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”
Pineapple yoghurt. Trifle. The last few months he wanted milky things. I bought a bottle of Rémy Martin. He took a sip, made a face. ‘It’s too much now, too strong. I’m sorry,’ he said.
I hear everything: the soft cry of my mother, the beep of the heart monitor, the whispers of the nurses, and the subtle hum of the air conditioner. I feel the rough texture of my hospital gown against my skin, the cold hand of the doctor every morning when he visits, and the warm hand of my mother every time she touches my cheek. I am awake. Wide awake.
“… bled all over the counter, staining my hands and the floor before I could get it cleaned up,” finished the lanky, slightly dirty, anemic-looking kid ringing me out, unaware, or perhaps undaunted, by the fact that I hadn’t been listening to him.
Leila Allison has dug deep now into the archives and rooted out a gem from the early days with a story by June Griffin. This is what she said:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Margaret’s Mementos by June Griffin”
Here we are at week 203. That number seemed so boring that I didn’t even look it up!
I’ve been thinking about animals this week. And no, not in that way! I may be a bit strange but I’m not fucking deranged!
Continue reading “Glam Rock, Docken Leaves And Some Other Barry White.”
Fear has seeped into my sixty-year-old bones. Dread is my shadow and accompanies my every step. Terror has hollowed me out, emptied me, leaving me broken and brittle.
“This has got to be the sorriest sight I have ever witnessed in my long and storied military career!”
“One dollar,” young Earl C. Calder said and looked at the farmer before him transfixed on the small the blue vial Earl held in his hand.
Earl didn’t blink in the mid-day sun, all 110 pounds of himself holding steady next to Ida. The vial of elixir they had emptied the night before still floated through him, but he didn’t flinch, not Madam Wilma T.’s son, born in a brothel and groomed for greatness.
Continue reading “The Grass Jesus Walked On by Elizabeth Bruce”
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