Here we are at Week 205.
Anyone who has read our previous posts at this time will know that we all write a wee message, so I’ll do the reviews and such-like first.
We had three new writers, one on his second story and me.
The topics included; Limited customers, a surprising film buff, a bridge, a soul-mate and medication.
As always our initial comments follow.
Continue reading “Week 205 – Christmas Break, Christmas Messages And Super Sex.”
Rita Sajevic lost her mind on home plate at 5:15 pm, two days after dual interviews at competing churches. She’d work the night shift cleaning 11 blocks from home. All this was in shorthand on her palm faded by cherry red ink. On her other palm was a tattoo of a fetus whose life ended tragically. After Rita relived the event, outside of confession mind you, I swore to several saints never to retell that story to anyone.
Magnificently justified, she teeters on the parapet of her limestone tower. The herd lows below, and in the autumn air all stands still except for Tom, who has spied her from a distance and now is racing to her rescue. Her foot shifts and slips a bit, sending down a pebble cascade, but her heart is strong, and she refuses to be petrified. She stares straight ahead at the hillside, where leaves fall from their trees, drifting, dropping, like children’s valentines into makeshift paper-bag mailboxes taped to her classroom wall many years before. Cards of teddy bears with hearts, Hello Kitty with hearts, blooming flowers with hearts, circus lions proclaiming, “You’re purr-fect!” Suppressing squeals, children scurry. Others’ bags fill up. In hers, not one. Eyes anchored on the hillside, all she sees is disregard. That and the teacher frowning with pity for poor Samantha San Gabriel, so shy and so odd.
He looked around. It was dark but there were a few lights on the bridge. He stood in the middle and peered over the side, down into the water. The night was still and the smell of the trees and moss made him smile. The countryside always had that effect on him, this was as good a place as any.
Continue reading “Nature And Nurture – The Devil’s Mix by Hugh Cron – Adult Content.”
The home-med stopped giving Alice her usual meds on Tuesday, and by Friday she was feeling unlike the person she’d been, unlike anyone she’d ever met or even heard about. The feelings were waves pushing a new tide ashore, erasing and redrawing the beach of her mind with each of a thousand pulses from an ocean she’d been unaware of until sometime on Thursday. She’d lain in bed Thursday night, drifting in a sweaty tangle of cotton, dangerous and terrifying thoughts banging noisily around inside her skull; Alice couldn’t decide if she was more scared that the new thoughts and feelings would continue or that they’d stop.
The Almighty was taking a bath. It had been a long week with the creation of the universe and whatnot, and He felt he was due some respite. The water was perfect, the temperature set just so. The tub big enough that he could stretch out and rest his head on the rim while playing with the two ornate gold taps at the far end with his toes. And of course, the bubbles. The good lord could never have too many bubbles. A small rubber duck bobbed up and down, it’s bright yellow head briefly appearing above the waves of suds before vanishing once more. Closing his eyes, he soaked in the pleasure of a good bath and a hard weeks work, and slowly but surely, he drifted off…
Continue reading “The Man Who Sold the World by Martyn Miller”
Another suggested blast from the past by Leila Allison. Again she has chosen a regular to the site and this is what she said:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – When Planets Miss by Doug Hawley”
I’m getting this out the road this week and I’ll try and be nice next week!
I’ve avoided it for a while but the ‘C’ word is coming and not the ‘C’ word that I am comfortable with.
Continue reading “Week 204 – Christmas Pondering, Tattie Soup And Acceptable Leakage.”
It´s a balmy evening, there´s a couple leaning out of a dimly lit window at the side of a house overlooking an alley. They´re both naked and their heads are wreathed in smoke from their cigarettes, its effect heightened by the intermittent blinking of a faulty street light. You can´t even see the moon or stars.
Let´s call her Kate and him Daniel.
Continue reading “The Night of the Haunted by Michael McCarthy”
These were more than echoes, the soft sounds I was hearing from the rear of the barn sitting back from Route 182 in Franklin, Maine, half a dozen fat pigs to one side, corn as deep as Iowa on the other side, and the terrain across the road flush with blueberry bushes until a slow rise tipped the landscape in its favor… and in mine. In my son Tim’s favor, too. He lives by this barn. Perhaps I had lived waiting for its sassy voices.
Continue reading “Talk from the Back of Tim’s Barn by Tom Sheehan”
literally stories 