I have a feeling that if there wasn’t a place like Cambodia, we would have to create one. I’ve never been there; but I understand that any place capable of building Angkor Wat and nurturing Pol Pot (a unanimous first ballot inductee to the Evil Fucker Hall of Fame) is someplace one can still notice from a great distance.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Chicken Farm Blues by Alex Sinclair”
Today we visit a story from five years ago that still shines as though only five seconds have passed. Moving Day is a quiet thing that disturbs and asks unanswerable questions about the echoing hell of humankind’s worst action.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Moving Day by Mary J Breen”
Michael Bloor’s excellent little gem, The Questing Knight, looks at, then beyond the charm of a pub raconteur. Michael shines a light on the truth that people had ignored with his description of the man’s previously unseen widow. This is a beautifully understated piece of work that says more than its small quantity of words.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – the Questing Knight by Michael Bloor”
The two things that stand out for me in Rachel Sievers’ Paper Lined Tables are displacement and expectation. A hard to face big problem is usually addressed through an unrelated smaller trouble, and waiting for something is often better than getting that something. Mostly, the things most wrong in our lives are impossible to articulate without receiving negative pushback from a person associated with the woe. And dreaming of a best pal dog without accounting for how you will deal with the uptick of chewed slippers, barking and dogshit in your life can be stressful.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns: Paper Lined Tables by Rachel Sievers”
Even the stars will go out, one by one, the great and the small, at entropy all will be done. And such is the case with Margot, a small star in the show business sky, yet a first magnitude sun in Jane Houghton’s Walk on By. This is a fine example of parallel writing. The current story nurtures the backstory and both resolve together in a bittersweet, even uplifting conclusion.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns: Walk on By by Jane Houghton”
Horror and tension are the theme of this rerun, in case you didn’t get enough of those items this week–or maybe because you have.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – The Bargain by Diane M Dickson”
Quite often a writer will streak across our virtual sky, a word comet, who graces our viewing for a while before moving in. From late 2016 into ’17, Nyx Bean gave us four memorable stories, and it is a shame that they should sit in the vault, alone, neglected.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns- Hi, I’m Stacy by Nyx-Bean”
Word Puppet by Nik Eveleigh is something I can relate to. Writers create characters and then take the job of their God and that of whatever Universe the character inhabits. Even though we control the action, no one can be certain exactly what kind of God is in charge of her/his reality. Does your God care about you? Or are you stricken with a God who has a nifty twist in mind and you are nothing but a means of arriving at it?
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MC “Laura” is nothing short of honest, which gives Hugh Cron’s Concealer an extra level of irony. At her interview for what we Americans call Unemployment Insurance, she divulges the reasons for her loss of a job–and how. Her delightfully profane observations and storytelling (only half-heartedly, so it seems, warned off by her interviewer) say much about the downside of the workplace and people in general.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Concealer by Hugh Cron”
Long time site friend David Henson has published everything from tragedy to jocularity with us. He excels at stretching reality until you believe that, why yes, I can see a future in which handling a black mamba for forty seconds without dying can improve one’s credit score.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Byrds Syndrome by David Henson”
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