Tag: drugs

Short Fiction

Grayscale by Carolyn R. Russell

literallystories2014

From behind a second story window, we three watch for the girl. Fissured by time and fractured by turmoil, the glass allows for less than optimal viewing, but my sisters and I can see well enough to take immediate notice when her slight figure emerges from a subterranean staircase and melts into the crowd. This particular evening is boisterous and punctuated by the trappings of revelry. A new year is preparing to throw its filthy arms around the neighborhood, animated celebrants studding the sidewalks like remnants of a tenement fire.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Horror

Spite by Alex Sinclair

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The congregation came to him in the merest tendrils of the dawn’s earliest and sickest light, the sky’s face the same faded blue of an overdose.

They came to him like faces in a fever dream, seeking answers as they always did. The preacher didn’t have them. He was looking for answers of his own. He was dope-sick after all, the slow crawl of heroin fidgeting in his collapsing veins as it made its retreat, making the marrow of his bones ache. His body was already begging for more liquid forgiveness, and there was the other issue that he needed to attend to, the issue that made his need all the more desperate, the issue that had marooned the preacher in the sleepless raft of his stiff bed with nothing but his anxious thoughts to sustain him.

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All Stories, General Fiction

At My Feet by Michael Tyler

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And I’ve swallowed the pill only to have my friends bail and so I walk the streets alone.

 I am a streetwalker.

 I come across a hostel bar … backpackers, ‘Fuck it,’ I think ‘They’ll be up for a yarn.’

 There is a staircase leading upward and so I climb and enter a bar full of chatter in a multitude of accents.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Jerry’s Last Problem by Jennifer Maloney

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The Doctor is cleaning up Jerry’s mess, as usual. With a grunt, he bends, grabs the dead boy beneath the armpits and drags him toward the stairs. While the Doctor works, Jerry hides in an attic bedroom of their mind, eyes closed, fingers in his ears.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Barang by Alex Sinclair

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Sihanoukville began dressing itself in a fresh coating of sleaze just as the night bruised the evening’s amber face.

Its nocturnal denizens awakened bleary-eyed to crawl out of a thousand tacky rooms and flee the judgement of mirrors, desperate for another drink, another fix, another sordid five-dollar fuck.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Arm Milk by Spencer Levy

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Tin men play their kazoos too loud. Like having an annoying ass bee trying to drill into the deep part of your ear. It’s Sunday and it’s the boardwalk. Sea spray that you’re not supposed to touch or it’ll leave a nasty pollution rash. Gregg doesn’t care, though. His arm is messed up anyhow from all the lousy skateboarding.

Gregg rides and I walk and the waves shove against the wooden thing beneath our feet. Some people call it an embankment, but that sounds too much like a place where loose-tie fathers coax children into cashing checks in exchange for thin lollipops. Gregg grazes his lousy arm against the slippery arm rail, catches some sea spray in his mouth.

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All Stories, General Fiction

End by  A. Elizabeth Herting

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Sterling Redmond Calico lay sprawled out on his stain-covered recliner, his limbs heavy and lethargic. The poison was snaking its way through his body, he could see with an artist’s imagination its slow and determined march through his veins. Thick, black and ominous, destroying him cell by cell as Red caressed his cheek on the cool salvation of a half-empty beer can. He could see the snow falling fast through the single cracked window in his rent controlled, shitty third floor walk-up. The flakes made neon-white streaks, flying in rapid succession like a warp-speed trip on the Millennium Falcon.

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