The world had been ending all week. I heard the growl and supersonic whine of jet airplanes whooshing off Grissom Air Force Base. The rain came down all week, too. Like it would never end—even if the world did. I stood at the porch railing with my eye on the pelting silver darkness, but I didn’t see Boone. All I saw was the glare of the streetlight reflected on the wet tarmac like a false moon.
Continue reading “Relapse at the End of the World by Christopher J Ananias”
I stopped drinking after my younger brother Cody chose assisted death. He was paralyzed from the neck down and never able to get high again because of it. That gave him courage.
Continue reading “When I Almost Became a Monk by Harrison Kim”
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.
Continue reading “On the Edge of Gas Stations by Christopher Ananias”
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.
Continue reading “Solaritude by Robert Reece”
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.
Continue reading “Her Ghost in These Pages by Daniel Joseph Day”
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.
Continue reading ” Unlucky by Gareth Vieira”
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.
Continue reading “Get Yourself a Hotplate, Pal by Daniel Crépault”
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?
Continue reading “Days Off by Dylan Ng”
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.
Continue reading “Like Lightning by Evangeline Golden”
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.
Continue reading “Dirty Screen by Christopher Ananias “
literally stories 