The loose hall board, if you rocked heel to toe, sounded like someone drowning, that bastard son-in-law he hoped. He tried to silence him with new copper nails along its length. For a while it worked. But one evening the gasp returns, quieter now, pitched high. His weighted heel brings his wife, grasping a breath before sinking under a swirling sea. His toe raises her sea-washed face and she gasps again; help me, John, I have her.
Continue reading “The Sea by P O’Connor”
There must have been about ten or twenty of Them. Circling above the house like the beginnings of a tornado. Their smooth, steady flight was stark against the clamour from inside. Voices clashed against running footsteps, something clanged in the kitchen, and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. One man sat huddled in the corner, unable to move. And in the midst of it all was a wail, a cry that every few minutes rose from within and floated slowly outward. But They remained indifferent, a set of black wings and sharp beaks stark against the sun that was just beginning to dip downwards. They soared round and round, while inside the small bungalow chaos reigned. One of Them ruffled its feathers.
Continue reading “Relief by Rati Pednekar”
The pain in her chest was akin to a physical blow. It had always been this way, in life outside of family she was well-spoken and liked by many. In the circle of family suddenly she was reduced to the small child who hid when voices rose.
I just don’t understand why you have changed so much Callie Rose,” the woman’s voice was raspy from years of chain-smoking. “It’s like you don’t even love the Lord Jesus anymore.”
Continue reading “Hen and Chicks by Rachel Sievers “
Dear Survivor,
I’ve always scoffed at the concept of a zombie apocalypse. That is, until now. It’s here. Think you already know everything about it? I bet there’s something you don’t know. Read on.
Continue reading “Dear Survivor by Gary Opas”
Sooner or later it’s going to happen to you. You forget the hand-me-down hanboks, blaring F-84s, stitched up sacks of half empty barley portions from a bustling market stocked with rows of mung beans and buchu. You weave through scenes of shirts drenched in sticky blood and machine guns shooting your neighbors down to become spine-chilling nightmares. You become another identity that hopes to forget the feeling of a complete family—a sort of silent-lipped desire that keeps you from proudly marching into Olympic Mart with your mother for a touch of authenticity you desperately want to forget. You force yourself to grow up to match the number of times you ate seaweed soup on your birthday, fourteen, to keep your ripped up photographs tightly shut in your safe.
Continue reading “Mung Beans and Happiness by Emily Khym”
Alice Lockland, wife of two-time sheriff in two Idaho towns, said to her husband, “Steve, today is the day you will become a father for the first time, and if justice is to be done, the child will be a boy.”
Continue reading “Born to be a Gunman by Tom Sheehan”
Yuko says she wants to wear a gray dress. I told her she can’t.
Sachiko sighed at the text from her younger sister. Yuko wasn’t even supposed to be in charge of everything, she was.
No, gray is fine, too, Sachiko texted back.
Continue reading “Hatsubon by Sarah Hozumi”
My mother told me, “Clovis Clayton Holiday, you gonna be the death of me with the way you do the things you do.”
My father instructed me, “Clovis, son, sometimes you have to go along to get along, you understand?”
My older sister, Nora, scolded me, “Clo, Negro, you can’t just go and do anything you want to do. You got to follow the rules.”
Nelda, my younger sister, declared, “Clo, You, too weird to be my brother. I disown your Black ass.”
Continue reading “Clovis Clayton Holiday by Frederick K Foote”
Uncle Florio’s face was all lumps, his purple left eye half shut. His swollen lips barely moved as he spoke. “I’m gonna kill him,” he said. “I’m gonna kill that prick.”
My mother, his kid sister, poured him a shot of anisette. He sipped it and grimaced with pain, gently touching his lips. A dark stain splotched the collar of his red plaid shirt. I wondered if it was blood.
Continue reading “Uncle Fail by Salvatore Difalco”
She was different from my father’s mother, Mary Elizabeth King Sheehan right out of Cork. There was an elegant thirty-year widow for you, tall and gracious, precise of language, with her little black widow’s hat on her head and the shiny glasses on her nose and a bread roll or two in her pocketbook whenever she supped outside her Somerville home. Her pocketbook was always black. It always shone the light around it. A touch of new leather at her hands as if a bargain had just been made. At Ginn and Co. in Cambridge, she was a bookbinder, for more than sixty years eventually, and never baked a pie in her life it seems. Or baked bread. But she could wash your feet and scrub your back on a visit with her slender fingers and make you feel new all over.
Continue reading “Telling Two Granddames Apart by Tom Sheehan “
literally stories 