Category: Short Fiction

All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 350- An Antisocial Experiment, Five Magi, A Special Announcement and Hell’s Jukebox: The Love Songs

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An Antisocial Experiment

There are endless social movements dedicated to improving people by requiring them not to be like people. Depending on your point of view this activity lies somewhere between education and brainwashing. I am old fashioned to the degree that I believe a person is influenced by both her upbringing and whatever chemistry is peculiar to her. You do your best to raise a child and if she grows up to be a doctor or a teacher you share in the credit, if she turns out to be a Josephine Mengela or the incarnation of Lizzie Borden, you shoulder some of the blame.

A person can improve. But people, as a whole, seldom do because there are “leaders” who want you to do as they command and will reward “good behavior” with letting you spend your life gazing into your phone and punish “bad thoughts” with unsupported accusations and placing you under the spotlight on the scaffold for a good old fashioned cyberstoning. This has been going on in one form or another since the invention of the third person–the first child who decides that her parents should be severely sanctioned for bringing her into this overlighted, loud and dreary existence, as well as not allowing her to have a phone until she can use one responsibly.

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Short Fiction

Pie-Eyed Peety and the Prohibitionist: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison

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The Principle Players

Pie-Eyed Peety the PDQ Pilsner Pigeon is alive in the sense that he walks the Earth, is self-aware (well, sort of) and is routinely observed “doing stuff to other stuff.” Peety neither breathes nor eats, yet he does speak (again–well, sort of), drinks, urinates, vomits and frequently passes out, so it is assumed that he sleeps, perchance dreams. Through a bizarre, interdimensional transformation unlikely to take place in the Universe again anytime soon, Pie-Eyed Peety the PDQ Pilsner Pigeon, once merely an insensate cartoon character used to move cheap beer in a duplicate Earth, back in the late 1940’s, has been installed on our Earth as an active “citizen.” More simply put, like everyone and -thing else, Peety is.

Unlike Bugs Bunny or a Simpson inserted into a live action film, Peety remains two-dimensional. In form he is as artiscally fine and realistic as one of those “turkeys” little kids draw in school by tracing the outline of their hands on construction paper then cutting it out to be placed on the refrigerator. Peety is about the size of a Big Mac and he wears a fedora and is always seen carrying and drinking from a bottomless can of PDQ Pilsner. He travels around in a yet to be explained by science halo of popping bubbles, as to convey his constant state of intoxication.

Continue reading “Pie-Eyed Peety and the Prohibitionist: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison” →
Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – Bathroom Throne by Yash Seyedbagheri

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Nobody knew at the opening of 2021 that Yashshar Seyedbagheri would have a record breaking year on the site. At this moment, on an otherwise forgettable Saturday morning in the Summer of ‘21, Yash has appeared thirty times, with more to come. In fact we will be running out of year before all of Yash’s acceptances in 2021 will be posted. It looks like 2022 will be another Red Letter year for this author at Literally Stories.

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Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 349 – Feet Coverings, A Wish On Mr Coopers Sexual Technique And A Recipe For A Burn Worse Than Thrush.

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I need to thank Leila for the last two postings. She stepped in when I was a bit preoccupied.

But you have no such luck today folks as it’s me again.

Continue reading “Week 349 – Feet Coverings, A Wish On Mr Coopers Sexual Technique And A Recipe For A Burn Worse Than Thrush.” →
Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – Authentic by David Lohrey

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Ironic contrast and compare fiction is easy to conceive but tough to deliver. Thus Authentic by David Lohrey is a piece that underscores its own name. The story is simple enough but the author deftly captures a moment and lets it go unharmed. It’s a little thing, like a hummingbird, easily damaged if handled without care.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 348: The Graveyard Game and Rejected Classic Special Episodes

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The Graveyard Game

I grew up across the street from a graveyard. By old world standards Ivy Green Cemetery is freshly dug. Still, it was founded in 1902, which makes it the oldest boneyard in town. Then again, there are only two.

The cemetery is fourteen and a half acres seated in a sprawling hillside that faces west. When the weather is in (usually it’s not) you get a fine view of the nearby Olympic Mountains.

Despite its relative youth, Ivy Green is almost at capacity. There are only a few prepaid plots left to fill. Yet it could take a long time for that to happen. Nearly all of the plots belong to women; as everyone knows, nothing dies harder than an Old Lady.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – The Hangings by James Hanna

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There are all types of world gone wrong pieces in the LS vault. Simply, we find Dystopia much more interesting than Utopia; same goes for Hell and Heaven. Perhaps it is indicative of the human species that we are much better at imagining pain than we are happiness.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

347: Mental Scar Tissue, Curtain Calls and Scares A to Z

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I recently recalled a cherished Halloween memory from my childhood: I was in the living room watching a Casper the Friendly Ghost Halloween special on TV the Saturday morning prior to the big day. My monumentally hung over grandfather just came out of the kitchen, a glass of what surely held only healthy tomato juice in his unsteady hand. A great question had formed in my mind.

“Grandpa, how did Casper die?”

“He asked the wrong people a lot of stupid questions.”

By now it must be obvious that I have seized upon Halloween as the inspiration for this post. Since the Nobel prize for literature has already been passed out, I see no reason to introduce revolutionary literary techniques or topics until the next voting cycle begins.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

 The Quiet, Empty Bedrooms of Saugus by Tom Sheehan 

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As all of earth once growled and gnarled its way to an instant conflagration, a calamitous roar, all its gears beginning to shift, in the near-middle of the last century, Saugus, Massachusetts, a small town just north of Boston, started to empty its bedrooms… the ones in the attic, in the space out over the garage, third floor second door on the left, the bedrooms facing on the pond or the cemetery or those looking broadly down on the wide marshes or quickly down on quiet Cliftondale Square. The bedrooms where boys cruised into manhood, almost overnight at that.

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