All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Cherries by L’Erin Ogle

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Frankie is his least favorite nursing aide. She wears cheap perfume that smells like cherries and he hates cherries, the knotted pits inside them, the red juice that blooms across fingers and teeth, the bittersweet taste spread across the tongue. His mother loved cherries, left bowls of them half eaten sitting on dressers and counters and even stacked on the floor, the pits stinking and rotting with bits of the fleshy fruit still attached. The stain on her fingertips resembling the lipstick smeared around her mouth.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Historical

What’s in My Wallet? By Tom Sheehan

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For these past 70 years, since 1951 in Korea, I have carried a 1000 Won Korean Banknote in my wallet with the signatures of all my squad members on the face of that banknote, our unit being Headquarters section, First Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division, when we were deployed on the far side of Lake Hwachon, and when squad members put their signatures on that bank note, given to me by a Korean worker assigned to our unit, Lee Bong Ha. He was a chief figurehead in his own right when he made a replacement crystal for a comrade’s broken watch crystal out of a plastic spoon, which was carried in many military papers under the title of “Time to Spoon.” Lee Bong Ha had been paid off from his government contract with a basketful of such banknotes, and passed them out like the near-useless paper that they were (some of them used for the most unlikely reasons you might think of.)

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – Peculiar Folk by Frederick K Foote

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I like this story because if you took away the enhanced visions and replaced each one with something commonplace it would still play out truthfully. For instance, instead of the mother’s skin changing tones, you’d have her moods.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 366: Interstellar Demands, The Week That Was and the A to Z of Soul Crushing Coworkers

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Interstellar Demands

The ten billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope began its journey on Christmas Day. The Webb is reputedly a hundred times more powerful than the Hubble– a garage sale find, costing a mere billion and change. The giant eye is scheduled to get down to serious peering by “mid year”–which I call June. Considering how it goes with NASA and associates, I think we can safely assume that June will happen no sooner than September–or at a time when I do not start three consecutive sentences with “The.”

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Loch Ness Monster by Steven French

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He loved the drive up to Inverness: leaving Edinburgh on the motorway, crossing the Firth of Forth and looking across to the old railway bridge, wondering, each time, if it really was true that when they finished painting it they had to start all over again … Even the inevitable congestion around Perth he didn’t mind so much because once he’d got through all that it was the A9 and a free run all the way up to the Highlands. On a beautiful autumn day like today it was just unbeatable. He felt so good in fact that with only an hour or so still to go he decided to pull off the road into Aviemore and grab a bite. There was a wonderful ice cream store there that also sold cannoli and he picked up a box for the trip home. That put him behind schedule a little but he reckoned he still had plenty of time to do what he’d come for and get to the bed-and-breakfast by a reasonable hour. 

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Soul Under Siege by Kindaka Sanders – adult content

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Something wicked this way comes as the bloody moon fills the room with the foul scent of red rum.  I didn’t say my prayers before I passed out.  I’m living in this grand dragon’s layer protected by a glasshouse.  Now, as I’m creeping into these stages of sleeping, this drinking got me numb, and I’m hearing sounds like Vietnam.  We weren’t warned about the shit that would follow.  I woke up scareder than that nigga Ichabob Crane in Sleepy Hollow.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Trailer Parks and Sagebrush by Rachel Sievers

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The old woman in front of me is dead, this is an absolute, something I cannot change regardless of the power I have. She has been dead for quite some time, but she flutters around the broken-down trailer house like she has just been reborn, and in a way,  I guess she has. It is my job to facilitate these things but she seems not to need me and moves in a busy rhythm to a beat only she can hear. 

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All Stories, Science Fiction

A Dose of the Glitters by Cataldo Carroll

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‘Çoè-àòk!?’ blurted officer Gargles.

‘Çoè-àòk!?!?’ he repeated with a bemused look. ‘How the feck am I supposed to pronounce this? Christ but these alien names would wreck your head. Why can’t they just be John or Bob for feck’s sake!?’

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Fair and Dear Damsel in Distress by Tom Sheehan – Adult Content

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Cookie Simms loved a single piece of furniture in her home, the two-foot wide, seven-foot-tall mirror in her bedroom, away from all the other fuss and bother in the house. She found it easy to favor the mirror because it favored her ass, her breasts, the elegance of timid nipples, the unnerving black clutch of hair highlighting her pubic area, after her ass or nipples, that dark and mysterious claim to feminine wares was knockout number one in the man-parade of gazers, she was ultimately sure. It had begun when she was a mere 15-year-old sophomore in high school and often heard the boys saying, supposedly in private, what was so good about the privates that roamed around them all day in school and much of the balance of day rushing to midnight, where new and nightly dreams about hidden female treasures flooded dark hours as well as supposedly sleep-like twists and turns of growing boys. Those secret hours were loaded with ideas of how all such goodness would soon be theirs, by hook or by crook.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Rerun – Unanimous by June Griffin

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An excellent friend of this site, David Henson, selected this piece by one of Literally Stories first excellent friends, June Griffin, for a rerun in 2018. I have chosen to bring it back again because, to quote the author in the comments section when it came out, “this is, hands down my favorite of my short stories.”

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