A short story by T.C. Barrera
from the on-going series yet-to-find-a-home,“Counting the Birds”
“Eli… Listen… Long as the vents blow cold and the wine stays colder, these motherfuckers don’t give a fuck, alright? How much are ya thinkin’?”
Colour Clash by Sandra Arnold
My brother parks the car opposite the house with the red door that used to be grey. The treeless street looks even grimmer than I recall. I glance at the rows of identical houses with the grey pebble-dash walls, trying to remember the neighbours who once occupied them. Women in pinnies and headscarves scrubbing their front steps. Sweeping their concrete paths. Men rolling drunk up those paths. Sound of yelling and slapping. Immaculately dressed children with polished shoes.
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Beetles by Brandon McWeeney
The beetles live in the stump out back, festering beneath the rotting remnants of an old dule tree. I call them, and they rise—the black coil of death—thousands of them climbing up, up, up and over each other, hissing and clicking, putting her together like sentient fog. Black fog. Only sometimes, especially when they’re hungry, they don’t quite get her shape right; I appreciate their efforts and reward them dearly, but when they get her wrong, I want to scream.
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The Rules of Love by Arjun Shah
“You are not here to become a man, because to become a man you must first learn the rules of love,” Vikram Paya, the best of us, began on the first day of the Dhoon School Weekly Newspaper class. “No, my old sons of Bombay, my riotous banchods of Delhi, you fish-eating Bengalis, and the rest of you celestial bodies, suburbanites, the few villagers—you are here to go to better places, because, after all, The Dhoon School is but a waiting-place for Cambridge, for Oxford… for the lucky few of you—here, you will not learn to be great men but exemplary boys…”
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Writers Read. A Most Unfortunate Incident by Geraint Jonathan
Apparently, in the Russian original, Dostoevsky is a very funny writer, his novels rich in comic turns, witty wordplay and, not infrequently, downright farce. That this may be lost in translation is often all too evident from the many English translations to date. (For some reason, as David Foster Wallace somewhere points out, Dostoevsky’s characters are still made to say things like “The devil take it!”, rather than, say, “To hell with it!”; such archaic expressions abound, lending a stiffnecked quality to even the most anarchic of situations described.) That said, however, there’s barely an English translation of Dostoevsky’s 1862 novella, A Most Unfortunate Incident, that does not carry at least some of the tale’s comic heft; other translations are titled, variously, An Unpleasant Predicament, A Sordid Story, A Nasty Anecdote, A Disgraceful Affair; but for my money, it’s Ivy Litvinoff’s translation from 1971 carries the day.
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Week 538 – He Was Brilliant In ‘On Frozen Ground’, I Thank The Trooper Of The Plague And Ah Need Some Time. (Mibbee)
Well hello there China’s!! (See Rikki Fulton – I’ve mentioned him before)
Here we are at Week 538 – These posts are fair drawin’ in. As it is after the 21st of June, which was the Summer Solstice here, that means that the days are getting shorter which really has fuck all to do with the post!! I just like the phrase!!
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Another Way to Do It by Stephen Silvester
Punch – the professor only used the honorific Mr when trying to seize the butterfly attention of excited children – woke up one morning and decided enough was enough. From his random dangling position it so happened that he was looking at – it could hardly be into – one of the glazed eyes of his unlawfully wedded. He didn’t know whether she was awake or not; he was only ever fairly confident that she was when she was on the other end of the tug of war with the baby and had already assumed the professor’s rather camp baritone. Punch sniffed the air and wondered if being upside down was making his sense of smell more acute.
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Beast of Burden by Frederick K Foote
In the marketplace, a couple of miles from my military base, a brown-skinned indigenous woman was walking with such grace and a mischievous face that she caught my eye, slowed my walk, and reversed my direction.
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Shadow by T H White
Tom Mitchell had lived alone for longer than he could remember. His wife, Lily, had passed away a decade ago, and their children had long since moved away, caught in lives of their own. The house, once filled with laughter and warmth, now echoed with a quiet, unrelenting stillness. Even the walls seemed to breathe differently, like they were holding their breath, waiting for something – or someone.
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Tiny Dancers by P A Farrell
In her nursing home bed, petite Margaret, just four feet tall, stared at the ceiling under the dim glow of fluorescent lights, her face devoid of the vibrancy it once held. Legs that had leapt across a sound stage lay thin and mottled with brown age spots. Feet that had slid into dainty slippers now stood as small, rigid reminders of long ago.
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literally stories 