Margery was a stubborn woman, but not without reason. She spends her days sitting on uncomfortable ground, sweating over tiny cooking pots and trying to make the best meal she can with the small amounts of food she has. Everyone is thankful, no one complains, but she knows she can do better.
Continue reading “Margery by Chloe Price”
The last thing Burt Shantell said to me was, “I’m not going to make it, Tom, but take this photo of my wife, Myrna, and tell her the last words I said were about her, and she’s in Stockard, Montana.”
I tried to quiet him; “Take it easy, Burt, you’ll be okay. The Medics are in the next bunker,” which was a lie, of course, a soft sponge of a lie.
Because I was talking to a dead man, a dead comrade, in Korea in 1951. The next thing was seeing him in a body rack as we moved along the trail on the other side of Lake Hwachon, already having seen a pal from my hometown, and another high school opponent from Lynn, Massachusetts, the town abutting one side of my home town, Saugus.
Continue reading “The Lady’s Photo by Tom Sheehan”
On a still fall day, I walk through the woods near the river. The sun is out and this makes the birch bark shine in white vertical swipes on a background of dun and green. The river is every shade of blue, capped with white horses beneath a sky of mare’s tails.
Continue reading “Piece of My Heart by Mitchell Toews”
For my sister Tracy – Happy birthday and I know that your mind will be elsewhere. Hope this cheers you up a wee tad.
Continue reading “Franky And Jesus by Hugh Cron (Warning – Very strong adult content with what some would find blasphemous references. Do not read if you are likely to be offended.)”
A while back, I was reading an account, by the poet and journalist James Fenton, of the fall of Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) in 1975*. In the middle of the despairing mob outside the US Embassy, begging to be evacuated, as the last of the helicopters departed, Fenton came across one man simply shouting over again, ‘I’m a professor, I’m professor.’ Poor guy, he was well behind the times, we university professors get dumped on nowadays just like any other employee. The trick is to spot when the shit-shower is imminent.
Continue reading “An Historical Footnote by Michael Bloor“
I was visiting Fraser, an old friend, in Fife. It was one of those fine, dry, crisp, cold days that you often find in Scotland in February and we took a walk out into the countryside. Fraser pointed out a ruined tower in the middle distance, Balwearie Tower. The name was familiar, like a fragment of an old song: ‘Balwearie Tower? The home of Michael Scott, the Mage?’
Continue reading ” The Laird of Balwearie by Michael Bloor”
I found him at a country fair. He sat apart from the other men, a distance only I noticed. Hearing the coin in my pocket, they turned when I approached. Money makes cocks of men. They tried hard to impress me with chest-bumping, fighting, and tidbitting. But this was the season for hiring, not mating.
Continue reading “The Hireling by Florianne Humphrey”
In the heart of Chicago’s new butchering center, in a ramshackle apartment in a ramshackle house, a truly destined cowboy was born to a hard-working Scots-born butcher and his wife. The year was 1864 and the Scotsman had just got a job with the newly formed Union Stock Yards. Ralston Condor was a meat cutter, one of many that came with the swelling herds in the yards. Eventually, after 7 years on the job, he’d come home at night and tell his wife and son all the stories he heard during the day, at work, at the tavern on the way home, from friends on the corner … all about the great herds of the west, the cowboys and drovers and ramrods and trail bosses and the Indians along the way as cattle headed for Chicago and the stockyards and the butcher plants. For all those years he longed for the open country again, like the land he had known on the moors of Scotland with Angus cattle, a distinguished and hardy breed.
Continue reading “The Broomstick Cowboy by Tom Sheehan”
Looking from one end of a story to another is enlightening in most circumstances. Often the surprises on tap happen out of the blue … or take a piece of forever to come around.
Continue reading “Burial of a Dark Charger by Tom Sheehan”
I leaned against the largest maple tree, planted hungry years before upon a leech trench in my back yard, watching my going out of me at play and shining the souls of mirrors back, telling each other what we knew.
I loved him from the tree, later a window dark-squared above the wide grass, as I leaned toward his hands moving out of himself, making; and the corners of the house, the inners and outers hammered upwards from my hand in late repair.
Continue reading “Flashing Mirrors at a House Built in 1742 by Tom Sheehan”
literally stories 