Rooooolllllll. Bang!
Rooooolllll.
Catch.
I love the solid smack of my dad’s old cue ball into my small palm. I sit against the foot of my bed rolling the ball across the floor so it ricochets off the baseboard back to myself. I’m only feeling my own momentum, but I can pretend it’s from someone else.
Something has been playing on my mind this week after eating some Japanese crackers – Do fish taste the way that they do due to the seaweed? Or does seaweed taste the way that it does due to the fish?
Continue reading “Week 556 – Two Questions, Oocha, Ooocha, Oocha Ooooo!! And Serial Killers Are Much more Interesting Than Your Kids.”
I have decided to cut down on my use of the exclamation mark. I have often used it as a shortcut to fake a sense of goodwill that I do not usually feel–or at not least up to the degree implied by an exclamation mark. There’s a stink on an exclamation mark, for me it reeks of perkiness and whatever potion lurks in Kathy Lee Gifford’s coffee cup. (You’ll probably have to be an American of a certain age to get that last bit. If not, lucky day: something to google.)
Continue reading “Week 555: Controlling Enthusiasm”
“People don’t care, Rich,” she shouts. Of course, people care, she just doesn’t care, which is fine, I don’t need her to care. I can care for both of us.
Continue reading “The Importance of the Ant by Rachel Sievers”
That last blow turned my head inside out and scrambled my brains. I didn’t have a fucking clue where the hell I was, but instinct kicked in and I started bobbing and weaving—a moving target would be hard to hit. I figured I could buy some time until my head cleared. But I was so wrong. Or maybe I was right, and it was this asshole who didn’t get that a moving target was supposed to be hard to hit because the bastard clobbered me with another whopper—this one to the side of my head—making me see double, triple even.
Continue reading “The Brawler by Héctor Hernández”
The dragon must be hundreds of years old. She leans on the door frame and spits a flame just big enough to light her cigarette.
“Don’t expect me to fight for you,” she says.
I look at the no-smoking sign on the door and tell her I don’t expect that kind of thing from a roommate. Game of Thrones is so overrated. Never be a fan.
She nods, passes by me, and walks into the apartment as though she owns this place.
Continue reading “Movies Can’t Show What is Like to Live with a Dragon by Ann Yuan”
Doug Hawley has been busy publishing work online for the past few years, including, happily with us. We are happy to share his often curmudgeonly POV, which is always tempered with amusement and is never caustic; he also presents his own original point of view that sometimes irks those who demand conventional writing. So it goes with Doug’s The Assistant.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Douglas Hawley”
Here we are at Week 554!
Okay, this may be a bit strong, but if any fucker tries to pull the wool over our eyes with some sort of AI, all I can say is I hope that you drown in the mess of your own pustules exploding!!!
Continue reading “Week 554 – Established Beasts, Superb Versions And Rest For Mickey Pearce.”
It all happened once upon a time about, oh, two and a half years from now. It was a warm summer morning, a Saturday it was, in the backyard of an ordinary house on an ordinary street in a most ordinary town, Sandusky, Ohio to be precise. But that’s all that was ordinary about it; the little girl certainly wasn’t. And as for the stranger… well, he was aptly named.
Continue reading “One Hellava Morning By John Doble”
Emmaline arrives back in Michigan for her mother’s funeral to discover the airline has lost her luggage. Through the fog of her grief, she makes it to a Target, which used to be the Dollar Store, which used to be the bike shop that her brother worked at for a summer. She would walk by while running errands for her father’s flower store, which is now a Starbucks. The cemetery behind her old house is still there, but people must buy their bouquets from the Target now.
Continue reading “More Disco Than Death by Haley DiRenzo”
literally stories 