Bikbratu’s body was sturdy, his shoulders strong, he dressed well for a man of his age, his face and hair were missing. As we were kerbside catching up with chat, several other people of all types walked past with no faces. Some were hand-in-hand with a partner with a face, nobody had half a face, it was all or nothing it seemed, it looked like only over-eighteens, this was off the scale of impossibility, why hadn’t I heard of this?
Continue reading “Bikbratu by Daniel Roy Connelly”
My uncle was a substantial man, a man whom you could roll because his stomach curved like a ball. I often had the impulse to bowl him: there was something frustrating in the way he spent hours stitching old clothes. His painstaking labour jarred with my need for going fast at the time, which I remember taking the form of speed-reading. While I took a break, I’d find him in the kitchen, stitching lugubriously. I wanted to pick him up and roll him at speed. He was like a blocker, resisting my need to encompass his deliberateness. He was stitching, stitching, methodically bringing together; I, at that age, wanted to tear things apart.
Continue reading “Uncle by Ralph Hipps”
Leena’s fingernails are thick as scallop shells, her case worker Victoria observes. Her clinical afterthought is shoe tying and sewing must be near impossible. They are driving to a campground outside of Anacortes where Leena will stay with friends. Borne from desperation and desolation the transitional housing definition has expanded to include camping. To pass the time as they drive Leena recounts traumas with her parents, ex-husband, kids – especially her youngest daughter who kicked her out.
Continue reading “To Anacortes by Susan DeFelice”
Your Walk Westward toward Sunset by Tom Sheehan
It is brittle now, the remembering, how we drove you east with your backpack like a totem in the rear seat, so that you could walk westerly across the continent’s spine, across the sum of all the provinces, through places you had been before, and we had been, and the Cree and the Owlcreek bear and wolves envisioned when night screams upwind, stars loosing their valid phantoms.
Now it seems the ready truth that juxtaposition is just a matter of indifference, because we have all been where we are going, into selves, shadows, odd shining, all those places the mind occupies, or the heart, or a lung at exercise. You had already passed places you would come into when we knew your hailing us down, thumb a pennant, face a roadside flag halting our pell-mell island rush.
To go westerly, to walk across the world’s arching top, you said you had to go east, to know Atlantic salt, kelp girding rocks at anchor, clams sucking the earth down, to be at ritual with Europe’s ocean itself, that mindless sea of lonely buoy bells arguing their whereabouts in the miseries of fog, singular as canyon coyote.
We promised you holy water at Tormentine, reaching place of The Maritimes, a fist-thrust ready for Two-Boat Irish Islanders, Cavendish’s soft sand, holy trough of journey, wetting place, publican’s house of the first order, drinks hale and dark and well met and Atlantic ripe as if everything the bog’s known the drink has.
It’s more apparent now, after you moved outbound, or inward on the continent, trailing yourself, dreams, through wild Nations once ringing one another, your journey’s endless. Nine years at it, horizons loose on eternity, trails blind-ending in a destiny of canyons too deep to be heard, and your mail comes scattered like echoes, scarred horseshoes clanging against stakes in twilight campgrounds, not often enough or soon enough or long enough, only soft where your hand touches hide, hair, heart caught out on the trail, wire-snipped, hungry, heavy on the skewers you rack out of young spruce.
Out of jail, divinity school, bayonet battalion, icehouse but only in hard winters, asking Atlantic blessing for your march into darkness and light, we freed you into flight. You have passed yourself as we have, heading out to go back, up to go down, away from home just to get home. Are you this way even now, windward, wayward, free as the mighty falcon on the mystery of a thermal, passing through yourself?
You go where the elk has been, noble Blackfoot of the Canadas, beaver endless in palatial gnawing, all that has gone before your great assault, coincident, harmonic, knowing that matter does not lose out, cannot be destroyed, but lingers for your touching in one form or another, at cave mouth, closet canyon, perhaps now only falling as sound beneath stars you count as friends and confidants. Why is your mail ferocious years apart in arrival? You manage hotels, prepare salads, set great roasts for their timing, publish a book on mushrooms just to fill your pack anew and walk on again, alone, over Canada’s high backbone, to the islands’ ocean, the blue font you might never be blessed in. Nine years at it! Like Troy counting downward to itself: immense, imponderable, but there.
A year now since your last card, Plains-high, August, a new book started, but no topic said, one hand cast in spruce you cut with the other hand, your dog swallowed by a mountain, one night of loving as a missionary under the Pole Star and canvas by a forgotten road coming from nowhere.
We wonder, my friend, if you are still walking, if you breathe, if you touch the Pacific will Atlantic ritual be remembered as we remember it: high-salted air rich as sin, wind-driven like the final broom, gulls at swift havoc, at sea a ship threatening disappearance, above it all a buoy bell begging to be heard, and our eyes on the back of your head.
That other landfall
on Equator’s quick needle
bamboo’s vast jungle
***
Our thoughts:
One day, I was on the grounds and saw a tower in the distance. Like a mountain in the desert the tower appeared closer than it actually was. It took many days and raises in the Sherpa’s (an Iberian Ibex named Aristotle) salary to reach the tower. Lo and behold the great tower was composed of Tom Sheehan Stories. Aristotle shook his head and informed me that there was no way to top the tower, and that we should just admire it for its greatness.
The tower continues to grow and one should expect that this growth will continue for some time to come. There is no finer professional than Tom Sheehan, and the best we can do to salute yet another achievement is to visit the tower and examine it piece by piece.
Congratulations Tom!
Leila
***
I often wonder, and we have never asked, what it was that prompted Tom Sheehan to send us his work. The muses and internet mages were smiling on us that day, anyway. Right from the very first time we knew that this was a writer of quality. What we have come to appreciate so much since then is his professionalism and wonderful gentlemanly nature. In a world and an environment where much is not as kind as it could be, to interact with someone like Tom is a real privilege. His work and output is amazing, and though some of his submissions haven’t been quite right for us it is all presented beautifully and the reading of it is a bright spot on any day. Thank you Tom for sticking with us all this time and allowing us to read your wonderful words. Long may it continue.
dd
***
It has been and still is my pleasure to be on the same site as Tom Sheehan. My admiration for the man is indescribable, I am in awe of his talent, his productivity but more so his respect and humanity.
If I am ever able to even write a quarter of the amount of words he has, I’ll be a happy man. I will bow my head though as I will never reach his quality!
One hundred and fifty stories on the one site is an achievement that very few will ever get near. Many congratulations Tom and thank you for gracing our site and my life.
All the very best my fine friend.
Hugh
Today was originally meant to be left open as a coda to that separates the departed 2021 with this brave new year. But as nature abhors a vacuum we here at Literally Stories dislike protracted silence. But instead of the usual Re-run feature (which will return next week at this time) we honor the work of a writer who will reach the mind boggling 150 story mark to lead off the year tomorrow, no one other than our friend Tom Sheehan.
Continue reading “Tom Sheehan Wild West Day”
Breaking News
Although an opus intended to run from pieces 98 through 102 was scrapped, and even though “Mimi” appeared in a Feeble Fable, I was able to salvage a portion of the set aside saga and create this story. Mimi was overjoyed by the news, and I think she gives a fine performance, along with “Probe” who is “essayed” by Boots the Impaler.
–Leila
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(The following is a translation of the numeric language of Probes)
In 1977, Probe appeared at a point roughly halfway between the Earth and Moon. Probe neither passed through the Oort Cloud, nor by the gas giants, nor navigated the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars to get to where he was; one moment Probe wasn’t roughly halfway between the Earth and Moon, the next he was.
“Just the shithole for Probe’s amusement,” thought Probe, after he took a quick scan of the planet’s radio and television transmissions. The creators of Probe had neither designed him to think crudely; nor refer to himself in the third person; nor had they programmed any of the millions of sentient Probes they had sent into the galaxy to sniff out intelligent life to believe that s/he was the only relevant being in the Universe. But that’s what happened with this Probe. A faulty sensor had prevented Probe from receiving system updates. Probe had discovered and repaired the sensor, but by then it was too late. He already had gone “nixxy-smonnix” (“space happy”), and only direct updates designed to correct the syndrome could cure it.
Continue reading “102 Nixxy-Smonnix By Leila Allison”
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Upon arriving at her new home in Wisconsin, one of the first things the Witch needed to do was select a tree for enchantment. In past incarnations she had enchanted everything from a scrawny scrub pine barely clinging to life on a steppe to a majestic redwood in northern California. Unlike other duties discharged by her vast array of familiars, tree enchantment was a task she had to perform in person. In a way it was like picking a Christmas tree, yet instead of murdering the damn thing and dragging it home, the Witch would endow the chosen tree with eternal life. The irony was not lost on her.
Enchanted trees gave the Witch a connection between Hell and the Earth itself, and they intensified her spells. Since she had to travel to a new land every time she returned from her latest season in Hell, a new tree had to be enchanted upon her arrival. She took heart that none of her former enchanted trees were sad to see her go. To the contrary, nothing conveys malevolent grace or gleeful, malign intent better than a retired enchanted tree. And if a branch happens to break off and kill a peasant now and then, well, accidents happen.
Continue reading “101-Evilmost Elm By Leila Allison”
Saturday, 8 February 2014
Torqwamni County Convalescent Center
4:53 A.M.
Naturally, the first thing healthy people experience when visiting the Torqwamni County Convalescent Center (T3C) is depression; many often secretly promise to kill themselves if they should wind up “like that,” but they never do. Mainly, T3C contains a sum of breathing bodies greater than the number of active minds. Most are elderly, and all are persons too well (in the technical sense) for the hospital but too sick to go home. Hardly any ever go home, save for in the religious view; most depart in the coroner’s van.
The inadequately appreciated orderlies and CNA’s and housekeepers, the real workers who do the staggering dirty work, and who are first blamed when something goes wrong, do their best to take care of the people in double occupancy rooms shared by pairs of the same kind of people: plainly, men with men, women with women, an active mind with another. The insensate are also kept together, or utterly alone, if their population is at an odd number.
Continue reading “(100) Calling Occupant By Leila Allison”
Introduction
Maab is my first FC to name herself. She was simply the Photobomb Fairie until she began to talk. When she called herself “Mab” the first time, someone pointed out that her name has been used by Shakespeare and others, and hardly original. It turns out that Mab is as common a name among Fairies as Taylor is in cheerleading.
No one remembers how the second A landed in the middle of her name, I’m guessing a typo. But Maab liked it and told everyone to call her Maab, and that she would hear it if you omitted either A.
Physically, Maab is four inches long, mostly iridescent green and is a very attractive mix of a Dragonfly and a Tinkerbell sort of person. Like everyone else, Maab moves at various speeds, but unlike the rest of us she is able to hop dimensions and seemingly disappear from common sight and yet still be “there” when captured by a camera–hence the title Photobomb Fairie.
Continue reading “99 Maab and the Rehab Spirit: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison”
Introduction
From slots 98 on there was going to be a saga. A continuing opus of staggering brilliance; something to cement my legacy. And for one shining moment, all was clear to me. Goodbye Feeble Fable Factory, the kid is on her way! Then the bourbon wore off and I saw the mess I made. And as it always goes in the drizzly gray aftermath, when life shows itself to be little more than a protracted exercise in humiliation and despair, I reluctantly set aside the legend maker and returned to my cell at the Feeble Fable Factory. Which required gaining further permission from the union; permission gained through bribery.
But there was a complication.
Continue reading “98 Boots the Impaler and the Qddyte: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison”
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