You’re wondering about that? That old jar, yeah, that’s somethin’ I got years ago…
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Category: General Fiction
Personal Growth by Ben Fitton
The hole was definitely growing.
Jonty could tell, having just woken from a nap, face tingling with grass imprints and a half-crushed flailing ladybird stuck on his eyelashes, to find the hole bigger and nearer.
Jonty was seen as a shabby, acceptable kind of aristo who loitered in gardens on dewy mornings, drunk or whimsical, misquoting Homer and asking for a crustless sandwich while he sat, as squat as a stone rounded by a forgiving sea, marvelling at the stains on his tie.
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Ghost by Margaret Wells
Text 9:40 pm “It’s not the same without you [shrug emoji].”
Text 9:41 pm, Spotify link, “Tu Orgullo” [Your pride]
Text 9:42 pm, Spotify link, “Estoy Aquí” [I’m here]
Part of me wanted to type, are you fucking kidding me, after four years, still with this bullshit? What part of “we’re divorced” is not resonating with you? The other half of me knew that there was no possible way to reply. Every reply would be the wrong reply. To respond to the substance—really, my pride was the problem, you cheating bastard?—would be to invite more back and forth. (That our split was all about my pride was one of his constant refrains.) To remind him that I’d asked him to stop sending texts like these would bring the rejoinder that he knew that already, but couldn’t I see his true and beautiful love, a true and beautiful love that existed in and around the totally incidental cheating that went on sporadically ever since we got together when we were twenty-two? Couldn’t I see that he had given me every reason over decades to fight for him and for our relationship? What was wrong with me?
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Ghost of a Shark by Neil James
The monster on the beach lies on his side – bigger than a boat, sadder than the ocean. The seafront’s deserted at dawn, so I leave my bike in the empty car park, next to the tariff sign that upsets the tourists. My shoes imprint into the wet sand as I approach him, the creature from another world.
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Mushawie off the Hill by Tom Sheehan
Jimmy Mac, on the second-floor porch of his Smith Road house and the early sun barely creasing the edge of Baker Hill, looked over the top of the box scores, the Sox winning their fifth in a row, and saw, for the first time in he’d later guess to be about eight years, Mushawie just coming to the bottom of the Cinder Path. Coming off Baker Hill. He couldn’t remember Mushawie being off the hill. My God! Jimmy, said to himself. Nobody saw Mushawie unless he wanted them to see him, him socked away back in on the Delmere property the way he’d been since VJ Day in ’45.
Week 508:Inspiring Words From the Past; New Inspiring Words and Remembering a Friend
Inside Information Inspiration
At the start of his career Hunter S. Thompson typed copies of famous novels in effort to gain a “muscle memory” of greatness–Gatsby for instance; the whole thing, seeking the inspiration; how it felt to write the powerful words. I have never gone that far, but I do surround myself with what I think are great words and images. These are pasted to my walls along with what I consider fine art. Visually, I have (among many others) Van Gough, Picasso, Dali and Giger prints as well as a large Shakespeare poster (whose accusatory eyes tend to follow me for some reason) on my walls. But it is not all highbrow, because I also have stuff like Elliott the Pigeon (of this wrap’s header), “Dogs Playing Poker” and a poster for Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster on the same walls
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In Want of a Home by Alannah Tjhatra
Angel was sprawled across the couch, the TV turned to Seinfeld. She had a cigarette in one hand and a magazine in the other.
“Wish you’d at least take that shit outside.” Grace stripped off her soaking coat, peeled a dead worm off the sole of her shoe. She stuck her sneakers on the heater to dry.
Angel rolled her eyes, a puff of smoke escaping her lips. “And hello to you too, baby.”
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Being Billy Olsen by Gerald Coleman
“One’s real life is often the life one does not lead.”
—Oscar Wilde
Billy Olsen didn’t remember the moment he started to grow into the image everyone had of him. Nor whether other people’s “Billy Olsen” was anything like the real one, if there was one. Self-awareness was not a strength. Perhaps that’s why he confided in me.
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Rence in Repose by J.H. Siegal
John Rence, the cobbled-up person you thought you knew, now lies here charming and cold.
His voice will endure, on those many recordings, and many of you will claim, hearing them again someday in a department store or in a television commercial, to have known him. But he was not the sloppy socialite you thought you met in bright apartments and dingy clubs. He was in fact a marionette holding his own strings.
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Joker by Kaela Li
Our love language is card games.
Idiot expresses our affection and respect, BS is our way of checking in with each other. War to express our shared frustrations. Spit and Blackjack to say hello and goodbye. A jack secretly gifted in the hallways between class is an inside joke. A queen is empowerment, when the hours get too long. A two is permission to rock the boat and get wild.
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