowly pair of eyes looking up from the dark. That was for the punters. You’d be among those gazed at, ten times your own size, Mariella the Bonnie to your Clyde, you the Abelard to her Heloise. And Mariella seven years dead and you getting by on the doorman gig. What Mariella would have done with Lady Day in your Billie’s Lonely Sunday is for you to imagine, others to ignore or deride or otherwise befoul. How long had you longed to see your name in print, see your own eyes looking up at you from the glossies? Long time, and as I say consistency of desperation does have its currency – especially when coupled with undimmed rage or greatness unrecognized, a state of misery as fresh today as it was back in the sepia. You were not feeling well, and the acid-reflux was back. There’d been no call from your brother, and there’d been words the night before between you and the landlord, his tone ever more peremptory, yours a notch or two up from humble but soon plummeting to the reedily apologetic. Where was the man you were meant to be? There’s six-foot of you. When was it, do you think, you blinked?  A lot of bridge gone under the water. The day marked X. The glory that was yesterday, how small misery would be welcome. You had things, you know ‘things’, on your mind. What comes, be it good or ill, does so in battalions, that old fangle. The car was having problems. There was your tooth, and the clove oil it was taking to numb it. You’ll’ve heard such things are sent us. You took the highway smiling. I’ve seen that smile, the one that says fuck with me at your peril. You don’t mean it of course but not meaning it is not enough. And so, into view came Stupid Person Number One who failed to indicate before switching lanes. Soon enough Stupid Person Number Two slowed to a crawl and seconds later Stupid Person Number Three, a motorcyclist, gave you the finger. Persons, eh? The likes you’d have once called ‘worldlings’. Poor them. Poor you.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Indian Summer by Mike Lee

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There was a sense of peace, anticipation, and of place when I arrived at the Krispy Kremes that cool October morning; autumn leaves turning and the sun bright over the roofs of Asheville and the surrounding mountains. It was a Friday, before school, and coffee and glazed donuts beckoned while waiting for Mariah, my girlfriend, and walking on to the bus stop. Suppressed an urge to talk her into skipping school; we had fifth-period English together, and it was our chance to read our story assignments.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction, Short Fiction, Writers Reading, Writing

Dirty Glass by Hugh Cron – Adult Content

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“Dirty glass…Fuck!”

…The first time that Martin had really focused on a dirty glass was decades back, in another one of his lifetimes. He’d had a few lifetimes and each had caused him a different level of grief.

Martin thought back to that morning at 8.00am, when he had been told that he had to check on a property. He found that depressing, fuck all was said about checking on the resident, no, he had to check on the property.

He pulled up beside the row of Maisonettes and sighed as he saw that the main entrance door was hanging off its hinges. He headed into the building. It always made him laugh that this was a building that you had to go inside, to go upstairs, to then go outside to get to the front door. He rattled the door. He could hear some mumbling and drunken giggles, “I hope that’s a lovely lady with nice tits!!”

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Poem That Changed His Life by Michael Bloor

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I was reading James Fenton’s ‘Selected Poems’* and was very taken by one called ‘The Skip,’ in which the poet decides to take his life and throw it in a builder’s skip, parked outside the next-door neighbours’ house. Then he goes down to the pub. And coming back home, half-pissed, he’s surprised to see that his life was no longer there – some bugger had nicked it. The next morning he wakes up, checks, and sees that there is in fact a life lying in the skip, but it’s not his: someone must’ve spotted the poet’s old life lying in there and decided to swop. So the poet takes in the other life, sodden from last night’s rain, dries it on the stove and finds it fits him like a glove.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Bomb Defuser Barbie by Calla Gold

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The rainbow-colored, balloon-patterned gift-wrapped box sat like an invitation atop the cement stoop. The ticking sound could be heard from the sidewalk. Barbie spied the thin wire paralleling the red ribbon, rising into the frothy, rosette bow on top. Barbie’s little plastic hand followed the wire to a fold in the paper, eased the wrapping open, sawed with care through the ribbon, and cut away the paper to reveal an edge-dinged box proclaiming the presence of a Spirograph Drawing Set. I really wanted one of those.

Barbie had spent enough time in the toy store to know the weight was all wrong. It was too heavy. She fearlessly sawed a hole into the side of the box, revealing wires, a wind-up alarm clock, and a small brick of tan, clay-like material. Enough to blow the whole city block sky high. With her steady fingers, she cut the green wires and, finally, the red wire to the detonator. She then flopped back into a sitting position and told me, “That was close.”

That was the first story I told Dolores, but you haven’t met her yet.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Hell by Michael Smith

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Today’s one of those team-building exercises, you know the sort. Sales are down, management wants to raise morale (and hence production (and hence profits)), so we’re all here to waste a day, listening to a team of consultants (hired at great expense, no doubt) impart some modern thinking upon us, “injecting cutting edge vitality”, I think they said.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Call of the Bacchante by Matias Travieso-Diaz

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No retreat offers someone more quiet and relaxation than that into his own mind, especially if he can dip into thoughts there which put him at immediate and complete ease.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

She was foaming at the mouth. Her eyes dilated rolled.
Her mind was gone–possessed by Bacchus– she could not hear her son.

Euripides, The Bacchae

Marcus sat alone, cross-legged, in the quiet of his studio, having dimmed all lights. He sought to set his mind at rest by deeply inhaling and exhaling; as errant thoughts floated into his mind, he considered each one for a moment and dismissed it.

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