All Stories, General Fiction

Vigilant by Doug Hawley

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At first it was thought to be an isolated case.  A loud, self-important person said that his cell phone had overheated and mildly burned his ear while he was talking about his proctology exam on a crowded bus.  When several others related incidents while talking loudly about work, grocery lists and fights with spouses or bosses occurred, the phenomenon quickly passed through urban legend into a genuine mystery.  Because the cell phones only overheated in certain situations, no one could find any problem inherent in the phones themselves.  The problem had to be external.

After the hot cell phone cases became well known, the long-suffering public began to cheer each burnt ear and was happy to lose the distracting and irritating chatter of the cell bozos.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Lemondrop by Meghan Louise Wagner

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I sat a long time before going up to the house. Vanessa lived on the left side of a duplex behind the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. There was a pink beauty salon chair on the white paint chipped front porch. Weathered cardboard boxes filled with National Geographic magazines and empty Marlboro 100 packs were stacked in the corner. After I knocked at the door, it opened and I saw Vanessa standing there before me. I knew her as the regular who always asked for extra soymilk in her reusable coffee mugs but my manager called her Fat Madonna. I didn’t get the joke until he showed me a picture on his phone one day.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Was Und Warum Bist Du by Leila Allison

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Was und warum bist du? asked the Invisible Rain of an old man seated at a small table, on which lay a bottle of vodka and a snub-nose revolver. The Invisible Rain tapped out its ceaseless question on the window, roof and eaves, the walls and even on the underside of the floor. The old man refused to answer. He never did. Although the Invisible Rain already knew everything there was to know, it was greedy and insatiable; it increased exponentially with what it devoured, thus always hungry. Why feed a thing that can never get enough? The old man imagined himself as a drum in outer space: “Beat me as long and hard as you can, you’ll never hear a thing.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Two Fathoms Down by Tom Sheehan

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“Though curious, be you kind to yourself, and leave here now, lest you ….”

Anton Chalkov thought he chased only a dream out of Siberia, a dream and nothing more. He boated across the Bering Strait, with divine intervention on few occasions, and into Alaskan waters. Once ashore in Alaska it was obvious he had not gone far enough and set out, overland for a portion of his journey and then back on coastal waters in the company of fishermen, for the New World of America. All this travel in pursuit of the dream. The dogs he bought for the overland portions of his trip were masterful, they too having good blood in them, born for the snow and the task. The dogs got him all the way through a few of Canada’s territories, before he swapped them for one horse in Montana territory of America, where he had been headed all the time.

He’d been a Cossack, now he wanted to be a cowboy.

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All Stories, Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Week 197 – Critiquing, Commenting And Not Getting Wood

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Hello there folks.

I just wanted to pass on that our Sunday Re-Run spot is doing very well. Leila has embraced this with her perception and wit, Dave Henson is there being thoughtful and selective and L’Erin has also thrown her pen or typing finger into the fold and we would keep asking that more of you get involved.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Man of Mine by Emily Suzanne Young

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“Isn’t this all a bit – I don’t know – American?”

It was the only description I could think of that fully captured my distaste. I sat in the kitchen with my arms crossed, looking up at where Jack, my husband, and William, his publicist, were standing on the other side of the kitchen island; the low-hanging light above us illuminated their faces as they watched my every reaction.

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