Fantasy, Short Fiction

The Mynah Fall and the Major Lift: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison

ireneallison12

Marianne was an uncommon Common Hill Mynah. Hill Mynahs are native to Southeast Asia, but they can be hatched anywhere in the world as long as they are kept warm. This was the case with Marianne, who had been born in Norway, lived for a time on the Greek island of Hydra, then Asia, Canada, the American northeast and eventually wound up residing at a Bird sanctuary at the University of Southern California at Burbank. In her first six years, Marianne had seen more of the planet than most people see in a lifetime.

She was a well adjusted and happy Mynah, with a large, eclectic vocabulary drawn from several cultures. And all was going well until the following sort of thing began to happen on a daily basis:

Continue reading “The Mynah Fall and the Major Lift: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical By Leila Allison” →
Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 337 – Adult Warning Is All Your Getting, Repeating Like A Radish And Where The Fuck Is A Rip Tide When You Need One.

literallystories2014

I find it weird how alike we are and how the same mistakes, attitudes, attempts go from generation to generation.

For example, all babies try to walk on tip-toes first. Either that or they are craving to be taller. And sorry to give a reality check to disillusional parents, it doesn’t mean that your kid is going to be a ballerina. It has more chance of being a crack addict or some form of prostitute.

Continue reading “Week 337 – Adult Warning Is All Your Getting, Repeating Like A Radish And Where The Fuck Is A Rip Tide When You Need One.” →
All Stories, General Fiction, Romance

Cold Night’s Dark Advances by Tom Sheehan

literallystories2014

And always it is this Gift-giver, this woman from the other side of midnight, this darkness that is not taken from. And she comes in pieces, trajectories, soft angles and planes, curves from a world galore I look for in this, her classroom of touch, taste, and sleek terrors wherein she says, Hello, Two-Dream Tommy, here are dimensions of a barrier, the two roads you must take one at a time if you’re meeting me and getting crushed that side of midnight. Oh, is she north of me or south, breathing yet or not, an image impossible to see, yet I would bet on her on either road I find. Lo, I speak out to her and dream of her, spraddled, urgent, these two parts of unspeakable darkness. Do they have to mean or what become?

It is more than geography hugging me, but what deliciousness in the wind in January, trees stripped to the rawest dimensions, oh bare bark that’s borne. On edges of this electric road, crows by dozens the only intruders in full dress shadows, a three-day-old snow crusting to gray, three marvelous, mysterious wires hanging as if they knot ships together at low tide, weighted with more than a sense of ice, sing a song through the keen teeth of a day going down to its knees in her own perfection. Absolve me, love.

Continue reading “Cold Night’s Dark Advances by Tom Sheehan” →
All Stories, General Fiction

About 465 nm:  A Chronology by Martin Agee

literallystories2014

Age 7

You can’t imagine how much I loved holidays. Especially Christmas. Getting out the Christmas records and playing them over and over on the stereo. There was a Bing Crosby one where he talked in soothing tones about Young Jethro unwrapping presents all done up with paper that looked like stained glass. Decorating the tree. I was a Christmas ornament. Miss Twitchell told us to bring our school photo and we cut it into a triangle and put popsicle sticks around the edge. She came around and put glue on them and we sprinkled dusty sparkles that looked like icicles all along the frame and it made us feel proud. We knew we’d be right there on the tree, front and center, and everyone would say “oooh” as the tinsel reflected off the sparkles that made our faces with smiles shine and our lips look like flower petals that would bloom in different colors in April. I’m still there, somewhere down inside a cardboard box under the stairs wrapped in newspaper that’s got 1950 and some other words on it. Once a year I come out and hang there smiling at everyone with sparkly popsicle frame.

Continue reading “About 465 nm:  A Chronology by Martin Agee” →
Short Fiction

The Cormorant and the Afterlife Coach By Leila Allison

ireneallison12

At age six, Gordon Cormorant suffered a midlife crisis. Sensitive and melancholy, Gordon believed that he’d explored every mystery that life had to offer a Brandt’s Cormorant. It seemed that the only thing left was to while away his remaining seasons on Cormorant Piling, with similarly disillusioned members of his species, gleaning hollow accomplishment from ferryspotting and offending humans with the frequent and hoselike power defecations peculiar to his kind.

Cormorant Piling stood fifty yards out in Philo Bay. There were other pilings, but the one taken over by the large black birds was by far the largest. It was composed of twenty steel-banded telephone pole timbers sunk deep into the floor of the harbor. The human reason for its existence was to correct the crooked approaches of incoming ferries to the terminal dock. The large vessels brushed their sides against the piling several times a day, with varying intensity. Most times there’d be a slight bump, on rare occasions the boats would strike with such force that the piling would rock violently–sometimes even cracking the timbers.

Continue reading “The Cormorant and the Afterlife Coach By Leila Allison” →
All Stories, General Fiction

The Sowbelly Trio by James Hanna

literallystories2014

My wife, Mary, and I sit on the front porch of our Florida home. Mary is feeling nostalgic, so she asks me a syrupy question. I never feel very comfortable when Mary asks me such questions. I am not good at providing the sort of answers women like to hear.

Continue reading “The Sowbelly Trio by James Hanna” →
All Stories, General Fiction

Crack by Yash Seyedbagheri 

literallystories2014

The train horn rises through my window. It starts as a hum, but rises to a wail, insistent and bursting, fragments of noise burying themselves in my ears, in my body.

I cover my ears again, sitting on my bed. Mother tells me to think of anything else, moving closer and closer. She plops beside me, a defeated little plop.

“Close your eyes, Nicky,” she says, her lips quivering. “Take your mind elsewhere.”

Continue reading “Crack by Yash Seyedbagheri “ →
Short Fiction

Week 336: The Words of Prophets and My Unsteady Jukebox

ireneallison12

The Words of the Prophets

I had lost the ability to hear The Sound of Silence until Disturbed brought it back brilliantly in 2015. My mind gets that way with songs; I can hear them too many times–at that saturation point they assume the guise of an echo that my mind ignores upon further soundings. But Distubed’s over the top yet somehow restrained remake of the Simon and Garfunkel classic brought back to me one of the truly great lines in the history of music: The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls…

I wonder what Paul Simon felt when he wrote that line in 1965. Did it excite him or was he so lost in composition that it was just more words to choose from. I also wonder what Da Vinci experienced when he finished Mona Lisa. Did he bask in the glow of his own genius or eat cheese? Now, obviously you can ask Simon the question, but I doubt he could give you the actual answer because time has a way of reshaping memories, and inevitably a legend of some sort will creep in and take the actual event’s shape. I’m not saying he’d lie, but there stands a chance he’d buy the mirage.

Continue reading “Week 336: The Words of Prophets and My Unsteady Jukebox” →