All Stories, Horror, Short Fiction

Mr. Lucky by Frederick K Foote

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I’m one lucky son-of-a-gun. I’m not boasting or complaining. I didn’t create my good luck. It was something that just dropped on me. I’m not talking about that fool’s gold good luck of winning the lottery or a bet on the Kentucky Derby. I’m talking about the real meal deal like when you bend down to pick up a dime, and there’s a hail of bullets hitting the wall where your head was seconds ago. My kind of good fortune steers me out of harm’s way, and when I do enter the danger zone, I leave pretty much intact.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Horror, Short Fiction

You Won’t Believe It by Rohit Arora

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I was driving at 85. The night was darker than it should have been. There was nothing on the road, not in the windshield, not in the mirrors. I was so sure that we were not coming back. That we would go into the dark and then never appear at the other side of the road. She lay on the back seat staring at me like a voodoo doll. Oh, and she was dead. Did I tell you she was dead? She was. The wind whistled past me through the window like running away from something. The trees beside the road ran back. I looked at her once and she blinked. I turned back and focused on the road.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Fertility by Jeffrey Penn May

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Justin and the campesino, Santos, spent the morning hiking deep into a ravine, carefully picking their way down narrow goat paths and occasionally chopping through vines and thickets. Now they were at the bottom of the ravine and sitting on a boulder that sloped into a stream snaking around gray rocks and lush vegetation. Santos was tired, a man who had lived well past fifty, pushing sixty maybe; it was difficult to tell. He had been evasive about his age, gesturing with his callused hand and saying, “Viejo. Old.” The younger man Justin had stated boldly without shame that he was twenty-seven.

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All Stories, Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 98 – Sawdust, Alterations And What’s Missing?

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We have every now and then done things a wee bit differently. This is one of those times.

So with that in mind, I hand you over to Diane who will explain more about the story and why we are publishing it.

On occasion we receive submissions that miss the guidelines by miles but for whatever reason they catch our attention and demand an outing. We thought that this story Sawdust was in that category so here is a little extra treat for our readers.

Diane

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Back Side of Sight by Tom Sheehan

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In the bedroom, upstairs, front corner, blind amid the toss of linens he had known intimately for seven long years, in touch with passing traffic and summer conversations when the windows were open, Jack Derrick lay in the middle of sound, in the middle of darkness. His left leg, or most of it, set upon by diabetes and the perfection of the surgeon, was elsewhere; his right hand was stained by nicotine, the index finger and close companion yellowed as shoe leather, and those fingernails bore fragments of that same deep stain. Gray, thin hair, most of it about his ears except for one thatch above his forehead as if an odd bird, at length, would roost there, drooped like fallen stalk. The stubble of his beard sprouted as off-white as an old field of corn waiting the last reaper.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Ghosts by Terry Sanville

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Nathan Bellamy hunched over a cardboard box on the floor of his bedroom closet. He sorted through a stack of yellowed papers: insurance policies for cars long sold; records of mortgage payments that Loraine filed away during their first years of marriage. They’d lived in the house on a quiet street in Pacific Grove for more than four decades. Nathan felt her spirit in every room that he’d cleaned out, even in the musty closet with its dark corners filled with old shoes and empty suitcases.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Workplace Harmony by Rebecca Field

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Eric slammed the fridge door in disgust. It had definitely gone. He’d been looking forward to that can of cherry cola all morning and somebody had taken it. It was the audacity of it that really got to him; who would be so brazen?

 Clutching his plastic clip-top box of ham sandwiches closer to him, he slunk back to his desk, eyeing up his co-workers with suspicion as he went.

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All Stories, Fantasy, Short Fiction

Frivolous by David Henson

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“You should’ve just popped in, Mathis,” Mrs. Kelly says opening the door. “You know we’re waiting for you. Come, come.”

“I never like to presume, Mrs. Kelly,” Mathis says entering the small home. “It’s nice to see you again.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Body in the Bay by James Hanna

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Nietzsche’s cutting quote, “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you,” is by now a redundancy.  And so, when I became a San Francisco probation officer, I prepared myself to keep company with the abyss.  But I had not quite realized how extensive the abyss was.  I saw it in the eyes of the senior probation officers, so exhausted by massive caseloads that they were counting the months to retirement.  I saw it in the faces of deputy jailors, disaffected shift workers who were all but deaf to the human clamor of the cell ranges.  And, of course, I saw it in my clientele: hollow-cheeked crack heads, asocial gang bangers, vagrants with thousand mile stares.  But at least the abyss could be mellow where probationers were concerned.  It was mellow in the case of Joseph Shepherd, a middle-age drug peddler on probation for choking his girlfriend.  Entering my office for his intake interview, he glanced at the tower of case files on my desk and chuckled.  “I know you have it rough,” he remarked in a voice that could be poured over waffles.  “So I plan to make it easy on you, sir.”  He smiled with the insular charm of a sociopath then shook my hand with a python grip.  He seemed to be a man of elemental strength—a brawn with a life of its own—yet his broad open face and puppy dog eyes set me completely at ease.

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