All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

The Bridge at Drochaisling by Anthony Billinghurst

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Georgia was being difficult before we landed in Dublin, which was nothing new. She changed and became assertive the second she was promoted to Deputy Head at her primary school; she even adopted a power walk. It’s true the flame of our marriage no longer burns like a log fire, but it does glow like anthracite when fanned enough. My friends who noticed told me I’m hen pecked but as Georgia said, I needn’t wonder if I’m hen pecked, she’ll tell me when I am.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Anne: Office Monster by Michael W. Clark

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She shouldn’t have red hair.  Also, it shouldn’t be the red that it is.  It is a dye job, a bad dye job.  She should act her age, but it’s not clear what that age might be.  She has too much energy for her skin.  Her skin has the pale of age, old age, too many years, is the phrase I would use.  Her skin had too many years on it for the energy she had.  Her thin pale epidermis indicated she should be slow moving, if not immobile, bed ridden maybe, but not walking faster than all the other employees.  People so much younger, so much stronger, should have so much more life than she had.  Her energy and her fire engine red hair, they just weren’t right. 

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – The Busker by Marco Etheridge

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The Busker is the first story, but certainly not the last, written by Marco Etheridge to appear on the site. It is a simple piece that changes keys and time signatures and passes from Vienna to New Orleans and back. There’s something lost and forlorn about it and it has the magic to transport me to two places I have yet to visit, in person.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 350- An Antisocial Experiment, Five Magi, A Special Announcement and Hell’s Jukebox: The Love Songs

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An Antisocial Experiment

There are endless social movements dedicated to improving people by requiring them not to be like people. Depending on your point of view this activity lies somewhere between education and brainwashing. I am old fashioned to the degree that I believe a person is influenced by both her upbringing and whatever chemistry is peculiar to her. You do your best to raise a child and if she grows up to be a doctor or a teacher you share in the credit, if she turns out to be a Josephine Mengela or the incarnation of Lizzie Borden, you shoulder some of the blame.

A person can improve. But people, as a whole, seldom do because there are “leaders” who want you to do as they command and will reward “good behavior” with letting you spend your life gazing into your phone and punish “bad thoughts” with unsupported accusations and placing you under the spotlight on the scaffold for a good old fashioned cyberstoning. This has been going on in one form or another since the invention of the third person–the first child who decides that her parents should be severely sanctioned for bringing her into this overlighted, loud and dreary existence, as well as not allowing her to have a phone until she can use one responsibly.

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All Stories, General Fiction

As If He Still Drives a Capri

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In the lull between my husband’s condemnations, I reminded our daughters that each Sunday is a Christmas. This way of thinking is Karen’s idea. She does Fridays and Saturdays in the shop with me.

She said when sorting citrus, ‘When life serves you lemons–’ and I held up my hand and asked, ‘Is there a cliché for grapefruit?’

Karen couldn’t think of one.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Hacienda of Love by Monika R Martyn.

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The weather app on my phone lies and says there’s only a 10% chance of rain; it’s raining. I listen to the sound of the soft rain as it mingles with the stillness evaporating with the rising sun. The world sleeps, and only the doves are awake with me. Humidity is 96%. Maybe it isn’t raining after all, and the sky is merely sweating. It’s hot in Mexico.

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Short Fiction

Pie-Eyed Peety and the Prohibitionist: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison

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The Principle Players

Pie-Eyed Peety the PDQ Pilsner Pigeon is alive in the sense that he walks the Earth, is self-aware (well, sort of) and is routinely observed “doing stuff to other stuff.” Peety neither breathes nor eats, yet he does speak (again–well, sort of), drinks, urinates, vomits and frequently passes out, so it is assumed that he sleeps, perchance dreams. Through a bizarre, interdimensional transformation unlikely to take place in the Universe again anytime soon, Pie-Eyed Peety the PDQ Pilsner Pigeon, once merely an insensate cartoon character used to move cheap beer in a duplicate Earth, back in the late 1940’s, has been installed on our Earth as an active “citizen.” More simply put, like everyone and -thing else, Peety is.

Unlike Bugs Bunny or a Simpson inserted into a live action film, Peety remains two-dimensional. In form he is as artiscally fine and realistic as one of those “turkeys” little kids draw in school by tracing the outline of their hands on construction paper then cutting it out to be placed on the refrigerator. Peety is about the size of a Big Mac and he wears a fedora and is always seen carrying and drinking from a bottomless can of PDQ Pilsner. He travels around in a yet to be explained by science halo of popping bubbles, as to convey his constant state of intoxication.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Seroquel by Olivia Austin

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I sit in darkness, isolated from the world by a dark wooden door. If I think hard enough, I can imagine I’m standing in a sunny field, or listening to the roar of ocean waves. But I’m not. As much as I try, the thin closet door in the bathroom is not enough to block out the screams.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – Bathroom Throne by Yash Seyedbagheri

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Nobody knew at the opening of 2021 that Yashshar Seyedbagheri would have a record breaking year on the site. At this moment, on an otherwise forgettable Saturday morning in the Summer of ‘21, Yash has appeared thirty times, with more to come. In fact we will be running out of year before all of Yash’s acceptances in 2021 will be posted. It looks like 2022 will be another Red Letter year for this author at Literally Stories.

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