I caught her eye. Recognised a kindred spirit. Her head then converted into cruor popcorn. Colour of grey nail varnish, millet porridge. Scarlet white and woeful.
I feared Iād lose my lonesome bench for good.
Continue reading “All My Darlings Waiting by Antony Osgood”
It’s right rare that someone asks me to take them down a road I don’t know ā been traveling the backroads of Teyach going on twenty years, and the only ones I don’t know are those little sandy, marshy stretches in the inside. Figures that’s where the lady wanted me to take her. She wasn’t much of a talker, wouldn’t even give me her name. She just sat there in the passenger seat with her eyes fixed on the horizon, those dried up flowers crinkling in her grip. Not that I didn’t try to make conversation ā drive mile after mile through silt that’s aching to swallow your tires whole, and you just have to say something, even if it ends up being to yourself.
Continue reading “A Flower for a Lost Grave by Andrew Johnston”
Bettyās blue sneakers are alongside of the road. My sneakers are red.
Continue reading “Betty and My Sneakers by Townsend Walker”
A clutter of stray cats roams the streets at night, eating corpses. Least thatās what they say. The clutter donāt make the corpses neither; they just sort of clean them up for us. Course, technically speaking, theyāre a destruction of cats, seeing as how theyāre wild. But clutter sounds better. Besides, all cats are wild no matter how fat and lazy and orange they might pretend to be. Cats are more like us than we care to admit. Only two animals who regularly practice sadism are us and the kitty cats. Hell, they even domesticated themselves just like we did. But even after all these thousands of years, theyāre still creatures of the night. Just like us. Just like that Laura Branigan song. And just like the world.
Continue reading “Kitty Cat Man by Erik Sorensen”
She said she saw angels, and repeated it, so I did too, but I still havenāt grasped what it means.
I climb onto my bed, above the covers, and I gaze at the ceiling, yearning to comprehend it. This gray and dirty ceiling has hovered my whole life, floating above my bed. Built before I arrived, still standing after Iāve gone. Untouched, unchanged. Can I imagine a life without its ever-presence?
Continue reading “The Ceiling by Charlie Rogers”
Huddled in the dark, the three children shook at the sight of the black horse. Itās head, bashed in from madness, left a bloody smear along the splintered barn wall. Itās body was too still on the dusty floor. For Walter, the blond-haired boy of four, it was just a rigid, mountainous shadow. It frightened him to watch the beast, the devil and his illness finally take hold of the animal. The silence that followed that was unbearable, unclear. Walter felt that something was very wrong but his innocence would not allow him to understand the stillness of the mare. As his unease grew, consuming his little heart, he buried his head into his older sisterās arms for relief.
Continue reading “George and the Horse by Jazeen Hollings”
My doctor says, “Zeeb, my old friend, your remaining days can be numbered in weeks, and not more than four. Then your Black ass is out the door forevermore.”
Continue reading “Goodbye by Frederick K Foote”
The body was still in the house when we got there. Graciela saw it first and let out a sharp, āDios mio!ā She was the most senior local employee at the Consulate and had seen Americans in trouble before, but none as distressed as George McMahon. He was lying on a thin mattress on the concrete floor of his living room. A machete was planted in his abdomen, just below the breastbone. It had been put there by his girlfriend, according to the police, but they also said he was at the morgue.
Continue reading “Death Misspelled by David Robinson”
The last words she ever said.
I just wanted to know what they were. Call it a compulsion, a thought that nagged at me like a hot plate of my wifeās lasagna when Iād spent the day not eating.
My aunt had passed away. She was the last remnant of my fatherās side of the family. My dad died of cancer at the age of 47 when I was eleven. My aunt had just died at the age of 86 (my dad would have been 85), and I really wanted to know the last thing she said.
Iād just walked into the office and hadnāt had time to set my coffee down when Vicki stuck her head in and said, āHR wants you to call them, itās about Jack.ā
āIs he here?ā I replied.
āIn his cubicle, talking to Eileen.ā
Continue reading “Jackās Back by David Thomas Peacock”
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