She pulled out the Nuclear option and tossed it on the table like the Ace of Spades.
Nothing to do but bluff.
He then called her back and said “Let’s not ruin three lives here. Stick to the current agreement. ”
“Ok, but you better make your payments every month. Get a job at Starbucks.”
“Yes. I will,” he replied not knowing exactly how he was going to do that.
And that was it.
‘We were fair game
but we have kept out of the cesspool.
We are strong.
We are the good ones.
Do not discover us
for we lie together all in green
like pond weeds.
Hold me, my young dear, hold me.’
Anne Sexton, Rapunzel
The sound at the end of the phone was a metallic female voice, not her mother’s. “I’m sorry.” Pause. Her mum’s voice: “ANGELA.” Pause, then the robot woman again.
“… cannot come to the phone right now. Please leave a message after the tone.”
“Mum, I don’t want you to worry, but please call me back if you can. I just wanted to tell you… I forgive you.”
He had awakened with the itch on his face, from a lone and long hair floating across one eye and one lip, or was it a cob web, a remnant, a silver runner of aerial flight? It definitely was cob-web thin, a filament, a gossamer streamer, light as thought, but not the thought of a spider like the one he had seen eye to eye above his camp bed as a kid. That one hung on such a silken, thin, lone strand that almost wasn’t there. He had always believed he had smashed that black-eyed spider into space with the magazine he had been reading earlier.
Lianne skipped from her brother’s room. She was bored and left him with his trains. He was fixated with them. She really did think boys were stupid.
Silence is the color
in a blind man’s eyes
Leo wondered if it was some kind of contest, if it smacked of more than what it seemed. He had heard the poem a hundred times, Chornby always walking around with the book in his shirt pocket or back pocket suddenly reading it to him, again and again, and Leo, the Blind Man of North Saugus, let the words sink in and become part of him, part of his sightless brain. Just like Chornby had become part of him. Chornby’s face he could not picture, nor eyes, nor beard, nor jut of chin, but settled on the imagination of Chornby’s hands and could only do so when he felt his own slim unworked hands, the thin fingers, the soft palms, the frail knuckles, how the fingers wanted to touch a piano but couldn’t, or a woman, but who wants a blind man?
Continue reading “Chornby and Leo the Blind Man by Tom Sheehan”
He was a shit junky, a shit shoplifter and a shit human being.
Those were his words. Nobody else bothered enough to comment.
Here we are at Week 182.
Our process was my inspiration this week, well sort of, I did go off on a few tangents so no change there.
When we read all the submissions, it makes us realise what we like, enjoy, what we dislike and what annoys us. And I am not talking about the writing, (…Well!) I’m talking about the subjects and what they make us consider.
Continue reading “Week 182 – Hated Things, Freedom Of Speech And Mixed Emotions”
I know you grew up on the streets, that you feel the streets made you, that you are now the streets, maybe just a human version. I know that when you were younger, death led your parents along and your relatives rejected you saying you were bad omen, that whenever you passed something gets missing. But you knew you were not a thief, that you could do nothing with your skinny limbs, so you told everyone you met on the streets that your relatives were wicked. But those strangers never understood you because you spoke Igbo in a city dominated by pidgin speaking strangers. The few who understood you called you a liar, ajo nwa, a bad child. You must have been six then.
Continue reading “A Frog’s Home is Called a Pond by Bryan Okwesili”
She hated her job. All day she read and reworked words that didn’t satisfy, words dry, tasteless, and underripe — words like rectifier and microprocessor and power semiconductor. Their heaviness left paste in her mouth.
Continue reading “The Literal Gourmand — A Fable by Daun Daemon”
I saw it all, from the very beginning, heard it all, too, every word rising on the air … in our first classroom, in church, everywhere it happened, you name the place and I was there. Unannounced it came. From the heavens it must have come, taking over his soul, his body, his mind for a few bare minutes of magic. Once, and once only, every five year like clockwork, it came on him, as if grabbed by the heavenly spheres or ignition itself lighting up his lungs from the inside. My pal Victor, classmate for 16 years of schooling, teammate for 8 years, inseparable companion, fifth year custodian of miracles that made him, for the nonce, an extraordinary singer without explanation, an indescribable tenor so gifted I have to place the cause on an element beyond us mere men.
V for Victor, dit dit dit dah, dit dit dit dah, dit dit dit dah.
literally stories 