Tag: aging

All Stories, General Fiction

The Narrow Gauge by Ed N White

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On this first day of May, I return to the abandoned farm I once owned and stand in a pasture now overgrown with creeping jenny vines and clumps of brilliant yellow buttercups. Slatey gray clouds collide above me and fold into each other in a birdless sky. A whispering breeze ruffles the tops of the leafing red maple trees. Half a century ago, I found an abandoned narrow-gauge rail track set on hand-hewn locust ties at the back of the farm. I was unaware of their presence until months after the purchase and could only guess their purpose. Shuffling several ideas, I thought they might have been used to bring wheeled carts of fieldstone or firewood to the bottom of the hill. Or, perhaps maple sap to boil in large vats for spring syrup. I enquired at the local historical society and asked my neighbors, but no one had an answer, only more guesses.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour

Garf and the Purple Pickles by Landon Galliott

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When Garf opened his refrigerator, he saw a jar of purple pickles beside the carton of expired milk. This was strange as, only yesterday, they were green. Garf stood in his itchy annoyance before the refrigerator, his red, black-striped robe hanging off his slumped body like an old, worn-out curtain.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Cheap Whiskey and a Crumpled Dollar Bill by Lee Conrad

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Russell Freeman, long white hair tied back, dressed in jeans and white cotton shirt, got off the bus and walked down a side street of the city he grew up in. He looked around and shook his head. Urban renewal in the late sixties had taken much of the character out of the center of the city and replaced it with parking ramps, cheap prefab buildings and fake facades. According to city elites the old sturdy brick buildings of the past were obsolete and old fashioned. We must look to a bright new future said the politicians as money flowed to demolition companies.  

“Renewal my ass,” Russell mumbled.

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All Stories, General Fiction

At Sea by Andrew Bennett

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In the muted afternoon light that leaked through the curtains high on the cellar wall the old man, sweaty and disoriented, reached out from a nap he had not planned to take. He lurched forward and tumbled headfirst out of his recliner and up against the television, two feet in front. He cursed himself. 

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All Stories, General Fiction

Sky Lights by Melissa Dyrdahl

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Ella wished she could sit here in her car, parked in the driveway of her parents’ house, for the rest of this slowly dissolving afternoon, into the lulling dusk, all through the gray owls echoing at midnight, to the quietly fading stars at dawn, and then just leave. Never entering the house at all. She would just sit here, letting the silence seep into her skin, sheltered by the insulated interior of her SUV.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Heirloom by Natalia Pericchi Paga

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There are pieces of the past I keep on her behalf. I tie my hair in a bun and start humming a song while I concentrate on lining my lips. The kids are asleep, the dishwasher is working, the counter is wiped, the door is locked. I am getting ready to talk to my grandmother over Zoom. Preparing to reconnect. I haven’t seen her in a while. When I think of her,  I remember the cigarette smell, the afternoons sitting on her lap while she watches T.V., the feeling of her long, red nails running gently through my back, up and down. I remember her evening routine.   

   

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Lava’s Bar by Marisa Mangani

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Sarah parked in the small lot beside Lava’s Bar on Lower Main not knowing what to expect. The ancient and industrial part of Wailuku looked the same as it had when she was a kid: non-descript dingy buildings, narrow alleys with the odd apartment sprinkled in, a snuffling dog on the corner. Despite the post-sunset, orangey sky, the area emanated an enticing melancholy, a feeling she remembered from the seat of her dad’s tow truck back in the early seventies en route to the junkyard, stereo shop, or TV repair. But now, there’s a bar! Maybe there was always a bar—or bars—here, but bars weren’t on her radar in those days, obviously. She’d always been curious about the dusty, mid-island pit of industrial Wailuku, compared to the tourist-dotted beaches in Kihei, where she had grown up a mere ten or so miles away.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Borderland by David Calcutt

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In her dream she was speaking a language she did not know and had never heard before and when she woke to the half-light and strangeness of her room some words of it were still on her tongue. There was a dry and bitter taste in her mouth and her fists were clenched. Her body ached as if she were a traveller returned from some far off border of the world.

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