All Stories, Fantasy

The Toll Collector by Jack Kamm

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“There’s a toll for everything…the toll for happiness is often sorrow.” — James Carr

Would you opt for a different life if you had the choice?  This is the question I asked myself, a question so burning that it dampened my palms; it’s also the question I needed to ask my best friend, Charlie, because we both hated our lives—just as much as the guy who pulled up to my booth on that icy evening. Under the amber lights, his red Jaguar gleamed like a ruby. Decked out in a fancy camel-hair overcoat, he told me he was gonna jump off the bridge.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

Behind this Stone by Tom Sheehan

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I’ve always listened to humming here in this old house of mine, thinking so many times from my early years that it was the universe humming, or the humming of the gods coming to sensitive me, especially in that period around my 12th year when my imagination ran wild.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

The Confession of the Mayo Killer by Thurman Hart

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First thing is this: You didn’t catch me. You aren’t smart enough to catch me. I gave up. I confessed. That’s it. Make sure you get it right.

Second thing is this: I have regret. I mean it. I really feel bad about killing those people. Except that first guy, but that’s different, because he deserved it. But the other six? Okay, yeah, maybe some more than others, but I have regret.

You want me to run through them? Fine. Take notes, because I’m not doing this twice.

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Short Fiction, sunday whatever

Sunday Whatever: A Double Shot of Diane M. Dickson

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For this fine Sunday we present two little pieces written by our own Diane M. Dickson. One is an article the other is one of those odds and ends tales best suited for this feature in its own indefinable little way.

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Editor Picks, Short Fiction

Week 478: We Keep Playing Them Word Games Forever

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Roughly speaking, there are more than six-hundred thousand words in the English language (minus the stuff you see on medicine jar labels). The average English speaker’s vocabulary is between twenty and thirty-five thousand words. Anyone can contribute new words to the language; Mr Shakespeare added seventeen-hundred now commonly used words on his own. But with so many words, it is inevitable that some of the juicier ones are often overlooked. (Quick disclaimer–the obviously googled numbers produced many results–I selected the sanest looking source to quote.)

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All Stories, General Fiction, Horror

Hooked by Jack Kamm

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“We create monsters and then we can’t control them.” –Joel Coen

Looking back through the window of memory with all its scratches, I’m driven to tell my story not to frighten but to enlighten because in the end—that cocky, inescapable end—-it’s truth, not reality, that transforms us. According to Dr. Hornsby, the men shuffling cards at my kitchen table that December at 3 in the morning were part of what he called my ongoing childhood fantasy— except that, unlike all the other fantasies, this one was the first that could be fatal. 

“It’s called paracosm, Peter,” he informed me.  “None of it is real.”

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All Stories, Historical

Shinmiyangyo, 1971 by Samuel T. Hake.

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Dock-tailed and white-eyed, the aged collie barked at a boy’s approach. The boy halted and then crept on in silence. Her cloudy gaze remained fixed. Twenty paces down he turned and watched the blind animal still shouting threats at that vacated point. He stood dumb, impressed. Something caught his eye in the rear of Train Man’s house. It was a dark figure swinging a large hammer in the perpetual motion of an oil derrick, and from that ceaseless striking of steel on steel emanated a violence so general it seemed part of the air.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

Bunker Cleaning Lady by Franny French

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They only had time to perfect the robot dog, and the robot car, and the robot bank teller, which still eyed people like me with suspicion. And the robot mail carriers, whose knee socks would not stay up. And the robot Walmart greeters, whose human accents weren’t much better than the old GPS bots that put the emphasis on the wrong syllable (“Take a left onto ML … K-Junior Boulevard”). And the robot armed-agents-of-the-state, which, it’s weird, actually did resemble pigs. Before the outside air became unbreathable, they never got around to perfecting the robot house cleaner. That left them no choice but to save people like me, laborers who more and more had gotten used to things not working in our favor.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Monster at the end of this Tale by Mohammed Babajide Mohammed

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Growing up as a Nigerian meant that your parents filled your head with all sorts of supernatural phenomena. When we were children, my mother would tell us these euphoric stories, a lot of which kept us up all night, like they kept a lot of other kids around us up at night as they too were being told these stories in their own homes.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Horror

Gentlemens’ Agreement by Steven French

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As one of the new faculty members at a small Midwestern college, I used to get the short straw when it came to various off-campus activities, such as ‘community outreach’. Basically, that involved a long drive out to some godforsaken rural township in the middle of nowhere to give a talk on local history to a bunch of bored Shriners. Who never asked questions, never showed any more interest than ‘that’s another event ticked off the calendar’ and who wouldn’t even stump up for dinner afterwards. Which meant hunting down a diner somewhere for a slice of pie as a reward to myself, partnered with a stay-awake coffee and refill.

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