Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

The Attic Room by Cris Aboobaker

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In the dim twilight of Charlie’s bar an old man sat at the counter muttering about the weather. Outside, night winds blew up from the sea, salving the day’s heat still rising from baked pavements. It was too hot the old man said, it was too dry; his bones ached, his bowels didn’t move; John, the barman nodded, wiping glasses with a small towel. The barking laughs of other regulars, the clinking of the pool table, the air conditioner’s hum and Bob Montgomery’s measured voice on the TV lamenting another Red Sox loss mixed with the old man’s mutters.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

Bangkok, If You’re Listening by Prin Sairungsri

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I wake up face-down on cold vinyl tile, my sweaty cheek glued to the gray-specked floor. My mouth tastes like someone juiced a cigarette, poured it into a rotten durian, and forced it all down my throat. For a second, I think I’ve died in a stranger’s apartment. Then I see my crusty Jordan 1’s stuck on the ceiling fan.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction

I Don’t Like to Complain by Russell Dupont

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I don’t like to complain.

When you live in a neighborhood, side-by-side with other home owners, there’s a little give-and-take that has to go on. On one side of us there’s the Cummings. The Cummings are in their fifties and almost every Sunday they have a little family barbecue, their two sons and their families come over and the kids, they’re still kids, and they make a little noise but Fred Cummings is a good guy and I don’t mind the smoke from his grill because what he’s cooking usually smells good. By seven o’clock, they’re long gone.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Amelia in Waiting by Leila Allison

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The cataract sky saw not, yet watched; the wind moved not, yet listened; God spoke not, yet instructed. The day simply was and would be until the last mind stopped thinking about it. A low slung blotch of scuzzy radiance, which Amy assumed was the sun, slouched west within the ashes.

Amy gazed out the living room window. Only a double thickness of glass lay between her lungs and the poisons of an imagined alien atmosphere

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All Stories, General Fiction

What is Offered by Chris Klassen

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When the storms end and the first rays of the sun finally penetrate through and around the dark clouds and the temperatures rise, that means new potential has returned.  For the last while, it has been impossible to really do anything other than exhaust existing provisions and rest and stay as warm and dry as reality allowed, and usually that meant not so warm and only moderately dry, but that didn’t mean it was bad because it wasn’t.  It was fine.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Wrong Road by Cris Aboobaker

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The train rattled through the trench of the tracks, rocking Bill and Lon like children on a carnival ride. With each stop, the Christmas crowd leaked away, clusters of homes seen out the windows dwindled to an isolated few until they were flying past banks of leafless trees and brown fields fissured by frozen marshes, their view widening to the glow of the evening skyline.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

Savage by Henry Edwards

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He finds it beneath the firewood, stashed amongst hickory and maple, wrapped in linen cloth and frayed pages of a Daily Express; by its side, ammunition.
It is long and unwieldy. Rowan has never held a rifle before. He examines its walnut stock, a Savage Model 110, rubs his palm along the shaft and looks around.  As far as he knows, no-one has come to his grandfather’s farm in weeks but the item’s sheer menace beckons caution. Swallows swoop and warble, eyeing his catch, tending their precious nests in the rafters.
Does it work?  
He turns it in his hands, holds it up, takes aim.
Is it loaded?
He has no idea how to use it. He googles Savage 110, allocates pieces and elements, slings the leather strap over his shoulder and walks to the far end of the barn. The swallows look on in silence. Rowan wonders what he looks like: stupid, no doubt. Yet he doesn’t feel stupid.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Ascension by Nigel Pugh

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Brutal, late May. Wet blankets of hot weather, suffocating. When the midday heat receded, Thomas nixed the novellas (Mattie’s legacy), filled a tall glass with seltzer and ice, and padded into the yard. He sprayed the concrete and his chair, sat on the damp fabric facing east toward the fishtail palm and the privacy fence, looking up at the eaves of the cottages the far side of the street. Old Florida. Wood and stucco. Termites and social security checks. Not yet gentrified.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 601: The Judge Steps In (It)

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My great great great great great grand daughter, Miss Allison, usually tends to the bi-weekly festivities at Literally Stories, but her continuous state of despair has created a temporary state of mental paralysis brought on by the conspicuous consumption of apple jack on an empty stomach, heart and soul. Therefore she beseeched Yours Truly, Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender Spirit, to fill in for her this bi-week.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Specificity by Ryan Scribner

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As I pulled into an almost vacant lot in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the cars of the few Saturday patrons and library staff parked, I noticed a pale woman wearing a cream-colored dress, its lace browned faintly around the cuffs. Her face possessed the pale stillness of old photographs. Her eyes shifted strangely, as if several people were considering me from behind them at once.

“Good morning,” I said to her.

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