Carly’s hair is falling out. She leaves gold strands everywhere, Gretel’s nightmare version of bread crumbs. We don’t talk about it.
Category: Short Fiction
Three Things by L’Erin Ogle
“Three things?” he said.
“Three things,” Lexie said. She was lying on her stomach, ankles crossed and held in the air, typing on her Mac. He had a Dell himself. But Lexie and her mother were Apple through and through. His ex-wife would buy a toilet seat if the Apple logo was on it.
The Girl Who Became a Goose by K. Barrett
This is the story of a girl who became a goose.
It began with a broken heart. Eloise found herself crying in unexpected places at unexpected times. In the grocery line, when a clerk with kind eyes asked with such sincerity, How are you today?, her eyes brimmed. The answer swelled in her throat. She had to look away and mutter Fine, I’m fine. She was not.
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Broke Nose by L’Erin Ogle
“Tell me where it hurts,” he says.
Are you fucking kidding me? There isn’t enough time for that. But I know he’s not asking about that. My eyes are black from the corners to across the bridge of my nose, swollen across the bridge. My nose feels like hamburger meat rotting on a kitchen counter that we forgot to put away because Kenny actually showed up on time with the dope for once. That meat sweated and swelled and stank for a week before we finally came down and realized there was a dead animal rotting next to the empty cans of beer and overflowing ashtrays and stacks of dollar bills from a great weekend at the club.
Confessions of a Failed Weekly World News Reporter by Jonathan DeCoteau
Aliens Invade Florida! You May Be Next!
There are weird spots all around this country—like Plano, Texas, home of the Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum—and then there’s Hell Country, a patch of the Everglades so remote, it stands apart from time altogether. As a crack reporter for the Weekly World News, I’d visited a number of strange and eerie sites, but Hell County was a whole different animal. No one goes to Hell Country unless they’re running drugs or fleeing the law. It’s a network of badlands full of lightning-struck sawgrass marshes and impenetrable cypress and mangrove forests lost to the brackish reserves of time. Hell Country’s marshes are so vast, so immeasurable, that their topography changes over the hundreds of miles this river of grass consumes, from stale pine forests to coastal prairies whose more colorful denizens include stone crabs, alligators, and Burmese pythons. Oddly enough, though, it isn’t the pythons—which I’ve photographed—that haunt me to this day. It’s my friend from fifty years ago, Dalton Trummel, the last of a strange breed of tabloid reporters who never let well enough alone and vanished because of it.
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No Past, No Future, Just Now by Michelle Ann King
Front door shut and locked. Push it again, jiggle the handle a few more times, to be sure. I left it open once — maybe more than once?—and next-door’s cat got in the house. Henry wasn’t pleased with me. He’s been so good, so patient, but he was very upset about the door. I’ve been much more careful since.
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If… by Hugh Cron – Warning Strong Adult Content
“Mum, mum, I’m just going to come right out with it…I’m straight.”
“My God!”
Janice crossed herself and burst into tears.
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Week 163 – Fun With Answers And Fudfucks With Perfect Rolled Up Sleeves
Thanks for the questions folks, they are posted at the end of the reviews. We all had a lot of fun answering them.
So not too much wittering from me.
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Lamentation by A.E. Herting
Even the sky grieved. Gray and bleak, the wind cried out in lamentation, sending leftover pockets of old snow onto stark marble gravestones. Mourners passed by, eyes forward, each lost in their own world of respectful sadness. They walked along in silent groups, no one engaging in small talk or forced levity. Their task was much too grave for such normal pleasantries.
Blessed are the Little Things by Leila Allison
There were only four tables in the cafe, and I saw that my date was already seated at one of them. I had figured this out by the process of elimination (there was nobody else in the cafe except her and the young woman behind the counter), and the stretched possibility that my date bore a slight resemblance to the younger, fitter, and brighter-looking person in her profile gallery. A “helpful hint” on the lonely hearts’ site says that you can judge your match’s interest level by the amount of preparation she has invested in meeting you. Interestingly, the lady had gussied herself up to a point which lay between rushing to the convenience store at five in the morning for coffee filters and awakening in a dumpster. And she seemed oblivious to every atom in the universe that wasn’t displayed on her iphone.
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literally stories 