Latest News, Short Fiction

2000+ Lovely People, One Arse For Number Ten And No, I Didn’t Forget ‘Pulp Fiction’, I Wanted It In The Title.

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We have now reached 2000 followers (At the time of writing) which I am so proud of. But in the whole scheme of things, that isn’t that much. If I was a Kardashian holding a puppy with my nipple out, I’m sure that number would be in the millions in less than a day. I think I used that line when we reached a thousand but as that was about three years back I thought I could get away with it once again.

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All Stories, Fantasy

My Wife’s Short, Strange Career as a Certified Ouija Boardologist  by Dave Henson

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Lois let out a whoop. “I passed!”

I went to my wife, who was sitting cross-legged on the sofa. The laptop’s screen displayed an image of the certificate. “I knew you could do it, Honey.”

We were out of college five years and married three, but not making enough at the milk studio to feel comfortable starting a family. So soon after the veracity of Ouija Board spiritualism was scientifically validated, my wife enrolled at Alternate Realities Online University.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Catch and Release by Heather Rutherford

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Jackson’s silver hair glinted under the full moon. His boots crunched the gravel parking lot in front of the ramshackle apartment building, long ago a hotel, where I shared an apartment with my mother. Jackson shared our space a few nights a week. He cursed and cast a black trash bag into the bed of his truck. It landed with a soft thud. He hadn’t noticed me yet, standing on the sidewalk, but his presence allowed me to soften my grip on the house keys poking through my fingers. My white, work button-down was stained and reeked of the whiskey spill from an overserved guest at the Angler’s Inn.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Unity by Phil Temples

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I’m drawn again to this little spit in the road about six miles outside of Tupelo, Mississippi on Road 1233 in the Town of Plantersville. I stand near a pasture across the road. Two hundred feet to the north, there’s an abandoned structure that’s falling in on itself.  A weathered sign with faded lettering in the front reads “Unity Church.”  It hangs awkwardly from a broken chain banging in the wind against a post. The roadside is littered with beer bottles and fast food wrappers. A car hubcap lies nearby.

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All Stories, General Fiction

On the Wretched Road by Tim Franks

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The lorry drivers trudged into the service station diner and lined up along the bar, slouching on stools. They were quiet and bleary eyed – yawning into their fists as they braced themselves for another fifteen-hour shift. With a series of points and gestures they ordered banoffee pie and pancakes, chasing cups of coffee with swigs of whiskey from their hip flasks. On the Perspex table top, they rolled cheap tobacco for the road and slipped the cigarettes behind their ears.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Ghosts at Horseshoe Creek by Tom Sheehan

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A soft, steady breeze, with no puff to it, lifted over the edge of Horseshoe Creek and carried with it the sooty odor of a dead fire, a dank, drifting smell that came like the death of an animal a man has long known, perhaps a favorite horse, like a black stallion unseen at night but a dark star in the sunlight. Another person might say the odor was of an old market in a corner of town or an old home left to rot in the wake of a hundred battles that raged around it, the inhabitants, a man and his whole family, gone to dust in one of those fierce battles, so that their essence alone remained of them. One could almost see the house as it stood decorated with gardens, pet animals, and lusty children bouncing with life. Yet the odor, despite various images passersby would have, remained the cold, dank ashes of a fire long gone into night’s realm, thus it came back each and every nightfall thereafter.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – L’Erin Ogle – Ugly

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This week’s entry into the archives is by the inimitable L’Erin Ogle. L’Erin always lands in an unexpected fashion, and I hope she doesn’t take the stunned silence that often follows her work personally, or incorrectly. It’s that in the case of something such as Ugly, the depth of the work and its refusal to be easily digested by the mind do not allow for the quick formation of intelligent comments. Nearly all the remarks that accompanied the story on its original release (including my own) are complimentary, yet not of great depth. For L’Erin’s work has to be examined and given time to sink in.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, Fantasy, Short Fiction

Week 392: J.D. Raccoons Tip Flower Pots Because Cows are Too Tall; Another Week That Is, and the Operation Snapped Shoelace Diary

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(3 A.M., 22 August)

Life is full of idiotic vexations that should not be. Silly, inconsequential events that should mean nothing yet are something enough to fret over. A continuing woe of mine involves my part in a neighbor (from here, “Green Thumb”) having her flower pots tipped by Juvenile Delinquent Raccoons.

As I’ve stated in earlier posts, my building features a common yard inhabited mostly by flitting little Birds and Squirrels by day and semi-wild beasts after sundown. The beasts include my feral Cat friends, Alfie and Andy, an occasional Opossum named Olivia (who has a way of popping out from under the bushes and scaring the hell out of people) and a marauding band of four to six Jugglao/J.D. Racoons who drink Faro and smoke discarded cigarette butts. Green Thumb seems nice enough, but she operates under the delusion that she can place potted flowers in the courtyard and expect nothing bad to happen to them overnight.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Mung Beans and Happiness by Emily Khym

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Sooner or later it’s going to happen to you. You forget the hand-me-down hanboks, blaring F-84s, stitched up sacks of half empty barley portions from a bustling market stocked with rows of mung beans and buchu. You weave through scenes of shirts drenched in sticky blood and machine guns shooting your neighbors down to become spine-chilling nightmares. You become another identity that hopes to forget the feeling of a complete family—a sort of silent-lipped desire that keeps you from proudly marching into Olympic Mart with your mother for a touch of authenticity you desperately want to forget. You force yourself to grow up to match the number of times you ate seaweed soup on your birthday, fourteen, to keep your ripped up photographs tightly shut in your safe.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Just Trying to Make a Living by Donna M. Williams

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Ethel Jordan holds her hands out in front of her. She never liked her hands. The fingers are stubby, too short to be mistaken for the fingers of a pianist which she had wanted to be in another life.

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