Jamie was a very successful killer.
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Are You Ready Annie? by Martin McNeil.
Annie awoke to the feel and smell of soft, clean linen against her skin. Yesterday’s flight had exhausted her, but she’d slept well, and felt rested. She lay on her back wriggling her toes, deriving a childlike pleasure.
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The Promise by Russell Fee
The lake breeze chilled the back of his neck as he bent over the boulder to inspect the patterns of lichen spreading on its surface like an ink spill. This was the one he was to find. As the receding waves sucked the water from the sand around it, the rock sputtered and gurgled as if it were alive, a nursing infant or a dying soul. He had trekked almost three miles from his cottage to reach this point on the beach, the farthest out on this side of the island. From here it was fifty miles to the mainland over the surface of an inland sea. He removed his clothes, tossing them into the water. He was to carry nothing. Standing nude, he waited, facing the dunes that rose to the stretch of trees above the beach.
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Notion by Chris Klassen
“It’s a lovely day,” my friend, a small sweet person, said to me as we stood on the lawn next to the sidewalk on a warm morning, “and I want to take you to my favourite place, a place I frequent for peace and calm and gentle thinking.” I had never heard of this penchant of hers before, even though we had known each other for a long time. She began walking, meditation-like, with soft quiet steps, and I followed more clumsily. The sidewalk was dust-swept and the grass on each side was manicured meticulously like it had been treated with scissors, like a hair stylist had trimmed it instead of a landscaper. We walked silently for a minute or two.
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Nora in Five Acts by Leila Allison
Act One
Nora Lynn Manning was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on 6 December 1941. Her parents, Arlene and Jay, were high school sweethearts who realized too late that they did not like each other all that much. Still, they chose to marry before Arlene began to show. Like so many hideously bad ideas, it was considered the “right thing” to do.
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Writers Reading – Review by Dale Willliams Barrigar
Kafkaesque
Franz Kafka has a sixty-something-word story called “The Watchman” in the translation from German. In this piece, the narrator keeps running back and forth in front of the watchman in order to taunt him, while also being terrified that he might be arrested at any moment, but unable to desist. In sixty or so words, Kafka encapsulates the outcast outsider, the paranoid underdog known as the modern human being: the contemporary everyman.
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Week 511 – Don’t Let Them kid You, Go Out For A Regular Beer and Inappropriate Ink.
Here we are at Week 511.
I hate this time of year.
I hate the greed of the supermarkets – Just look at any dangling clip-strips, dump bins and every piece of space that is occupied by some shite or another.
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Human Resources by Salena Casha
The first message on Elana’s iCom pulsed red as she stepped out of harassment training. This job gave her no time to breathe. When she’d signed on, they’d told her the cadence would be intense, like drinking water from an Old World firehose. Ironic, for obvious reasons. Just the thought of filtered droplets made her throat hum. Given the time, given her title as Head of Human Resources and Logistics, making jokes about water wasn’t ever in good taste.
It was her tenth day.
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Baby Blues by Jack Powers
Cass had been on the Cold Case Time Travel squad eight years when I replaced her partner, Hoss. We’d done things differently in Present-Day Homicide so I shut up and listened. Cass was a pro, by the book mostly–she could even fix the damn machine! And since no other towns could afford the traveler fees, we’d be in ’60s Harlem one day and ’30s Greenwich the next. I’m guessing they brought me in for the Harlem cases. Brothers don’t tend to open up to two pale folks from the future. Of course, they weren’t supposed to know we were from the future, but occasionally our Era Lingo implants malfunctioned.
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The Horrible Relocation by Marco & Liam Etheridge
A cross-country move is a big change, I get that, but no way I deserve this nightmare I’ve landed in. The relocation wasn’t even my idea. Doctor’s orders, right? The doc said I needed a drier climate and less stress. And the move did lower my stress level, at least initially. Putting three thousand miles between me and the cops, that’s a hidden bonus. Needless to say, I didn’t mention that to the good doctor.
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