The forest held its breath, and so did Amelia, as she crouched in its undergrowth, heart hammering and a lump rising in her throat. She silently swore off the next fiery ache that coiled in her thighs. She listened for the delicate puff of air that would bring the spores, echoing across the pines and oaks as they descended in a curtain of death that would fell the living, leaving in their wake only the eerie, absolute silence of death.
Continue reading “Scarcity by R.W. Owen”
I probably wouldn’t be in Mexico if there hadn’t been a knife on the counter at the Bad Dog Bar last Tuesday. I been going to the Bad Dog for two years, since I been working the graveyard shift at Drake Manufacturing. If you ever spent eight hours attaching table tops to the leg frames, you know why that kind of work goes better if you got a couple beers in you. One of the evening bartenders at Bad Dog is Hitch. He was working last Tuesday with Sheila, who waits tables. She ain’t much of a waitress, to put it gentle. She gets orders wrong ever night, even in a place like Bad Dog where most everbody orders the same cheap beer. Sheila’s popular, though, with them low-cut blouses. Most of the Bad Dog customers are guys don’t care what they’re drinking as long as they’re looking down a woman’s blouse. That’s one reason my brother liked Bad Dog right away. Plus he didn’t have to walk far after work. Then he got me to going. And I gotta say about Sheila and them low-cut blouses, when you look down that valley, you know there’s a better world waiting when you get there.
Continue reading “A Sharp Knife for Cutting Limes”
It’s a scorcher of a summer night in Gaza City and Fadi lies naked in bed, sweating buckets in the dark. His mother shouts something from the kitchen, her voice bouncing off the walls, mixing with the clanging of pots and pans. From the bedroom, his father’s reply is a muffled murmur, drowned out by the blaring TV. A stray dog barks outside, and soon a few others join in from a distance, their barks blending together like a chorus of sirens.
Continue reading “Chasing Sleep on a Hot Summer Night in Gaza by L.F. Khouri”
Mriya
To the boy it looks like a ravaged animal. Its head ripped-off, body torn apart with stringy guts hanging out. Scattered chunks of flesh strewn around the barren hangar.
“Thank God your grandfather is not here to see this,” the boy’s mother says. “He wanted to watch it take off one last time.”
Continue reading “Mriya by George Nevgodovskyy”
These days, you’re the only Townie I would know on sight as you grace our Riverside Cemetery in your own hellos, tall as all get-out, robust, time marking your way past that mere issue, and a charmer from a distance on any day of the week. I wish, among other issues and dreams, that you’d recognize me, wrap those loving arms around me, greet the passing among all these stones, upright, neat in place, fighting off the centuries one by one.
Continue reading “Charlestown Calling Back by Tom Sheehan”
There is a familiar quiet across the gardens, the usual character of a Sunday afternoon in autumn. Visitors are thinly scattered across the grounds, the tea room and the house. There is no guided tour of the house at this time of year; people wander round in twos and threes. They speak in low voices to each other so that they are nearly muffled by the sounds of their own footfalls. Their shoes knock slowly on the floorboards and receive creaking replies.
literally stories 