We went as far as his car would take us, driving past the smoking blue mountains of north Georgia and Tennessee, the hickory sweetness invading the cracked leather of our 1995 Chevrolet Cavalier, which was an indistinguishable red-brown-orange depending on which angle you looked at it from. We sped through the once-treasured nightmare of Detroit, the neglected chaotic sunset of Dallas. Yellowstone, freshly scorched and withered from its latest cleansing.
The barber-striped blades of the level crossing fell and, one breath later, civilisation fired past like a bullet from a gun. I waited, Rum tensed at my side, and then continued on, releasing the extension lock on his lead, the swish of his ribboned tail communicating his pleasure at this small freedom. At the crest of the road, I stepped, and Rum bounced, over the sagged section of fence wire and into the field. The land lay fallow, my Hunters squelching in the waterlogged grooves of the soil, dull and lifeless in the shadow of the fir forest. On rare summer days, when heat distorted the air into ruffled fabric, the line of firs shifted and undulated, an emerald curtain revealing another world – which, for me, it did. Every morning, I came to learn more about its indigenous race of insects – gods of nothing, my husband called them – while Rum conquered the undergrowth with a raised hind leg, each of us in our element. My latest academic paper was on the Andrena fulva – the tawny mining bee – due for publication in the forthcoming volume of Entomologist’s Gazette. I never used to believe that I had the intellectual capacity for science, but time taught me that brains came second to commitment and, after six years married to Paul, I was more committed to my work than ever.
I stare into the fire, tendrils of heat swirling around my face.
It is the first time I will do this. I had anticipated growing inherent wisdom, like that of the elders, but here I am at a ripe age and still rendered witless by the task ahead of me. Adulthood is a farce.
That night was still. I heard the silence of all those lost souls. I considered myself being one. I dismissed the idea very quickly and drank another gin. Straight gin was allegedly, the drink of alcoholics. Specifics for some reason outweighed quantity. The gin wasn’t really a choice, it was simply what was there.
Continue reading “Going Through The Motions by Hugh Cron – Adult Content.”
When the bell rang, signaling mid-morning break, the floors of the factory shook as workers scrambled away from their stations, rushing to vending machines or out exit doors for a smoke. Morning break was eight minutes. The men on the loading dock kept working. They kept working because they were blind and eight minutes was not enough time to navigate from one place to another.
Continue reading “The Manufacturing Of Sorrow by Bob Thurber”
Judd Helme, as a youngster, was held by his naked heels out over the edge of this very same bridge by his drug-addicted father, and in front of his mother, now long deceased. The act was done in view of a small group of onlookers, one of whom related to me the events of that situation. Nobody knows why Judd was not dropped. It was only after a considerable amount of time, and rehabilitation, that the witness was able to tell me the circumstances, he too being hit by the slam-bang of it all, he too taking a look down into that awful reflection… thinking, as he often said, that memory comes in most horrid shapes, and most horrid visages.
Continue reading “Two Characters Caught up in Shantytown by Tom Sheehan “
Yet again I start with our wishes going to innocents caught up in madness!
Barcelona has become another victim of a sickness we are struggling to cure or even cope with.
Continue reading “Week 138 – Peas, Classification And Funny Tasting Orange Juice.”
She knew why he hung himself.
Holly had just returned home when she heard her her mother’s screams. She ran upstairs and into her brother’s room.
Long before the birth of God, the Torqwamni People crossed the land bridge that connected Asia to North America and glacier-surfed south to the Puget Sound Region. They eventually settled in an area known today as Philo Bay, which became home to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS) and its attending city of Charleston, Washington, toward the end of the nineteenth-century.
At first the idea (not yet fixed) seemed to him strange. To write a story about a pushcart. That if he wrote about a pushcart, he would have a better chance. To be nominated. To be nominated for a Pushcart Prize. To write about a pushcart was good. But how? Ok, pushcarts immediately raised in his mind the association: The Lower East Side. Pushcart country. He could go there. But then he remembered. They no longer used pushcarts.
literally stories 