Nelson was watching the fan wobbling from the dining room ceiling when he heard a gunshot somewhere in the distance. From the couch, the blades swayed and rattled unlike their original behavior upon moving in. Something he’d have to fix himself, no doubt.
Continue reading “Maintenance by Bryce Johle “
My girlfriend has the habit of tapping my hand with her bare ring finger; in libraries, in crowded bars, as we walk through galleries, in bed when she discusses my performance, at restaurants where she asks after my unsophisticated palate, whenever she wishes to emphasise her point, she raps a morse code bruise. In another year, I will be identifiable only through the stigmata she causes. I have said this when out with friends, only for her to tap my palm and tell me I’m not that funny. Each tap implies I am shallow, that I need to listen more, or perhaps simply that I’m lucky she has any time for me at all. Her friend Greta once took me aside to say she thought I was a little more than a mere project, (‘A doer-upper you are not,’ is what she mumbled drunkenly), and that I might do worse than speaking up for myself. Greta said even love might feel like a steamroller somedays.
Continue reading “Sidelined by Antony Osgood”
Up until quite recently, you were a very sick man. The Big C, of course. Leukemia, a nasty version. Picture the scene, sitting across the desk from your oncologist. You hear the word cancer, then the hunky doctor lays out the projected timeline of your now limited existence on this earth. The oncologist speaks with precision, each phrase an expression of practiced compassion. He’s done this before. You haven’t. All you hear is blah-blah-blah. That’s how it was for you.
Continue reading “Embracing Your Evil Twin by Marco Etheridge”
Most British towns and villages are ancient foundations with Roman remains, ruined castles, and the like. Not so Daleforge. Before the 1840s, there was just the forge and the smith’s cottage. Butthen, in quick order, came the pit, the rows and rows of workers’ cottages, the ironworks, and the railway. With the houses, came the football. Not at first the codifed game of eleven versus eleven,but the rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred, pitched battle held every Shrovetide between those in the houses on one side of the Red Brook versus those on the other. But soon enough after the English Football Association was formed in the 1860s, Daleforge United FC emerged and eventually became a founder member of the Football League. And that was what my dirty old town became famous for: the foundries and the football.
Continue reading “Jack o’ Diamonds by Michael Bloor”
Like Nature, Literally Stories abhors a vacuum. And like the Victorians, LS considers the occasional empty space left open on Sundays as scandalous as showing too much ankle before marriage, or opening a post with consecutive similes.
When the weekly Rerun became a monthly feature, we found ourselves a bit restless on the other three Sundays in the month (yes, I know some have five, but let’s jump off that bridge when we get to it). The Sunday Whatever, a collection of essays and odds and ends, was invented to take up a bit of the slack, yet along with the Rerun, only half the ankle was covered.
Continue reading “Week 421: Sunday Will Never Be The Same”
I do not recognise the face of the man who sits across from me at my dining table. Like a patchwork quilt, his skin is stitched together with different shades of white, pink, and brown. He does not blink; one glassy grey eye gazes listlessly at nowhere, while the other stares directly at me as it flits and shutters like an old-fashioned camera lens.
Continue reading “After the Robot Wars by Kim Morrissy”
Who are these artists? I thought. If somebody wants to talk about the barriers we put up between ourselves and the abyss, they can say it with words, not with a dead shark. I saved that thought for the date debrief with Clara. I pictured how she’d reply, gently sarcastic, “I don’t think that’s really the idea, Christine. The world would have lost something if Van Gogh had just turned to the next bloke in the guinguette and said, “Bright out tonight”.”
Continue reading “The Impossibility of Death by Tiffany Williams”
He was on his way to our weekly meeting when he slipped on a patch of ice, fell backwards and cracked his head like a piñata, spilling its candy-colored contents onto the asphalt. I read about it in the paper the next day or I would have never known, would have simply given him up for another one who lost interest. We had never exchanged numbers. I didn’t even know his last name until last week. But they ran his picture with the obit and the announcement of the memorial service to be held Wednesday at 2pm. Today. Today is the day I will see his wife for the first time. Today she will find out.
Continue reading “The Scrabble Player by Alison Kilian”
Puma-Dog, heavily burdened yet bound in belief, wondered about the inside of the mountain he was climbing, and the trail so old in the making that he could not begin to measure its age. Even the old chief and man of wisdom, One-Wing-Gone, told him the mountain was as old as the gods themselves. “They came as one before they became many,” he explained to Puma-Dog on the 13th celebration of all his moons. “One becomes many, to serve, to light the path, to push against darkness, to fill tribal history with heroes all going back to where they came from, from the Heart-of-the-Mountain, and to be served.
Continue reading “Caves of the Gods, Heart of the Mountain by Tom Sheehan”
One month after my mother’s funeral, Darian and I are buying flowers again. My brother Lloyd is getting married tomorrow. I lead us through Madison Square Park to Belle Amie, the flower shop my family frequents.
Continue reading “Flowers for a Wedding by Victoria Mei-ling Kerrigan”
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