Adrian Prokhoroff stood before his newly bought, newly painted home, dark brown lining the façade of beige. He felt surprisingly little for it, though it would only cost him a few years of mortgage payments, and he had been initially excited to buy it for its bargain price. He had bought it cheaply in part to silly rumors of its being haunted. And they spoke of the Renaissance. He went in with his two daughters.
Continue reading “The Maker of the Dead by Edward Lee”
Everyone has a wretched story of their own, or at least everyone should. Mine began not in the street but at home. Nearly everyone’s story begins at home.
I never liked the script of this life I entered kicking at my mother’s belly. Still, I had no choice but to arrive. You cannot keep your distance from sorrow; sometimes you are born directly into it. But you cannot walk with sorrow either. The best you can do is hoist it onto your shoulder like some God-cursed angel and keep going.
Continue reading “The Dead are Cold by Feride Güney”
I was looking for a place to die; somebody recommended Brooklyn.
Man that’s a good first sentence, John reveled. Maybe the best. Definitely one of the few that had stuck by him all these years, resting in his subconscious. Although I can still recall by heart, he thought, the following: I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Chirstian because of Owen Meany.
Continue reading “In A Place Far Away by Dianne Willems”
Every respectable nation has a Ministry of Something Important. The Republic of Grand Intentions had a Ministry of Agriculture, although its farmers regularly demonstrated outside it with empty sacks; a Ministry of Labour, where very few people had ever laboured; a Ministry of Health, which advised citizens to remain healthy while hospitals ran short of beds; and, naturally, a Ministry of Peace, housed in the largest government building in the capital and consulted mainly on ceremonial occasions. It also had a Department of Necessary Sacrifices, an institution so indispensable that nobody could remember when it had been established. Its official responsibility was to explain why sons had been sent to distant borders, daughters were working in factories producing military supplies, villages had been reduced to rubble, and bread had become a luxury. Above the entrance, in letters of gold, was the departmental motto: YOUR SUFFERING IS PROOF OF YOUR PATRIOTISM.
Continue reading “Ministry of Other People’s Sons by Susmita Mukherjee”
Brutal, late May. Wet blankets of hot weather, suffocating. When the midday heat receded, Thomas nixed the novellas (Mattie’s legacy), filled a tall glass with seltzer and ice, and padded into the yard. He sprayed the concrete and his chair, sat on the damp fabric facing east toward the fishtail palm and the privacy fence, looking up at the eaves of the cottages the far side of the street. Old Florida. Wood and stucco. Termites and social security checks. Not yet gentrified.
Continue reading “Ascension by Nigel Pugh”
“Where are you a bishop then?” she asked, eyes darting around his drawing room, drinking in the fur and velvet, taffeta and silk.
“I’m tempted to say Bath and Wells,” he chuckled, perched earnestly on the armchair. His guest had slipped off her shoes and, cat-like, tucked her feet comfortably away.
Continue reading “Reconciled to Eternity by P.R. Woods”
She had done the same thing every evening for three years.
She would pour tea into a cup with a chipped rim, sit by the window, pick up her phone, and dial a number.
The same voice, every time.
“The number you have dialed is temporarily unavailable.”
Continue reading “The Last Number by Arpi Vanyan”
Content that some readers may find disturbing.
She must have looked alluring, though, on her midnight shopping trips to Walmart. He imagined a shopping cart full of red meat and baby clothes. Dr. Lieberman worked alone inside the morgue. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees.
A toe tag, said Jane Doe. Lieberman, a single man in his mid-forties, studied her with a clinical detachment which made him a poor guest at the hospital mixers. Her enormous stomach under the sheet was hard to miss. It would be a cold baby.
Continue reading “The Cold Baby by Christopher Ananias “
I stood alone at my stepmother’s funeral, fondling a plant, watching rain bead down the fogged window. The funeral parlor’s black walls, and black curtains were heavy-handed leaning too much on the death knell. Ten lines of bright red chairs clashed with a maroon carpet. The organ music droned like it always did—my whole life.
Continue reading “The Convert by Christopher Ananias”
Where to begin? ‘Where’ being the significant word.
Some places seem to have been created to be a home for the disconcerting and unknowable. Dartmoor was the natural petri dish for The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is so… elemental. The dirty, dark and narrow alleys of Victorian London’s East End spawned Brother Jack, whoever he was, or might still be. But other places are so mundane you can’t imagine anything beyond the norm happening there.
Continue reading “By The Colour of Our Coat Shall You Know Us By J.S. Watts”
