Tag: despair

All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

On the Edge of Gas Stations by Christopher Ananias

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I should take the gun and throw it into the river. The cool morning raises a chill up my back and touches my ears. The ceiling fan spins silently, driving me into the bedroom for my favorite cardigan. I don’t turn off the fan because the little gold chain pulled off in my hand, so it runs and runs. Like it’s making fun of me for being such a loser. The cardigan is gray and fuzzy and once it’s on my shoulders I’m wrapped in a pleasant warmth. My feet are in slippers. A coffee cup steams from the round table by my chair. I cannot lose these comforts, but taped to the kitchen window, a white paper clearly states I can and will. Courtesy of the Sheriff and the BANK if such a thing could ever be called a courtesy.

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All Stories, Horror

Solaritude by Robert Reece

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Purification through fire. This was the last thought in a long, meditative contemplation of methods to ease the pain.  Ideas burned consuming. Golden aureole ablaze, she would be light cutting through prosaic night stupor.  Simple, pure. A luminous non-entity. She remembered the photo her father took of her on her 7th birthday, the candlelight reflecting in her mossy eyes. He said they looked like copper pennies. He left 3 weeks later. Why didn’t he follow that melancholy flame back home like a meager lighthouse? Maybe she was supposed to trudge after him into the vacant nightness instead.

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General Fiction, Short Fiction

Her Ghost in These Pages by Daniel Joseph Day

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I write about Jeanie just to keep her alive, her memory is a ghost in these pages. Though it hurts to remember, the pain is easier to bear than the emptiness. So I return again and again to the image of her face which at first was burned into my mind but now begins to fade – the lines once sharp and vivid are loose and blurred.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

 Unlucky by Gareth Vieira

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 Johnny Smiles was the unluckiest person in Hope County.

How unlucky? So unlucky that the town council passed a bylaw restricting him to his home. A motion that passed unanimously. A sentence he accepted without protest.

Although Johnny was an older man, most folks considered him an overgrown child. He was brilliant, in the way all children in Hope County were brilliant—a lingering side effect of the Disaster, that tainted the drinking water and perfumed the air with long-forgotten toxins.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Get Yourself a Hotplate, Pal by Daniel Crépault

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Cedric stepped down from the van and squinted toward the storefront. The icy wind roared through the low buildings of the industrial park, passing through his threadbare overcoat and making his skin ache. Reaching back into the vehicle’s dank warmth, he rolled up a small sleeping bag and stuffed it into the footwell along with the small camping stove. He carefully locked the door and walked across the snowy parking lot toward Rick’s Repair Shop, a small red and yellow building behind Main Street.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Days Off by Dylan Ng

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Do you ever feel stuck? Asleep at the wheel of your own life? Each day a motion, repeated to the point of mental RSI, a means to an end? You must surely know the feeling. The same papers passed over your desk. The same documents read on a dusty laptop screen. The same dull drum playing on the surface of your temples. And you think to yourself: surely this ends soon?

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All Stories, General Fiction

Like Lightning by Evangeline Golden

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It’s a fine day for a game. Though the sky is dreary– columns of smoke rise from the building above– the weather is just chilly enough to motivate us to stay moving, focused. We arrived at Mauthausen earlier this afternoon. One of the men had been waiting for us at the station. Our walk to the field was short, the town small but warm– comfortable. The people are nice here. The fuẞballfield is conveniently placed at the end of the main street– the bottom of the hill.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Dirty Screen by Christopher Ananias 

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The ice cream the night before was so hard I couldn’t scoop it. Today it was a cloudy tub of sweet milk. The Budweiser, I swore off, was piss warm. Even so—with all my new promises made to Denny—that was disappointing. I clicked my dry mouth. Denny watched me like how the sparrow watches the hawk circling in the sky. She looked down at her bandaged hands. 

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All Stories, General Fiction

One Way Street by Chris Carrel

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The city gets stranger the farther Randy goes and he wears a scowl to ward off potential hostilities. The mood on the street is like a spreading bruise and the faces of passing strangers bear the strains of dark struggles. He walks beneath a sullen haze that roughly complements the worn skin of the old apartment blocks. The nation’s malaise seems to have settled on everything like a fine dust.

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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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