Tag: Addiction

All Stories, General Fiction

The Hedge by Penny Faircloth

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The town fidgets on a rock outcrop spouting with springs. Only a few decades ago its salient features were a few old-time stringband musicians busking on the pavement, a minor moviehouse, a tractor showroom, the teaching college and the big Baptist church that owned the majority. Some of those old boys and girls are Grammy winners since, but the theater awaits refurbishment and the tractor palace is a coffee shop, the university is open to everyone and the Baptist Church is at most number two on the scene. The university has become the largest landholder in town. It owns almost everything. Another two thousand students and it can advance to a higher football division. Football has cleaned up the town.

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All Stories, General Fiction

All These Dreams and Tomorrow Too by Leila Allison

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Words cannot adequately express the giddy joy I experienced while I stood on the ferry’ s bow, alone with my “escort” (an amiable deckhand twice my size, half my age), as the vessel glided swiftly across the gunmetal Puget Sound toward Charleston, where the Law awaited me with open bracelets. The early spring sun made a lovely show of going down behind the Olympic Mountains–all dreampurple and pastel poetry. It had been ages since I had felt a sunset unfettered by loss. I was was further gladdened when my escort shooed off some fool who had come out of the cabin to capture (thus desecrate) the sunset on his phone. There was a reason we were alone; that reason (also, twice my size, half my age) was inside the cabin holding one of those phony “Blu-Ice” bags to the spot on her meaty chin where I had landed a right cross just a few minutes before.

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All Stories, Horror

Bone Girl and The Snake — An Infected Love Story by David Henson

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I come in and find Evie, wearing only a thong, standing on the kitchen table, bowing. I lean my guitar against the wall and admire my girl. I never get tired of her skeleton. The tat stretches from her forehead to the tips of her toes. Front, back and sides. She’s a masterpiece although sometimes I wish the skull didn’t hide her beautiful face.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Fries and Coffee by John Brantingham

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I found Ginny at the diner with her face square against the linoleum of the table. I thought she might be crying to herself, and I thought that tears were maybe a good thing. The waitress, Joyce by her name tag, asked, “Is she yours?”

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

All I Love Dies Alone by Leila Allison

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 Squirrel Pen Diary: First Entry

Last Wednesday morning I entered Our Lady Star of the Sea church during mid-week mass. While two dozen or so senior citizens went through the ancient, dusty rites (monotonously administered by an equally ancient and dusty priest), I rose unseen and snuck upstairs to a small balcony that communicates with the church’s attic. I climbed atop the guano splattered stone rail that hugs the balcony and balanced myself on one foot and held the other out as though I intended to take a seventy-foot step onto the marble walkway below. After I had done all that, there wasn’t much else to do except wait for someone to notice me.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Broke Nose by L’Erin Ogle

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“Tell me where it hurts,” he says.

Are you fucking kidding me?  There isn’t enough time for that.  But I know he’s not asking about that.  My eyes are black from the corners to across the bridge of my nose, swollen across the bridge.  My nose feels like hamburger meat rotting on a kitchen counter that we forgot to put away because Kenny actually showed up on time with the dope for once.  That meat sweated and swelled and stank for a week before we finally came down and realized there was a dead animal rotting next to the empty cans of beer and overflowing ashtrays and stacks of dollar bills from a great weekend at the club.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Have Another by C.M. Pratt

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Liam paces the floor of his “study” which is a bedroom in the home that he and his wife Eileen are renting.   The new addition screams its head off.  He wishes the thing would shut up.  Not the thing.  That’s terrible.  The girl.  The baby.  They cry constantly, babies.  They cry because they’re infants, then they cry because they’re teething, then they cry because they’re in the ‘terrible twos.’  It seems different names for the same dreadful screeching.  He has no idea why anyone would have a baby.  He has no idea how he ended up with one.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Under Cypresses by Karen Shepherd

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With a beard the color of November clouds, the man came in most mornings at seven o’clock sharp when the gas station’s convenience store opened. The electric door chime sounded and he shuffled through in his tufty shoes, schlepping his plastic bag bounteous with empty bottles. The smells of earth, sweat and cypress clung to him.

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All Stories, Horror

I Called my Alcoholic Friend Sad Satan by Ashlie Allen

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Maki looks angry when he drinks but I know he’s wearing a mask. The mask sprouts from his heart, across his entire face. Sometimes it spreads to his limbs and makes him destroy things. One night he smacked his son when he asked, “why are you crying so loud daddy?”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Daniel’s Day by Anthony Wobbe

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typewriter
Daniel was covered in tattoos and facial piercings; to me he looked clownish, like a painted up fishing lure.  He sat in my office, fidgety and nervous, waiting for the lunch meeting to be over; someone told him I was the person with the authority to approve his lease.  When I got there the receptionist whispered that he’d waited the entire two hours.

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