“Isn’t this place just perfect?”
Jan was talking to herself as she wandered around her new home. He hadn’t moved from the lounge.
No! It isn’t. It’s fucking yours! Your house! Your money bought the fucking house! Yours!! Everything is yours!! It will always be yours! God!! I FUCKING HATE THIS!!!
His thought induced tantrum died down. He took a breath and thought of puppies. Eddie liked puppies.
“Paula! Come in! Sit down beside your old Granny Lizzie… I want to tell you some things.”
“Another one of your stories gran? Are you not too tired?”
“Tired? Not now. I’ll be dead soon, so even if I wanted to sleep, I’ve not got the time. You need to hear this.”
“’Don’t move’? ‘Stay put’? Best mark thy lollipop-hole, Mouthy Munchkin, lest I break a ruby slipper off in your—”
Last Words, Wicked Witch of the East (Harriet Shelby’s Epitaph)
Continue reading “The Crossed Star of Bethlehem by Irene Allison”
‘I was found with a waitress in a cocktail bar… That much is true.’
Continue reading “Phil’s Lament by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
This one’s for you, Skink, this solid and remarkable dream I had one night, just last week, still haunting me in this, my 88th year on the planet. It was so real I believe it really happened in a place so near us, we can’t see it, or so far away from us, we’ll never get to see it for ourselves, even though we know it inside and out, upside and down, from left to right, and all the in-betweens, the hereabouts that may occupy more than one place in this universe.
Brandt Colson silently watched his frenetic daughter as she flitted from room to room in her usual style, talking about ten different things at once and fussing over details and generally majoring in the minor. Brandt noticed the bored and frowning, mostly grown boy, his grandson, as he stood at the front door leaning against the wall. The boy took no pains to hide his sullen, brooding, teenage impatience.
She stopped flying around the room and paused in front of the chair. Brandt looked up. “Plenty to eat and all laid out. Your list is on the counter. Sure you feel up to it, Dad?”
“Feel fine.” He replied. The stroke was jumbled memory now.
I low gear the Mazda pickup down the dirt road to the floodplain. The headlights help me find my way as the sun peaks over the horizon. I park by a small pond with stunted trees and knee-high shrubbery.
I grin at Mac, my big Airedale, rub his neck; he shakes his head, eager for the hunt. I grab the thermos of coffee. Mac and I move to the back of the truck. I open the top of the camper shell. Shaft and Dart, the brindle and the white greyhounds, greet me with muzzles and tongues and an eager trembling.
Mrs. Pascal’s first rule, no sweets in the parlor.
My fingers dig into the folds of my gloomy clothes, clawing at the satin that piles under my fingertips. It does not do to indulge yourself in front of the grieving, Genevieve. Her voice scratches against the walls of my head. Not when there is work to be done.
Perhaps not, Mrs. Pascal, but to deny one their sweets in time of such pain does not do as well.
Continue reading “Mr. Pascal’s Funeral Parlor by Nikki Macahon”
Zayde died last Saturday. This afternoon we gathered to attend a service over a plain pine coffin and to remember him over cold cuts on rye. I remembered my grandfather chiefly as a madman.
“He died happy,” said my mother. “That’s all that matters.”
Continue reading “The Man Who Lost Everything by Erica Verillo”
He hadn’t meant to do it. As his muscles strained against their tendons, sweat pouring from his brow, reality blurred like the trees standing behind rain-covered windows. Adrenaline coursed though his veins, filled his mouth with a metallic taste- He wondered if she’d tasted it too, in those few brief moments of chaos.
He hadn’t meant to do it. Really. But, in the moment, it was the only choice he had.
~
Jason Mattis was old. Not in the physical sense — though a few gray hairs had begun to work their way into his shadow of a beard — but in what he’d experienced over his 26 years of life. Growing up, Jason had watched his mother deteriorate in a mess of tubes and needles and medication, the whirring machines sucking the life from her as fuel for their colorful blinking lights. Sunken eyes, sagging skin, and the shadowy shapes of bones resting just beneath the surface. Smaller and smaller upon that white bed, until one day, she simply wasn’t there anymore.
literally stories 