It came to us in our dreams.
That’s how it passed, jumping from person to person, dream by dream. Some were lucky and woke with just a mild fever, but others weren’t so fortunate. They were never the same again following that dream, and sadly, some never woke at all.
Continue reading “The Dog in Our Dream by Chris Farrington”
‘Tiredness can kill. Take a break.’
The sign expanded, glowing in the beam of headlamps, and was gone.
The lights in the darkness were beginning to blur; the flecks of winding taillights, the flickering ribbon of the lane markers, merging to one. He put on some Iron Maiden to drown the hum of the engine and lowered the window for an inrush of air. The icy blast stopped him yawning. He blinked and leaned forwards.
Continue reading “Tiverton Southbound by Matthew Roy Davey”
I’m sleepwalking at night again but my wife sleeps so deeply she can’t hear my cries for help. Tonight, I’m balancing on a boat on the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. I hear hungry seagulls gliding through the salty air. “You can’t make me jump!” I call out to the fleets of ships and submarines that have surrounded me. “I will never give in.” When I crack my head on the medicine cabinet and cotton buds fall to my feet like confetti, I realise the cold tap from the bath is overflowing and I’m standing on the weighing scales, waving a loo roll at the mirror.
Continue reading “Sleepwalking Visions by Tim Frank”
“Mommy! Mommy!”
As the summer sun neared the horizon on this longest day, the heat of late June only fading slowly, Ann drew fingers through her dark hair, trying to work out the beginnings of a tangle. I should just cut it short, she thought. Everyone else my age does.
Continue reading “Night Stranger by Torger Vedeler”
He dreams he is a young Asian woman. Diminutive. Pretty not beautiful. Not distinctly of Indian or Pakistani heritage but notionally from that region of the world sometimes known as the Indian Subcontinent.
And yet in his dream he isn’t actually the young woman in question. Not as such. More, he is her in the third person.
Whilst the dream lacks structure he experiences a resonance throughout the day. An intangible notion of being someone else. It’s a novel experience but one that returns periodically.
Earlier in the day he had a fall.
Continue reading “Dreaming in the Third Person by Adam West”
An overcast sky spills milk-pale light over a blighted landscape. The light is too weak to shadow the dry-stone walls that run along a potholed lane. The stone walls rise to a vanishing point at the crest of a muddy hill, and over that crest comes the figure of a man.
Continue reading “No Good Deed by Marco Etheridge”
Today Leonardo comes home crying. When his father and mother hear what his school friend has told him, they understand that the day they have feared for a long time has come— the moment when they will have to start crushing his dreams. They speak to him, say that his friend is right; tell him I do not exist. But they are wrong.
I dream, therefore I am.
Continue reading “The Lighthouse Keeper by Loredano Cafaro”
…To waste his whole Creation, or possess
All as our own, and drive as we were driven,
The punie habitants, or if not drive,
Seduce them to our Party,…from Paradise Lost by John Milton
Just outside, a late season cricket clicked in the sea grass, its song even more mournful, as it was the only sound that night. Earlier, there had been a rich silvery light cast by a full moon, but that had since been covered over by a blanket of clouds from the bay.
Continue reading “Our Party by John Giarratana”
The tip of the shovel had talked to him with a dull thud, not just through his ears, but totally. It came into his hands and up the stiffness of his arms, through the quick riot of nerves on red alert, through all passageways of recognition. It was wood! At its tip was wood, a cavernous wood, a chesty wood, an enclosing wood. Promise poised itself, much like awards’ night and names to be named. Light leaped at his back, behind his head. Down through the awesome sky of darkness he could feel a star draining, down through thirty-five years of a hole.
Continue reading “Just Plain Hard Work of Ages, Work of Comets by Tom Sheehan”
Jake steps into the hall and comes across a staircase that he had never noticed before. The staircase leads to a suite of lavishly furnished rooms. This old house is grander than he had known.
literally stories 