Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction, Historical

What’s in My Wallet? By Tom Sheehan

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For these past 70 years, since 1951 in Korea, I have carried a 1000 Won Korean Banknote in my wallet with the signatures of all my squad members on the face of that banknote, our unit being Headquarters section, First Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division, when we were deployed on the far side of Lake Hwachon, and when squad members put their signatures on that bank note, given to me by a Korean worker assigned to our unit, Lee Bong Ha. He was a chief figurehead in his own right when he made a replacement crystal for a comrade’s broken watch crystal out of a plastic spoon, which was carried in many military papers under the title of “Time to Spoon.” Lee Bong Ha had been paid off from his government contract with a basketful of such banknotes, and passed them out like the near-useless paper that they were (some of them used for the most unlikely reasons you might think of.)

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 366: Interstellar Demands, The Week That Was and the A to Z of Soul Crushing Coworkers

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Interstellar Demands

The ten billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope began its journey on Christmas Day. The Webb is reputedly a hundred times more powerful than the Hubble– a garage sale find, costing a mere billion and change. The giant eye is scheduled to get down to serious peering by “mid year”–which I call June. Considering how it goes with NASA and associates, I think we can safely assume that June will happen no sooner than September–or at a time when I do not start three consecutive sentences with “The.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Trailer Parks and Sagebrush by Rachel Sievers

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The old woman in front of me is dead, this is an absolute, something I cannot change regardless of the power I have. She has been dead for quite some time, but she flutters around the broken-down trailer house like she has just been reborn, and in a way,  I guess she has. It is my job to facilitate these things but she seems not to need me and moves in a busy rhythm to a beat only she can hear. 

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Fair and Dear Damsel in Distress by Tom Sheehan – Adult Content

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Cookie Simms loved a single piece of furniture in her home, the two-foot wide, seven-foot-tall mirror in her bedroom, away from all the other fuss and bother in the house. She found it easy to favor the mirror because it favored her ass, her breasts, the elegance of timid nipples, the unnerving black clutch of hair highlighting her pubic area, after her ass or nipples, that dark and mysterious claim to feminine wares was knockout number one in the man-parade of gazers, she was ultimately sure. It had begun when she was a mere 15-year-old sophomore in high school and often heard the boys saying, supposedly in private, what was so good about the privates that roamed around them all day in school and much of the balance of day rushing to midnight, where new and nightly dreams about hidden female treasures flooded dark hours as well as supposedly sleep-like twists and turns of growing boys. Those secret hours were loaded with ideas of how all such goodness would soon be theirs, by hook or by crook.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Romance

The Impeccable Diver at the Pond by Tom Sheehan

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In a bathing suit, of a most direct design, Shelly Kearns was gorgeous and desirable all the way past dreams and, in the water, a sylph of the first order, and with every dive she took, explored the bottom of our pond for odd treasures of any sort, reclaimable for new duties or positive salvage. She kept her treasure of such objects on two shelves and a corner table in her home left by her husband Steve, dead from a high dive onto a half-sunken log that we assume made the trip on the river from the forest thirty miles upstream.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction, Short Fiction, Writing

Legs Eleven by Hugh Cron

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She smiled as she heard his wail. He’d always been delicate and wasn’t as mature as the other kids.

…But she knew that would change soon.

He ran into the room with his fist clenched out in front of him.

“Now then Jimmy, don’t cry. It’s only a bit of blood.

…And it’s worth it.”

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

In the Right Spirit? by Nidhi Srivastava Asthana

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It was a very steep slope. Even the hunters felt unsure of their steps. The thick creepers and grasses made every tread a threat since there was no way of knowing what the escapees were disturbing on the untrodden path. The deerstalkers amongst them could have been expected to feel less unsettled, but it felt strange for them to be carrying babies or half-carrying the elderly. Noi insisted on clinging to Sai. In the Asia of so long ago, much before any contact with Westerners or Christianity, ‘till death do us part’ was her own inborn resolve. Sai had no choice.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Fulfillment by David Lohrey – Warning – Adult content.

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At the corner of Wisteria and Hope lives a snotty little shit named Miss Hola Americana Chic. She’s a he. She wears a velvet garter. Hola wears penny loafers with a silver dollar. She has three titties and speaks Esperanto, but she’s Greek. She’s a delegate to the UN. She’s afraid to fly. She travels by boat. She spends her weekends boar hunting. When she goes hunting, she takes an entourage of three Irish setters and a black body guard. He’s a she. He speaks Swahili and is an alcoholic.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Deep Inside Woodwards by Harrison Kim

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Too sunny on the belt buckles, blinding my brown eyes.  Hooking them down to the sidewalk, I take control of my hazy head, walking quick with the crowds, watching for loose wallets.  I’m skinny, so I slip between pants.  It’s a familiar circuit on rainy days too, under the umbrellas and inside the handbags.  Hey!  There’s the known mullet cut!  Yes, over by the plate glass doors.  That’s Ed up there, jostling just up the Hastings sidewalk, debating with Miss Jehovah Witness, holding her pamphlets.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Foot of Bennachie by Michael Bloor

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As Alex was walking through the university gates to the departmental staff meeting, he was thinking about Black Holes, the first photograph of which had been displayed as a news item on his ipad that morning. One of the strange-but-true properties of Black Holes was that they slowed the progress of time. There was an unlikely parallel with departmental staff meetings, with their endless discussions of staff car parking provision. Looking on the bright side, it was the last staff meeting of the Easter Term, and at the end of the term he was retiring.

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