Tag: fiction

All Stories, General Fiction, Horror

Under the Same Sun by Astrid Ann Larsen

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Geneviève Gueron was as French as one could be. And while her peers were riding up and down the waves of hormonal instability, lamenting one second, rejoicing the next, she was simply and unequivocally in love with her life on the French Riviera. It had taken her some time to get used to the fierceness of the sunrays of the South, as the lack of obscuring buildings or tufts of sky made them bounce right off her white skin which would respond instantly with sizzling red spots. And with each day that passed, the deep yearning for her favourite dusty bookstores in Paris gave way to the undisputable dogmatic truth proclaimed by her parents, who had convinced themselves their new hometown would be kinder to them.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

A Particular Kind of Scumbag by David Henson

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Harold Marold was confident his new discovery was going to be big. Really big. Sure, his previous inventions hadn’t all turned out as he hoped. The periscoping contact lenses caused vertigo and motion sickness. His electro-socks to eliminate foot sweat were “shocking” — as he’d found out the hard way. And his chainsaw-equipped drone for trimming high tree limbs had its drawbacks. But his current project couldn’t miss. It was going to bring about world peace.

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All Stories, Humour

Case File: Something’s Cooking Under Where? by Frank Morelli

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Case File: Something’s Cooking Under Where?

6:58 PM: Dames play games with my head. They drive me to extremes. Run me off to sit in parking lots where the glow of the streetlamps glaze the top of my smoke rings in honey. Some dames disappear in the middle of the night. After twenty years. All because I was born to fight crime. All because I missed a few dinners, an anniversary or two, while out mopping vermin off the streets. Then she gets remarried, moves on with her life like I’m some speck of shit on the toilet rim that never spiraled down. I can only counter with three hundred sixty five canned chili dinners and a new leather duster. And now I’m about to attend my second class in an introduction to cooking course at the community college. I never dreamed there’d be a first, but canned chili only gets you so far before you reach colostomy bag status. So I sit here and wait. Watch the tall brunette, the curvy redhead, and the tattooed blond–my classmates–walk past and wonder which of these fair maidens slipped a favor in the front pocket of my duster last week.  It’s a silly little thing. Pink silk with eyelet trim and a round cutout on one end. Some kind of exotic lingerie apparatus, I imagine. All I know is my pocket was bare at the start of class and later that night I found the kinky surprise. It’s a real mystery. Now the only thought in my mind as I step out of the car is: which of these dames wants to toss my bacon in the skillet?

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All Stories, Writing

Week 186 – Writer’s Block, Questions And Ohhhhh Noooooo!!!!

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Here we are at Week 187.

I was wondering about writers block. Strangely enough when I thought on this I felt so many memories flooding back. Really strong, vivid memories.

I don’t know why as I’ve never suffered from writers block.

It’ll come to me.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Vestigial by Thomas Elson

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What can loosen a bond of thirty years?

What can strengthen what can no longer be made strong?

David felt as if he were living inside his recurring fear begun decades earlier inside a chanked and abandoned farm building off a path hidden by overhanging branches surrounded by unproductive land more than fifty yards from a gravel county road when he sat on the wooded floor with the tip of a rifle barrel stuffed in his mouth.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

Attending the Mote by Leila Allison

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Awesome meets Vicar’s link, travels deep into the Shog’s past, and gleans the stones. Awesome’s activity is represented in Vicar’s mind as a rotating red orb. This is the Third Form symbol for gleaning; when the orb turns blue Awesome will reveal the correct stone in Vicar’s mind. And at that time only will Vicar wield the glorious power death.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Jerry Cornelius (the English Assassin) Steampunk by Roger Ley

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Jerry Cornelius knelt by the side of his Norton motorcycle, laid his Lee-Enfield over the saddle, and sighted at the airship as it chuffed past, half a mile away. The musket was a new design with a rifled barrel. His shot hit the airship’s boiler and a jet of steam and water gushed out. The rear propeller slowed and stopped almost at once. The ship was at the mercy of the wind, its pilot, Telford Stephenson, would have to land and make repairs if he wanted to deliver the stolen ironclad warship plans to the rebel government in the North. Jerry Cornelius, being an agent of the British Government in London, had no intention of letting Stephenson deliver the plans to York, the Northern Alliance’s capital city.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Pulling Strings by Tom Sheehan

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He had awakened with the itch on his face, from a lone and long hair floating across one eye and one lip, or was it a cob web, a remnant, a silver runner of aerial flight? It definitely was cob-web thin, a filament, a gossamer streamer, light as thought, but not the thought of a spider like the one he had seen eye to eye above his camp bed as a kid. That one hung on such a silken, thin, lone strand that almost wasn’t there. He had always believed he had smashed that black-eyed spider into space with the magazine he had been reading earlier.

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All Stories, Latest News, Writing

Week 185 – Letters Of Acceptance, Rejection And Diane Biting.

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This week, I thought I’d give you all a wee bit of insight into a part of our process. It is regarding acceptance and rejection letters.

Now just like being on the hunt for an interested person of the opposite sex, it is easier to be accepted than rejected. Not many of my rejections had ever been written, normally a ‘Fuck off’ would suffice. In the same way none of my acceptances ever produced a letter, just a very grateful me and a lady that I would later judge. (OK, I may have written some poetry, but it was the eighties and I had hair.)

It’s easy to say yes to a submission but we wouldn’t be doing anyone any justice if we did this as a given. So we try to keep the site’s integrity.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Prisoners By Chad Plunk

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The German was nineteen or twenty and had bright blue eyes. He’d taken some grenade shrapnel in the stomach and he kept moaning, rolling around like it was the end of the world. It wasn’t a mortal wound, or even a bad one. Just bloody. The German spoke some English and between moans he kept looking at one or the other of the Americans.

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