Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

Skeleton Crew by R W Maxwell

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All things are equal when a ship is a ship and her crew is a crew.

So I say, “This here ship ain’t a ship, ’cause her crew ain’t a crew. Not even a skeleton crew, like Bucktooth says. Though I admit, ye won’t find a skinnier bunch of skeletons than us.”

And the crew laughs.

Then I say, “’cept for Fat Norton.”

And the crew don’t laugh so hard.

They looks at Fat Norton, who’s stroking the handle of his flintlock, and he’s looking right scared ‘n’ red ‘n’ round ‘n’ ripe ‘n’ juicy ‘n’ plump —like a tomato what’s ready to burst— and the crew’s looking right hungry and he’s looking real afraid.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Arm Milk by Spencer Levy

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Tin men play their kazoos too loud. Like having an annoying ass bee trying to drill into the deep part of your ear. It’s Sunday and it’s the boardwalk. Sea spray that you’re not supposed to touch or it’ll leave a nasty pollution rash. Gregg doesn’t care, though. His arm is messed up anyhow from all the lousy skateboarding.

Gregg rides and I walk and the waves shove against the wooden thing beneath our feet. Some people call it an embankment, but that sounds too much like a place where loose-tie fathers coax children into cashing checks in exchange for thin lollipops. Gregg grazes his lousy arm against the slippery arm rail, catches some sea spray in his mouth.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction, Writing

WEEK 410: Will You Still Feed Me; A Brave New Year; Mistaken Identity

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2023 looks more like an address number than a year to me. Yet when I see 1985 as an address, I think of the year. I liked 1985 for the most part, yet I have already developed a distrust of 2023, though we are just a few days into it.

Racehorses have New Year’s birthdays. As I have since childhood, I still imagine them wearing leftover New Year’s Eve party hats in the stable, eating birthday apples. I identify with the Horses because my birthday happens very close to the start of the year. But unlike a three-year-old Mare, I didn’t don a party hat because I am suspicious of 2023’s intent.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Iceberg by Paul Kimm

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Saturday night. They were round at Robbie’s getting ready. Paul was doing Robbie’s hair. An hour offloading a full can of hairspray, backcombing his dyed-black mass of candy floss that increased his height six inches and was broader than his shoulders. Mel, sprawled back on the bed, was ready, and had been since Paul started Robbie’s hair. The television, on top of the chest of drawers where his mum kept her extra clothes, was switched on, the volume turned to zero. Mel had his green jeans on, a Bauhaus t-shirt with the arms sawn off and triple-buckled boots. The hour working on Robbie’s hair was double the time Robbie’s mum used to take, but she refused to do it anymore. Robbie had on his mandatory black suit and a purple paisley shirt. His mum was already out somewhere so they had the record playing close to full blast on the turntable. Paul was mid-backcomb on Robbie’s fringe when he jolted forward from him pointing at the television.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Climbing by Antony Osgood

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For the fortieth memorial picnic, Egon Frankl had prepared ditalini with tomatoes smothered in oil. The food shimmered beneath an airless Viennese sun as he waited for his brother, who adored the dish. Not once did Egon sneak a bite. He’d long ago learned to go without so others might eat. Whilst his brother was normally late – Egon’s disappeared wife, Hilde, the person to whom the afternoon was supposedly devoted, once said being late was Ignaz’s chief characteristic – that day Ignaz excelled himself by failing to make any appearance whatsoever. Egon occupied himself by admiring the tattered life for which the city park was home. He ardently wished for his brother’s Copernicus moment, when it would dawn on Ignaz that the universe did not revolve about him. Younger brothers – even one aged eighty-two – seem duty bound, it seems, to disappoint.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Lone Inheritance by Tom Sheehan

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Henry Searles, once an unknown character in this business, did not imagine what the insides of Ted Gentry’s house looked like because he had no idea where to begin his search for furniture, trinkets, odds and ends, lackluster fragments of Gentry’s past, lost articles in a blindly-kept closet holding piled up clues. It all appeared pointless and highly impractical, just a guy he met on the corner where the river slips under the bridge, had a drink with him at a bar, like they were old friends suddenly rejoined rather than new acquaintances, but Gentry, sort of mystically, left a note with the barkeep to deliver to Searles if anything ever happened to him, as though Doom itself had made the call.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Jehrico and Chico and the Western Conservation Society, by Tom Sheehan

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They had found the secret cave, Jehrico Taxico and Chico Vestra, but they soon found out that they were not alone in the discovery.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Orchids in the Sun by Dorothy Rice

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Sadie Blankenspiel was raised without faith, which she’d always been stubbornly proud of. Pricing caskets at her brother-in-law Peter’s deathatorium, she wasn’t so sure she’d hadn’t been too hasty in giving short shrift to all that spirituality and after-life mumbo jumbo.

In her eightieth year aboard the mothership, with achy hips, estranged from her two narrow-minded children, she wondered if daughter Maribel hadn’t been right after all. What had the ungrateful girl screamed out the car window before tearing away from the house that last time? Always so dramatic. Something about her mother likely running out of time to make things right before the Grim Reaper plucked her number.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Karaoke Cowboy by Domonique

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Seated at a table in a karaoke bar was a blend of characters, men who had all worn a couple hats, in a couple colors.

Seated naturally in a thinking man’s posture, a man with a countenance expressing he owned masculine intellect, and, to be fair, a man well-liked for his intelligent conversation, was Think Too Much Tony.

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