“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.
Continue reading “Being Billy Olsen by Gerald Coleman”
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.
Continue reading “Rence in Repose by J.H. Siegal”
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.
Continue reading “Joker by Kaela Li”
“This didn’t happen when we were in school.”
“That’s true, honey, it didn’t.”
“I just don’t get why now all of a sudden – wait, why do you? – you don’t have to sound so patronizing.”
“I’m just listening, honestly.” She changes from her robe into scrubs, loose fitting and dark purple as an eggplant. Her phone rings. She answers it on speaker. “Say hi to your father,” she says.
“Hi dad,” Lily says. “How’s the year so far?”
Continue reading “What Can Anyone Say by Matt Liebowitz”
There were three of them. There were four of us, and April lay on the campsite and on the river, a mixture of dawn at a damp extreme and the sun in the leaves at cajole. This was Deer Lodge on the Pine River in Ossipee, New Hampshire. The lodge was naught but a foundation remnant in the earth. Brother Bentley’s father, Oren, had found this place sometime after the First World War, a foreign affair that had seriously done him no good. But he found solitude abounding here. Now we were here, post-World War II, post-Korean War, Vietnam War on the brink. So much learned, so much yet to learn.
Continue reading “The Three Fishermen by Tom Sheehan”
An Empty Family Cabin
I arrived after midnight. I found the key on the peg in the unused barn using the flashlight on my phone.
There was a blanket of stars so thick I stood in the barn door staring upward at the swirling white masses for a long time after I found the key. The shadows in the old, haunted barn had made me think of the birth of Christ story as I remembered all the departed members of my family.
Continue reading “The Ghost of Van Gogh by Dale Williams Barrigar”
A BIG ANNOUNCEMENT
First, before the Big Announcement, our thanks go to Doug Hawley for taking the helm last week. We look forward to extending further invitations to do so to our frequent writers and site friends!
Next week will feature our annual anniversary post. This year is special because it marks ten years for Literally Stories. There will be the many special features we add to our anniversary wraps plus an abundance of new ones. We have been working on this since summer and we hope to see one and all next week. As always, bring the kids, show up drunk, clothing is optional.
Continue reading “Week 506: A Big Announcement; Surreal the Deal; Five Great Values; Crystal Ball Questions”
The guitar player began. The two younger women, the singers, looked to the dancer, then to one another and laughed. Everyone knew the dancer was crazy. What would happen tonight? What madness revealed when, after standing stock still, face intense, concentrating, ugly, man-like, she would explode in sudden but precise movement. Arms and legs lashing out, a burning, erotic anger masked behind the frozen expression on her face. After moving across the stage, she would come to a sudden, freezing halt, slamming her foot down on the floor—loud. The women startled even when they knew it was coming. The dancer looked at the man—her partner. She always chose a younger man. He looked back, smiled but at a distance. She glared at him then suddenly moved again, whirling, white skirt flaring out to reveal a flash of the carmine lining.
Continue reading “Rage by Paul E Goldberg”
The pub had closed, the last bus still hadn’t arrived, the thin drizzle gave way to rain of biblical ferocity. Jimmy stood sheltering in the entrance to the dress shop, like a novelty dummy, while Willie (his tongue loosened by seven pints of IPA) explained about the likely existence of A Deid Agnostics’ Processing Panel.
Continue reading “Late-Night Theological Breakthrough by Michael Bloor”
I’d never been blown up before.
We were patrolling in the middle of nowhere during the late afternoon of another 110 degree day, with nobody around except a goatherd in the distance, tending a few scrawny goats. The IED must have been under a pressure plate in the road.
A slow-motion movie sort of thing is how I’d heard survivors describe explosions. Not me. One minute, I was in the Humvee’s right rear seat behind the vehicle commander, Staff Sergeant Bennett, getting my kidneys pureed on the rough road. Then I heard a roar like the sound of a passing locomotive. A white light filled the cabin like some nuclear camera flash and I felt a searing wind on my face. Then I was somersaulting through the air with my synapses flashing, envisioning how hard I might land. Pretty hard, it turns out. The ground rushed towards me, and I heard a crunch as I landed face-first in the dirt. And then the lights went out.
Continue reading “We Two Soldiers by Mark Schafron”
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