Tag: fiction

All Stories, Latest News

Week 183 – Milestones

Nik

At some undetermined moment between me starting this draft and it magically appearing in your inbox or news feed via the wonders of the interweb, Literally Stories will have surpassed 200,000 page views.

Yes indeedy faithful readers in four short years we have reached a level of activity that a Kardashian nipple or a Bieber tattoo can expect to log in just under 4 nanoseconds.

If Hugh was here this week he’d probably say something like “fuck those limelight seeking, dopamine craving, attention hugging social media whore-bastards and all who ride on them.”

But he isn’t.

So I did.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Naming of the Beasts by Matthew Roy Davey

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Daniel sat clutching a coffee, staring into the blur of humanity.  He wasn’t far from his parents’ home and had no need of a rest, he was here to put off the meeting.

He had read somewhere that the guns of HMS Belfast were trained on Watford Gap. He had no idea why, perhaps it symbolised those attempting to escape the capital.  Still, he was not attempting an escape, he was heading towards his conflict, though that conflict was an escape of sorts.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Condition of Absolute Reality by Leila Allison

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10:30, Sunday morning, 21 February 1970

-1-

It was one of those little lost lamb spring days that sometimes wander into the dead of a Pacific Northwest winter. The sky was as clear as the devil’s conscience, and the temperature would reach well into the sixties by mid-afternoon. By and by, almost everyone in Charleston would go out to grab a piece of that little lost lamb spring day; for everyone knew it wouldn’t be long until another dreary storm blew in off Philo Bay.

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All Stories, Horror

Artificial Love by L’Erin Ogle

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What is the most important quality that your Soulmate should possess?

It was not the first question, or the last. It was somewhere in the middle. I could look it up but you took my electronics. It’s only memory I can look to now, and we all know what a liar that motherfucker is.

Honesty.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Chornby and Leo the Blind Man by Tom Sheehan

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Silence is the color
 in a blind man’s eyes 

Leo wondered if it was some kind of contest, if it smacked of more than what it seemed. He had heard the poem a hundred times, Chornby always walking around with the book in his shirt pocket or back pocket suddenly reading it to him, again and again, and Leo, the Blind Man of North Saugus, let the words sink in and become part of him, part of his sightless brain. Just like Chornby had become part of him. Chornby’s face he could not picture, nor eyes, nor beard, nor jut of chin, but settled on the imagination of Chornby’s hands and could only do so when he felt his own slim unworked hands, the thin fingers, the soft palms, the frail knuckles, how the fingers wanted to touch a piano but couldn’t, or a woman, but who wants a blind man?

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

A Dream Lover by Frederick K Foote

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You’re alone hurrying by under cloudy night skies.

I’m lost in the shadows on the lips of the fetid alley. I’m feverish, near fainting, fading, fading away. You catch a glimpse of me, spy me, eye me, wonder, imagine me. You race away to lock your doors, check your windows.

In your simple underwear you slip between smooth, clean, cotton sheets and dream me, dream me tall, slender, strong.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Tender Kentucky by Emma Dahlsten

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Carrie tilts her head on the back of the vinyl seat on Bus 109 and breathes deeply for the first time in two weeks. The collar of her pressed white uniform is smudged with day old makeup and tears. Her shifts at Memorial Hospital are becoming longer and her patience shorter for the everyday cold and flu vaccinations. She lets her head roll until the tip of her nose touches frosted glass. Her eyes flutter open to see a man in his seventies, draped in loose cotton, stare back at her and wave. The man gives a one-toothed grin and turns his back, shielding whatever sits behind his tall frame. She allows her eyelids to become heavy and falls asleep to the soft lull of the bus’s engine as it trucks through Louisville, Kentucky.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Literal Gourmand — A Fable by Daun Daemon

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She hated her job. All day she read and reworked words that didn’t satisfy, words dry, tasteless, and underripe — words like rectifier and microprocessor and power semiconductor. Their heaviness left paste in her mouth.

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