When I walked into Helen Arbuckle’s room, I knew something was wrong. Her eyes were bright. She was watching television and smiling. She was alive. And I mean that in a way that the nearly-departed are not supposed to be alive. She was dying, for Hell’s sake. The least she could do is have the decency to look the part.
Continue reading “A Bad Day for Death by Thurman Hart”
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today,” the priest recited – as he did every Sunday – but today wasn’t Sunday.
Continue reading “Always by Karen Uttien”
I was seven years old when I first tasted death.
My father Nehemiah had sent me down the pit so he would have some drinking money, and I cut my leg on a jagged sail of rusted metal as I made my way down a tunnel.
It sang its way through my undernourished leg meat and by the time I had finished the day’s work,(my father would not have tolerated me shirking from an honest day’s graft, regardless of severe wounds. He had Guinness to drink) my peeling dealer boot was filled to its sloshing brim with a hot soup of blood.
Continue reading “The Many Deaths of Neptune Gilderoy by Alex Sinclair”
Our lovely editor Leila has worked incredibly hard at Reruns ever since we introduced the feature. In all that time she has chosen dozens of stories, written the blurb for them and produced interesting and amusing questions. I reckon it is Leila’s turn. Her cannon on the site is huge, and it’s impossible to pick one out as ‘better’ than the rest because they are all excellent. There is a vast range of genre and every one has something unique so this was not an easy task. The stories also come in little groups, each one a comment on a relationship, a gang or group of characters, fictionally fictional or just fictional 😊 (with a nod to Daisy Cloverleaf). As I was trying to choose one, I opened dozens, so I think my best advice would be for anyone reading this to just go to Leila’s pages and stroll through the treasures.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Saint Frances Everlasting by Leila Allison.”
DREAMING
Many writers are influenced by their dreams and nightmares–or at least that is the claim. I don’t dispute the possibility but if I had to lean on my dreams for material my stuff would be sparse and even stranger. A fine example of such happened just the other night when I experienced a dream I call “Bug-Bird.” My mind was in a white page and just ahead skulked Bug-Bird. Half Moth, half Pigeon and clad in a flasher’s raincoat and wearing a fedora, I could only see Bug-Bird from behind. But I spied antennae through holes in his hat, tail feathers and Pigeon feet. Bug-Bird staggered forward and I was gaining on him (only a guy would dare be Bug-Bird). I recall wanting to tap him on the shoulder and have a look at Bug-Bird but that is when I woke, with the words Bug-Bird, Bug-Bird, Bug-Bird chanting in my mind by what might be called a “sulfurous chorus” of demon voices. Hardly bestseller material there–and perhaps the only way Bug-Bird can get into print is through something like this.
Continue reading “WEEK 444: Bug-Bird And Dreams”
The Doctor is cleaning up Jerry’s mess, as usual. With a grunt, he bends, grabs the dead boy beneath the armpits and drags him toward the stairs. While the Doctor works, Jerry hides in an attic bedroom of their mind, eyes closed, fingers in his ears.
Continue reading “Jerry’s Last Problem by Jennifer Maloney”
Contains references some readers may find distressing, please refer to the tabs at the bottom of the page.
In the library I see a woman photocopying ultrasound scans. At first, I am sure not sure what she is doing, though I can clearly see her take the scan out of a purple folder and place it on the screen of the photocopier, before closing it and moving across to the screen to input her instructions. It is obvious that she is photocopying the scan – after my eyes recognise the black and white image, they then pass over the slight swell of her stomach, the glance more instinct than choice – and yet, it takes a few seconds for the obviousness of it to make sense in my thoughts; there is also a suggestion that I am not thinking of them correctly, that ‘ultrasound scans’ is not the correct terminology, but as to what it might be I do not know right at that moment, and this misnaming is, I believe, contributing to the delay of the realisation.
Continue reading “Scans by Edward Lee”
I’m sleepwalking at night again but my wife sleeps so deeply she can’t hear my cries for help. Tonight, I’m balancing on a boat on the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. I hear hungry seagulls gliding through the salty air. “You can’t make me jump!” I call out to the fleets of ships and submarines that have surrounded me. “I will never give in.” When I crack my head on the medicine cabinet and cotton buds fall to my feet like confetti, I realise the cold tap from the bath is overflowing and I’m standing on the weighing scales, waving a loo roll at the mirror.
Continue reading “Sleepwalking Visions by Tim Frank”
Release is real. These days there aren’t many left who’ll deny that. We’ve all had our glimpses. Maybe you caught someone’s eye at a bus stop in the rain, and when they smiled back it was like something heavy tearing loose inside you. You felt the future drain away through your fingertips. Not your future, the future.
Continue reading “A Latecomer’s Guide to Release by Greg Golley”
Ancient starlight is a key ingredient in Magick. Forget sunshine; aged roughly eight minutes upon arriving at Earth, it’s too raw and is to starlight what prison wine is to hundred-year-old cognac. And culling the rays that bounce back off something like Saturn only adds a few meaningless hours to the photons. Yes, the older the better, all the way from Deneb and Andromeda, Rigel and Beteguese, the maniacal red-shifted glimmers that howl silently through the endless now, the insane shine of forever.
Continue reading “For Whom the Elm Toad by Leila Allison”
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