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.
Continue reading “One Way Street by Chris Carrel”
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.
Continue reading “Garf and the Purple Pickles by Landon Galliott”
The Bardess house was in Aboyne Court, a group of maisonettes on the semi-derelict edge of the Tanshall estate off Aboyne Drive, a half-mile of semis under schedule of demolition. You’d to go up a dozen broken concrete steps to get to the tarmac path to the front door. It was one of the areas of Glenrothes popularly reputed to be a dumping ground for Fife Council, houses to put problem families, or challenging clients, as we in the social work department would prefer to describe them. The iron railings still stood there in front of a square of unkempt grass but were no longer connected to anything. Some kindly soul had thrown a car tyre onto the scrubby grass which had accumulated all kinds of rubbish; used pampers and newspapers blown on the wind and worse, lots of plastic cider bottles, anchored to a thicket of weed by dried-out dog turds. The building had no outer door and a cold wind whipped through the hall especially if the backdoor leading to the back greens had been left open. The front door was on the ground floor on the left where some altruist had scrawled in a heavy felt pen all along the wall Slag in among the usual spraypainted graffiti tags. There was no sound in the close, a smell of urine and I saw a dried stain against the wall. The glass panel on the door on the right had been replaced with plywood, the name J. Quinn handwritten in biro on a small patch of space between obscene graffiti. There was a musty smell of dog but no sound, no barking.
Continue reading “Last Refuge Andrew Murray Scott”
Patsy flipped his eggs in the small frying pan, sizzling on the coils of his portable electric burner. Thin bacon smoke hung in his room. Can’t let that old bat of a landlady catch me cooking. He walked five steps to the room’s sole window, pounded the frame to break the ice seal, and opened it. Rochester’s mid-winter night air hit him like an arctic blast.
Continue reading “Patsy’s Last Gig by JD Clapp”
“Sir?”
The Artist jumped, whirling away from the attic window out of which he had been staring.
“Stay there,” he barked, and the figure he had been sketching immediately froze, Lot’s wife on the heels of her one bad decision.
Continue reading “This is My Rifle, This is My Gun by Shannon Greenstein”
Warm tones hit the mahogany bed posts, struck by the sudden light entering the room. The French door moaned as the veil curtain swelled, and a leaf spiralled onto the crochet bed cover, the terracotta tiles, the dresser table.
Frida held a deep breath, albeit restrained inside the cast, until her ribs complained. As if she could capture the light within her lungs, the gap of blue that she envisioned open in the sky. Something inside her had changed; the narrowest ray of light had filtered through the fill of her darkness.
Continue reading “Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress by Ximena Escobar”
Lyssum presses her fingers into her forehead, tries to push back the frown lines she can feel gathered like pleats behind her black round glasses. She scowls at the mail, grimaces at the news on her phone. E-mail is worse, except for a funny note from her sister in Atlanta. Catches herself, I’m the woman fed up with everything, she thinks. She drops her packages on the kitchen counter, a large garlic bulb rolls toward the sink; the green sheaf of parsley peeks damply from a sack. Lyssum sees herself reflected in the window: black hair pulled back severely and restrained with bands and clips, long dark clothes in layers set off by silver earrings and a pin. I look like a nun she thinks and pulls things loose so she can breathe.
Continue reading “Remainders, Reminders by Bruce D Snyder”
When I am stressed, I sit on my bed and count five things. A booklight, melatonin tablets, black nail polish, faded jeans, and knitting needles. Name four things I feel: the dangling pillow tassel, the chilly windowpane, the geography textbook, my pinky toe. I cannot hear three things, because my uncle is working, and my mother is quiet. So I listen to the consistent hum of the heater three times as long as normal for good measure. I can smell the cheap air freshener and my soccer shoes. With the window open, my tongue catches the breeze and I taste cold.
When my mother is stressed, she slits her wrists in the bathtub.
Continue reading “L’amore di una Madre by Claire M Welton”
When my wife falls asleep in the hospital, I write Brock on our newborn’s birth certificate then super glue his eyes shut. His hands arrive to this world calloused like he was lifting heavy objects for nine months.
Continue reading “Pocket Monsters (Blue Version) by Corey Miller”
The D train doors closed just as Sammy stepped onto the platform of the West 4th Street station. Slightly miffed, he was nevertheless glad to be out of the January cold. He removed his pipe from the pocket of his overcoat, filled the bowl with loose tobacco, tamped it down into a wad, and lit it with a strike anywhere match he ran across the metal No Smoking sign on the station wall.
Continue reading “The Doppler Effect by Mark Russ”
literally stories 