When the bell rang, signaling mid-morning break, the floors of the factory shook as workers scrambled away from their stations, rushing to vending machines or out exit doors for a smoke. Morning break was eight minutes. The men on the loading dock kept working. They kept working because they were blind and eight minutes was not enough time to navigate from one place to another.
Continue reading “The Manufacturing Of Sorrow by Bob Thurber”
Judd Helme, as a youngster, was held by his naked heels out over the edge of this very same bridge by his drug-addicted father, and in front of his mother, now long deceased. The act was done in view of a small group of onlookers, one of whom related to me the events of that situation. Nobody knows why Judd was not dropped. It was only after a considerable amount of time, and rehabilitation, that the witness was able to tell me the circumstances, he too being hit by the slam-bang of it all, he too taking a look down into that awful reflection… thinking, as he often said, that memory comes in most horrid shapes, and most horrid visages.
Continue reading “Two Characters Caught up in Shantytown by Tom Sheehan “
Yet again I start with our wishes going to innocents caught up in madness!
Barcelona has become another victim of a sickness we are struggling to cure or even cope with.
Continue reading “Week 138 – Peas, Classification And Funny Tasting Orange Juice.”
She knew why he hung himself.
Holly had just returned home when she heard her her mother’s screams. She ran upstairs and into her brother’s room.
Long before the birth of God, the Torqwamni People crossed the land bridge that connected Asia to North America and glacier-surfed south to the Puget Sound Region. They eventually settled in an area known today as Philo Bay, which became home to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS) and its attending city of Charleston, Washington, toward the end of the nineteenth-century.
At first the idea (not yet fixed) seemed to him strange. To write a story about a pushcart. That if he wrote about a pushcart, he would have a better chance. To be nominated. To be nominated for a Pushcart Prize. To write about a pushcart was good. But how? Ok, pushcarts immediately raised in his mind the association: The Lower East Side. Pushcart country. He could go there. But then he remembered. They no longer used pushcarts.
You can rent Van Gogh’s bedroom on Air BnB for ten dollars a night. We were on the final leg of our cross-country expedition when we ran into Chicago and out of money. When we left Venice West we were intertwined in one-another firmer than the Treaty Oak’s roots, somewhere around Lincoln Nebraska we suffered our own poisoning. By the windy city it was more than just a cold shoulder. We checked our pockets. Seventy-two dollars in change and we still needed to get to New York where our flights home were waiting on us.
The moon’s on its way to November, sailing a sullen sky. I think the whole world breathed a sigh of relief tonight, when the major told us to find shelter, get some shut eye before tomorrow. We’re too close to the enemy for camp fire, all of us hiding behind trees, and under bushes, keeping as quiet as smoke, settling into the dirt and leaves like animals on the prowl.
When they can’t ignore the stink coming from his room anymore, Mom and Dad break the lock on Jeff’s door and go in, prepared, they think, for whatever happens next. It’s not like they don’t have an idea anyway, they still do all his laundry. There’s not a sock in his hamper that isn’t stiff and crusty and yellowed. Mom doesn’t even gag about it anymore it happens so much, she just makes sure to wear latex gloves when she does the whites.
The only thing that doesn’t make sense is why they always smell like sugar.
Continue reading “Sweet Boy by Matthew Lyons – Adult Content”
He looked out into the grounds and couldn’t understand the blackness. He thought that it was dead leaves. There had been a storm throughout the night which had unsettled. The dreams had frightened. He became anxious again as he tried to recall. They teased him, they were there hovering near to the edge of his consciousness, without form…disturbing. The Priest gave up and went into his bathroom to shave. The tremor in his hand changed his mind. He rinsed his face and tried to pray, the familiar words, spoken every morning since he entered the Diocese sixty years back were alien to him. They choked him and he felt a tear run down his cheek. It occurred to the old man that maybe he was having a stroke.
literally stories 