Category: Short Fiction

All Stories, Short Fiction

339- Secret Rooms, Incidental Blonde Bashing and Results From the Tiny Wildcat Division at the Feline Olympics

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Hugh is on a well earned holiday this week. This leaves me alone in a room, thinking of what to do for Week 339 at 3:56 A.M. on a Thursday morning.

The cursor is blinking, and my mind is its usual unsteady and fearful self. Writing is like life, I go from here to there and make it up on the spot, then return to edit the mistakes later.

Yet there are always some things I miss and never fix. For instance, the fatuous simile in the previous paragraph.

Anyway…

When I was a child we lived in a house that had secret rooms. Actually, the secret rooms were crawl spaces above the eaves–one at each side of the attic, accessed through pull out shelves. Only persons the size of your standard six-year-old (or so) could move around comfortably in the crawl spaces; only persons of six (or so) have enough imagination to consider the places the Christmas decorations wind up secret rooms.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, Short Fiction

Week 338: Fearing the Two-Hundred Degree Day and Results From Feline Olympics

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The Pacific Northwest winter used to run September through July. The main features were a minimum eight hours’ rain every twenty-four and temperatures favorable for sustainable mildew. Some years, but not all, there’d be a relatively balmy August, which motivated many to rush to the rocky shores of the Puget Sound to frolic drunkenly in the sea until they suffered pointless deaths brought on by hypothermia.

I avoid Climate Change as a subject for debate because it really doesn’t matter. It could very well be that the cloud of hairspray sent up into the atmosphere by 80’s Product Rockers, Poison, alone, has punched a lethal hole in the sky. But it still really doesn’t matter. My advice to the people who are smart enough to change the world is stop wasting time trying to make the people who hate you see things your way. Be creative and invent something big that will end the problem. Channel the same egghead pluck and ingenuity that ended World War II. Your scientific ancestors impressively overkilled the most significant event in human history by inventing a device that, when applied vigorously, can wipe out our species’ future in less time than it takes to roast a turkey.

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Fantasy, Short Fiction

The Mynah Fall and the Major Lift: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison

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Marianne was an uncommon Common Hill Mynah. Hill Mynahs are native to Southeast Asia, but they can be hatched anywhere in the world as long as they are kept warm. This was the case with Marianne, who had been born in Norway, lived for a time on the Greek island of Hydra, then Asia, Canada, the American northeast and eventually wound up residing at a Bird sanctuary at the University of Southern California at Burbank. In her first six years, Marianne had seen more of the planet than most people see in a lifetime.

She was a well adjusted and happy Mynah, with a large, eclectic vocabulary drawn from several cultures. And all was going well until the following sort of thing began to happen on a daily basis:

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Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 337 – Adult Warning Is All Your Getting, Repeating Like A Radish And Where The Fuck Is A Rip Tide When You Need One.

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I find it weird how alike we are and how the same mistakes, attitudes, attempts go from generation to generation.

For example, all babies try to walk on tip-toes first. Either that or they are craving to be taller. And sorry to give a reality check to disillusional parents, it doesn’t mean that your kid is going to be a ballerina. It has more chance of being a crack addict or some form of prostitute.

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Short Fiction

The Cormorant and the Afterlife Coach By Leila Allison

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At age six, Gordon Cormorant suffered a midlife crisis. Sensitive and melancholy, Gordon believed that he’d explored every mystery that life had to offer a Brandt’s Cormorant. It seemed that the only thing left was to while away his remaining seasons on Cormorant Piling, with similarly disillusioned members of his species, gleaning hollow accomplishment from ferryspotting and offending humans with the frequent and hoselike power defecations peculiar to his kind.

Cormorant Piling stood fifty yards out in Philo Bay. There were other pilings, but the one taken over by the large black birds was by far the largest. It was composed of twenty steel-banded telephone pole timbers sunk deep into the floor of the harbor. The human reason for its existence was to correct the crooked approaches of incoming ferries to the terminal dock. The large vessels brushed their sides against the piling several times a day, with varying intensity. Most times there’d be a slight bump, on rare occasions the boats would strike with such force that the piling would rock violently–sometimes even cracking the timbers.

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Short Fiction

Week 336: The Words of Prophets and My Unsteady Jukebox

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The Words of the Prophets

I had lost the ability to hear The Sound of Silence until Disturbed brought it back brilliantly in 2015. My mind gets that way with songs; I can hear them too many times–at that saturation point they assume the guise of an echo that my mind ignores upon further soundings. But Distubed’s over the top yet somehow restrained remake of the Simon and Garfunkel classic brought back to me one of the truly great lines in the history of music: The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls…

I wonder what Paul Simon felt when he wrote that line in 1965. Did it excite him or was he so lost in composition that it was just more words to choose from. I also wonder what Da Vinci experienced when he finished Mona Lisa. Did he bask in the glow of his own genius or eat cheese? Now, obviously you can ask Simon the question, but I doubt he could give you the actual answer because time has a way of reshaping memories, and inevitably a legend of some sort will creep in and take the actual event’s shape. I’m not saying he’d lie, but there stands a chance he’d buy the mirage.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction, Writing

Graham by Hugh Cron – Warning – Adult Content And Very Strong Language.

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“Hello baby, how are you? It’s lovely to know you’re there.

You do what mummy says, be a good girl. Now put mummy back on the phone. Thanks baby! I love you! You know that daddy loves you! Thanks baby!

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Short Fiction

Week 334: Little Toughs, A Kvetch, Good Stories and an Extra Helping of Frederick K. Foote

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Little Toughs

My football-shaped black cat, Dudley, has been assassinating my left ankle again. He is an irresistible little thug who takes “No” poorly. “No, Dud, I’d rather you not shred the new sofa.” “Um, no Dud, you may not go outside and fight with the crows.” He can hold a grudge longer than a Catholic funeral; and has the sort of personality that would drop a nuke to end a snowball fight.

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