Tag: family

All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Another One of His Punishments by Paul Beckman

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My son and I meet in the City, dinner and talk. And drink. More and more drink as time goes by. He is quite the drinker, my son is, Old Overholt Rye on the rocks–a drinkers drink. None of those blends that people call Rye. Who am I to talk? When I was his age, twenty-seven, I was out drinking every night and my poison of choice was Tequila.

But it’s not the same. Sometimes I think he needs his golden anesthesia to tolerate our time together. We hug hello and goodbye and he never acts embarrassed to kiss me when he sees me. We never have a bad time, not like the old days, which were rocky as all Hell. That’s okay. Fathers and sons should have a little conflict to make them stronger and bond as more than just parent and child when they get older. By now we should be bonded at the hip, but I worry that he’s getting the Irish disease which is even worse for a Jew than for a Mick. I should know.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Just a Moment by Daniel Paton

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And now little Charlie is banging on the door. He doesn’t understand why his dad has locked himself in there, and neither do I. All I know is that I started looking at myself in the mirror and now I can’t get out. And I’m sweating through my shirt, my tie hanging undone around my neck. And I’ve only just realised that my trousers are down around my ankles. I’m ridiculous. A grown man rooted to the floor with his trousers down. Imagine if Charlie was to see that? He’d be traumatised, confused, even more than I am.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Show of Good Faith by A.L. Ellis

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Tiny clots of tissue and intestine trailed down my driveway and snaked around to the backyard.  Before the touch of day, I’d let Shiva out to run free from the house and I.  Two hours later and still no sign of her. She’d usually come back to the front door scratching and whining to get back in; negative 42 degrees had a way of making animals panic.  The cold couldn’t bother me anymore, but the sun still did—it was too bright.  I grabbed a jacket anyway and headed out to look for her.  She had no problem jumping the metal fence around the property.  And when she didn’t feel like jumping, she’d dig her way to freedom.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Coeur de Lion by Chris Cleary

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Magnificently justified, she teeters on the parapet of her limestone tower. The herd lows below, and in the autumn air all stands still except for Tom, who has spied her from a distance and now is racing to her rescue. Her foot shifts and slips a bit, sending down a pebble cascade, but her heart is strong, and she refuses to be petrified. She stares straight ahead at the hillside, where leaves fall from their trees, drifting, dropping, like children’s valentines into makeshift paper-bag mailboxes taped to her classroom wall many years before. Cards of teddy bears with hearts, Hello Kitty with hearts, blooming flowers with hearts, circus lions proclaiming, “You’re purr-fect!” Suppressing squeals, children scurry. Others’ bags fill up. In hers, not one. Eyes anchored on the hillside, all she sees is disregard. That and the teacher frowning with pity for poor Samantha San Gabriel, so shy and so odd.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Talk from the Back of Tim’s Barn by Tom Sheehan

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These were more than echoes, the soft sounds I was hearing from the rear of the barn sitting back from Route 182 in Franklin, Maine, half a dozen fat pigs to one side, corn as deep as Iowa on the other side, and the terrain across the road flush with blueberry bushes until a slow rise tipped the landscape in its favor… and in mine. In my son Tim’s favor, too. He lives by this barn. Perhaps I had lived waiting for its sassy voices.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Christine-Ann Corbin by Arthur Davis

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The last time Christine-Ann Corbin wore a dress was two months ago when she turned twelve. Her parents had a small birthday party and celebrated with a few friends and neighbors. The conversation quickly turned to the unrest in Europe.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Rags By Tom Sheehan

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Rags, her son Greg’s dog, was a mutt who came home one day with her 12-year-old son, probably after being lost or dropped off by some callous owner and most likely hungry and attracted to Greg’s demeanor, soft voice, gentle hands, and a whistler, and that for much of his days when permissible.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Who Knows Who Lived in My House, Built in 1742, or Your House by Tom Sheehan

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For history and legend sakes, certain attributes, character traits if you will, have to be appointed here at the beginning of This old house (B. 1742), home for more than half a century of my life, and This old room, dressed with computer by me for the last 28 years. Yet I swear thick-cut Edgeworth pipe tobacco bears its welcome as strong as my grandfather’s creaking chair, diminutive Johnny Igoe’s chair. This most memorable compartment was also his room for 20 years of literate cheer, storied good will, the pleasantries of expansive noun and excitable verb, and his ever-lingering poems, each one a repeated resonance, a victory of sound and meaning and the magic of words. Yet be of stout spirit, for the chair mocks time only in the clutch of darkness thick as the eternal void, and the tobacco’s no longer threatening in its gulp.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Winter by Wm. Brett Hill

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When I was seven the world blew up.

I was in the depths of a nightmare when my mother, tears streaming down her face and her voice raspy like torn cardboard, shook me awake and dragged me from bed.  I was in the air before I knew what was happening, my favorite friend Fitzy hanging from my frightened grip as we bounded down the stairs and headed out the back door.

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