The dragon must be hundreds of years old. She leans on the door frame and spits a flame just big enough to light her cigarette.
“Don’t expect me to fight for you,” she says.
I look at the no-smoking sign on the door and tell her I don’t expect that kind of thing from a roommate. Game of Thrones is so overrated. Never be a fan.
She nods, passes by me, and walks into the apartment as though she owns this place.
Continue reading “Movies Can’t Show What is Like to Live with a Dragon by Ann Yuan”
Doug Hawley has been busy publishing work online for the past few years, including, happily with us. We are happy to share his often curmudgeonly POV, which is always tempered with amusement and is never caustic; he also presents his own original point of view that sometimes irks those who demand conventional writing. So it goes with Doug’s The Assistant.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Douglas Hawley”
Here we are at Week 554!
Okay, this may be a bit strong, but if any fucker tries to pull the wool over our eyes with some sort of AI, all I can say is I hope that you drown in the mess of your own pustules exploding!!!
Continue reading “Week 554 – Established Beasts, Superb Versions And Rest For Mickey Pearce.”
It all happened once upon a time about, oh, two and a half years from now. It was a warm summer morning, a Saturday it was, in the backyard of an ordinary house on an ordinary street in a most ordinary town, Sandusky, Ohio to be precise. But that’s all that was ordinary about it; the little girl certainly wasn’t. And as for the stranger… well, he was aptly named.
Continue reading “One Hellava Morning By John Doble”
When you ask me to take off my pants I agree and drop them to the floor, white undies shining brighter than the clouds, which I hope will blind you to my shyness. Then I see the mantis on the doorjamb leading to the treehouse deck and say we need to stop. I’d seen one on grandma’s body right before she died. Seconds before. She saw it too, said adios, and was gone. I know a sign when I see one.
Continue reading “By Sevens by J W Goll”
Sometimes paranoia is just having all the facts.
William S. Burroughs
One of Henry’s daily routines was to surf the internet’s social sites in search of interesting stories to read and – although he knew this was a long shot – search for lost friends and relatives. He ignored the barrage of political palaver and the innumerable solicitations that offered to sell him stuff, make him rich, or restore his health and looks to the days of his youth. “I am pushing ninety. Unless anyone can prove that he has rediscovered the Fountain of Youth, I have no use for commercial come-ons” he told himself.
Continue reading “Paranoia by Matias Travieso-Diaz”
Emmaline arrives back in Michigan for her mother’s funeral to discover the airline has lost her luggage. Through the fog of her grief, she makes it to a Target, which used to be the Dollar Store, which used to be the bike shop that her brother worked at for a summer. She would walk by while running errands for her father’s flower store, which is now a Starbucks. The cemetery behind her old house is still there, but people must buy their bouquets from the Target now.
Continue reading “More Disco Than Death by Haley DiRenzo”
Dad always told me there was an incinerator back here behind the gas station. Just didn’t think I’d ever see it for myself. And I especially didn’t think I’d see Mom’s stuff burning inside it. But life comes at you fast. Very fast. You have to keep up. Keep up or you’ll die.
Continue reading “The Incinerator and the Sinkhole by Christopher Miller”
In 2006 and 2009, at the ages of 70 and 73, Kris Kristofferson released two classic American folk albums that remain virtually invisible to the population at large, the mainstream media, and the general American culture, much like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who’s THERE but largely un-talked of, or Herman Melville, who half-invisibly spent the last decades of his life haunting the New York streets as a striking, but “unknown,” individual who looked half like a bearded mystic in a rumpled suit, half wandering minstrel just in from the sea. How strange it is to think that he was also probably passing bearded, informally dressed Walt Whitman on the street many times during those days, as writer Harold Bloom has pointed out. One wonders if they nodded to each other.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever -Kris – An Essay by Dale Williams Barrigar”
The young lady in the second image is “Peerless Perstephanie the Sunshine Squirrel of Twirl.” Her friends call her Percy. She holds the record for being the “spinniest” living creature known to Rodent-kind, and she is currently in training to break the record of fastest spinning object. (This is why she appears to be “shimmering”; or, perhaps, a shaky hand holding the phone contributed to the effect.)
Continue reading “Week 553: Sunshine Squirrel v. Pulsar”
literally stories 