Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

Lakota Betty by Tom Sheehan

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It had been about 20 years since the ignominious raid on the Indian village at River Hill had taken place. The army captain, Gregory Merton, who led the raid, and all his officers, and supposedly all but one of the enlisted ranks, had been killed in later actions. The sole known enlisted rank not dead was a retired sergeant, Martin O’Keeffe, who told the discharging officer on the day he left the army that there was one other witness to the raid, and he hoped she was still living.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Clean up in the Meat Dept. by J. Bradley Minnick

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I see her in the supermarket. She wears an oversized pink sweat shirt displaying two big cloth cut-out letters that signify sorority. She is maybe 30, beautiful, and not alone.

Her cart rattles against the unevenness of the shiny supermarket floor. A large man, her boyfriend I imagine, dressed in unmatched wrinkles, stands facing backwards wearing a backward baseball cap on the front of the cart she pushes. I watch as he cleans off various shelves with his broad arm while he uses the heels of his untied sneakers at intervals to slow the cart. “Woody” is written across his massive gray sweat shirt.

“Woody,” I murmur to myself. 

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Editor Picks, General Fiction, Latest News, Short Fiction

458: Personality Issues; Beautiful Losers and Winners

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Personality

Hypocrisy and altruism stop at roughly the same point in a person. Although finally copping to your own rottenness and experiencing exhaustion at the highest level of do-goodishness you are capable of are not the same thing, both terminate close enough to the center of a person to form a picture.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Sorting Apples by Ann Marie Potter

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“One of his girls, the youngest I think, got killed by that thing a few years back. Got her scarf caught and strangled.” Like many of her father’s words, poorly formed and slick with alcohol, these came with a belch.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Horror

Simian Revenge by Marco Etheridge

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Cling mama fur. Green tree. Blue sky. Rain, mud, vine, climb. Chase, run, catch, tickle, roll-roll-roll. Run, catch, tickle, Hoot! Hoot! Eat warm fruit. Sleep high, night breeze. Morning sun. Hot sun. Little bugs, itchy. Fingers in fur. Bad bugs. Find, bite.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Elephant in the Room by Barbara O’Byrne

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Across from her, Mabel was spooning her poached eggs while Emily rambled through a litany of complaints. Today it was the eggs, over-cooked, the night nurse tapping on her door at night, “You can’t hear her, can you, Frances? So annoying.” Frances nodded. Anything else would invite more exchanges with Emily, who laced every conversation with a side order of disdain. A smoke. She needed a smoke. Where was Jerome?

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Evening of the Black Dog Lavinia Andrei Jennings

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The dog scrutinized her through the glass door of the high-rise building. His wet pitch black coat shone smooth as glaze over metal, and for an instant she perceived him as a bad omen, a gigantic raven, haunting her. And yet, his gaze was benign, his attitude tentative and curious at the same time. Flakes of snow settled continually on his muzzle and shoulders, shriveling and melting, like grains of sand measuring his time out in the cold.  Irene, still and uncertain, eyes squinting from the sunset glow, met his gaze, then promptly switched her attention to her own reflection in the door, her curly hair in disarray, her arms hanging pointlessly along her body. She had nearly tripped over the dog who approached her unexpectedly as she arrived home earlier, lost in her usual musings. Their eyes locked for a moment, in a question and answer one-two. She moved away, though, determined to ignore him.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Loving You by Simon Ashton

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They hadn’t touched her daughter, the crowd outside. They had wept at her in holy resignation and punched fists of beads at the air, hostile with certainty, but Bec had drawn herself wider and taller, a linen sailcloth harnessing the crackle of hostile air, propelling them forwards to the safety of the car.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Things You Shouldn’t Say to Your Mother with Dementia by Maggie Nerz Iribarne

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“I’ve just told you that.”

When things became worse, I brought my mother to our abandoned-since-Dad-died beach house for the summer. A sabbatical and a newly west coasted daughter freed me to lug Mom like a bag of silent, bewildered groceries into the passenger’s seat of my car. We sped along the highway from the city to the coast, chasing the rickety car of Mom’s memory, lumbering just ahead. I savored the hopeful sensation of control and the encroaching smell of sulfury sea air.

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