Thomas Darwin, his cheeks stained with tears and his body quivering, slowly marched farther into the frigid Delaware Bay. The crowd gathered on the beach shouted for Thomas to stop, to turn around, to return to the shore. Eventually he did stop but not until the water lapped at his bare chest.
Continue reading “Modern-Day Heroes by Douglas James Troxell”
‘Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things…’ Robert Frost
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Daphne Robins decided to end her life immediately. Not in the conventional way with bullets or paracetamol or dangling from a beam. Far too dramatic. It was more of a replacement she was looking for. She’d been drifting. She knew it, and a change was needed. Not a small, measly, January-the-first-gym joining change, that wouldn’t do at all. She needed a profound, wow-your-so-brave-I-never-thought-you-would-could-facebook-status-update-to-all change. She placed her well-thumbed copy of the complete works of Robert Frost onto the speckled granite breakfast bar, but not before placing a soft kiss onto Robert’s sun-faded profile.
‘Thank you, Robert.’
Thanks again guys for all the lovely comments of last week we were all chuffed to bits!
OK, onto this week and we may have an old issue of mine. I will only mention this once. Well except for the notification that we take a break but that will only be a short sentence with two dates.
I have a hair up my arse for Christmas. And I’m making a point by making this point early. The Christmas celebrations are as premature as a horny teenager using a condom before they use a condom!
Continue reading “Week 151 – Face Grating, Sausage Rolls And The Christmas Puddle.”
His sister had suggested he contacted the TV production company that made the programme about hoarders. Those strange folks who collect things from bins, who live in houses so filled with clutter that they’ve been reduced to a small window of space in a back bedroom. Sometimes they’re rescued through a gap in the rubbish bags by the fire brigade. They argue until they’re blue in the face about the possible future utility of a broken coat hanger or a plastic duck.
I’ve been running long enough that everything in me wants to collapse and the grass is looking like an awfully good pillow. Every morsel of my body is getting back at me for those sports I never played and the exercise I never did. Just to rub it in, time slows to a caterpillar’s pace. You could solve a Rubik’s cube in the time it takes me to make one step. Slowly, I evacuate my body parts. It’s a skill I spend my gym periods perfecting. You try and imagine you don’t even have a body. I start with my legs. They still move but I just don’t feel them anymore, like an employee that keeps on coming to work even after you fired him. Then I release my kidneys, pancreas, ovaries, and all those other miscellaneous organs. Finally I reach the basketball court, light splattered liberally across it. I take a breather and check my phone, just in case she texted me back. She hasn’t.
Continue reading “Rounds Forty-Four Through Forty-Eight of a Game I Made Up by Daniel Olivieri”
On the horizon, out of the dust of the Harvest Road, comes a small trotting tribe of misfits.
The city outside of The Seventh Circle was a furnace whose incomplete combustion rendered spent, fetid air. Each time the bar’s door opened, squalls of ash and heat punished One Ball. He ignored the oily soot that coated his skin and leathers. This was where he sat. His headaches bloomed every day and were getting worse.
I was on the Northern Line a while back, from one of the Finchleys. I was listening to loud music, a thing my doctor had warned me not to do, and yet it was drowned out by nearby conversation. You get to after East Finchley, around Highgate, and wherever, up around there, and there is nearly always this kind of decibel-creating person gets on.
OK guys, we’ve a few things going on, so I’ll cut straight to the chase and get on with last week’s reviews.
‘Cut to the chase’ – There is a wee bit in the irony of that as it was originally a phrase used to get rid of the written word when we are reviewing the written word. No matter…And on to this week’s stories!
Keeper’s eternal eye opens in the sleeper’s mind, and the two become a selfless one. This doesn’t mean a lack of selfishness–the meaning is literal–no sense of I is present; no sense of Other intrudes. There are no assessing thoughts affected by personal prejudice; nor questions; nor judgements; nor reactions; nor guesswork. Only a pure stream of information passes across the stage of the sleeper’s mental theatre. The players, though strangers, are known to the sleeper, and the recent past returns to its former place in the now.
Continue reading “The First Symptom is Death (Part II) By Leila Allison”
literally stories 