Tag: drugs

All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Absolutely, Positively, Have to Be There Overnight by Todd Mercer

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Commotion from a rumble strip woke me up when the car I was in drifted from the road. The Kid Who Thinks He’s Grown was driving. We both snapped to alertness, there outside Carbondale. It was after 4 a.m., and we had a dawn appointment in Branson, Missouri.

I tried to steal another hour’s sleep, since the Kid always tells me he’s got things under control. But after working all day and now driving through the night, he must’ve needed to talk to stay with it. He asked, “Why are we even out here handling this?” He truly didn’t know, but he never needed a special reason to do his job well. He always seemed glad to be included.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Story of Jimmy Gray by Gerry Coleman

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“What the people believe is true.”
—Nanabush, Son of the West Wind, Grandson of the Moon

I was a story I told myself.

My body required mechanical help with inputs and outputs, causes and effects—the purpose of one function needed to be fitted to the function of a higher purpose, from swerve of nerve to bend of bone, synapse to neuron across the junctions electric.

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Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Short Fiction

A Courier with Morals by D. S. Stewart

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Rasmus Dreyer eyes the edge of the macadam, screening the underbrush, the rows of apple trees, the delectable fruit that deer like to forage. It’s from the roadsides where the deer come, darting from the shadows in a shattering second, frozen by fear, leaping through the windshield onto the lap of the driver. The high beam shovels away the darkness, the road spanning over rolling hills, upstate, its post-carded portraits of redwood farmhouses, and white picket fences. Only Pleiades and Saturn provide company and those colliding black holes scientists are constantly clamoring about, making him feel small, insignificant.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction

Old Haunts by Christopher Ananias

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I can’t help the past. Even if it would have been good, and sometimes it was… It’s gone. I met Angie where all transitory beings are met. I met her in a bar.

A cool basement bar, the “Das Keller,” scattered with peanut shells on smooth cement. Where a young demonic Hitler might thrive, but there were no demons on that bright, wasting-away afternoon. Unless you counted the ones inside me.

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Short Fiction

Grayscale by Carolyn R. Russell

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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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