“Handy, this is a pretty good turnout, isn’t it?”
“Oslo, man, how many people do you think are here? Maybe 200 or so? And people keep coming. I mean, a lot of these folks just invited themselves, I think.”
Handy and I are sitting on a slope overlooking the picnic grounds at Southside Park on a cool September afternoon. The sounds of the blues and the aroma from the bar b que are calling me back to the celebration.
Continue reading “A Hell of a Story Part Three by Frederick K Foote”
Sadie Blankenspiel was raised without faith, which she’d always been stubbornly proud of. Pricing caskets at her brother-in-law Peter’s deathatorium, she wasn’t so sure she’d hadn’t been too hasty in giving short shrift to all that spirituality and after-life mumbo jumbo.
In her eightieth year aboard the mothership, with achy hips, estranged from her two narrow-minded children, she wondered if daughter Maribel hadn’t been right after all. What had the ungrateful girl screamed out the car window before tearing away from the house that last time? Always so dramatic. Something about her mother likely running out of time to make things right before the Grim Reaper plucked her number.
Continue reading “Orchids in the Sun by Dorothy Rice“
I’m in Southside Park sitting on a bench at 7 am Saturday watching five Southeast Asians fishing in the pond that we locals have promoted with the title of “Southside Lake.”
Continue reading “A Hell of a Story by Frederick K Foote“
You need a fierce imagination to get along in Hell, and yet creative thinking is not appreciated here, and change is practically a dirty word to the old coots who run the place.
Continue reading “Good Intentions by Deborah-Zenha Adams”
I remember leading a rather ordinary life until the day I committed suicide. As I recall, that took place in late October in the year 1838. I don’t remember the actual death itself, but I know it happened because it was forty-eight Earth years before I was granted another physical body. I had never had to wait that long before. Not to mention the fact that my guardian angel, Thaddeus, had warned me many times not to make that mistake because it was one of the things the God’s frowned upon the most.
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“Attribute neither the magnificent nor the malign to the mysterious mind of a magic god as an excuse to stop thinking about what has happened.”–Czsminoothe, circa 1800 b.c.e.
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“You will remember everything.”–Eternity
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Continue reading “The First Symptom is Death (Part I) by Leila Allison”
literally stories 