Everything is opposite. That’s what I tell my therapist. Like a snakebite, the first-aid is not to wash the wound. You suck the venom out because whatever you swallow, your stomach kills. Or a concussion. People say never sleep after a concussion. But sleep is how your brain recovers.
“What the good Jesus!” Pete Tura yelled and disappeared, and as he said it again, his voice muffled, his mouth most likely closed by horse manure, a whole nine yards of it, the bottom of the collection box hanging from the second floor of the Hood’s Milk Company horse barn in West Lynn let go, taking my pal with it. I last saw one arm, not waving goodbye, probably trying to keep the pitchfork from doing him damage. Possibly he had tried to throw it behind him. That innocent weapon of deadly tines was not in sight as I peered down into the mixture of black clutter and hay still settling down with a metronomic slowness you could count.
Continue reading “Fred Rippon’s Mushroom House by Tom Sheehan”
Leila Allison slipped past security yet again. We could hear her rustling and cursing and she emerged, dusty and dishevelled with this Rerun from the One and Only Hugh Cron:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Four Bars by Hugh Cron”
Here we are at Week 238.
Yet again, the number is as interesting as listening to a conversation about moisturising. And before anyone thinks I’m being sexist, I’m not. Not being gender specific is an even sadder state of affairs.
The amaryllis appeared on the windowsill one Sunday morning in June. The bulb protruded from the soil in the cream-coloured ceramic pot, and sat next to the basil plant we had diligently kept alive for four whole weeks.
The cobbled streets bloat, filled with petrol fumes, birds’ droppings, and old receipts discarded by office workers returning home. A clock chimes seven times.
Mum opens the windows each morning to let the birds in and closes them at night to keep the darkness out.
Olivia squeezed the handle of her wheelchair so hard the veins stood out on her bony wrists.
Early evening light, what was left of it, spilled near Jack Wilkens in his one lone room in the big house, a house once flaunting and imposing in its stance, now cluttered like an old shed forgotten in a back lot, debris its main décor. Despite his reputation as the town drunk, a ne’er-do-well from the first day, an inveterate crank, there had been an instant and subtle attraction between me and the old codger, an attraction without early explanation.
Continue reading “A Secret Study of Jack Wilkens, Drunk by Tom Sheehan”
Leila tells us this rerun was just waiting to be chosen – this is what she said:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – The Dumb by Doug Hawley”
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