My name is Hakeem Alford, and I made the Dean’s List at San Juan Junior College (SJJC). I wasn’t trying to make the Dean’s list. I was surprised to find out that the dean even had a list. I’m not a straight “A” student. Most of the time, I’m a student, you don’t expect to get an ‘A.’
Continue reading ” A Casual Abuser by Frederick K Foote”
I selected this story by Louisa Owens as a rerun in 2020. Louisa intelligently and graciously answered my humble questions. But if episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies must be re-aired endlessly until Armeggedon, then perhaps it is just that a small good thing like Short Straw should appear on the site for a third time.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Short Straw by Louisa Owens”
Here we are at Week 422. I was thinking on doing a fashion section but reading this back and looking in the mirror, I needn’t bother!!
Clothes have always conspired against me.
Continue reading “Week 422 – Flairs Had Flair, Delicious But Itchy And I Forgot About Dr Jones!”
I met my oldest friend Greg for coffee when the allegations were at their height. We did not speak of them at first. I inquired on his health, which led to an inquiry on his family, which led back to the allegations. “She’s shut me out,” Greg said, meaning his wife, who had moved from their Manhattan apartment to their daughter’s place in Brooklyn. “Not a word in weeks.” Greg sipped his coffee and his eyes moved shiftily from side to side as if gaging whether anyone from the coffee shop was listening in. “But you believe me, right?”
Continue reading “My Friend Greg by Elizabeth Day Broschart”
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”
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