5:50 A.M., 21 August 2017, New Town Cemetery, Charleston, WA
“Have you met yourself in a Legend yet, darling?” Emma says. Her Spirit and that of her love, Lewis Coughland, have just gathered-to, as always, in the oak, prior to daybreak.
Continue reading “A New Book of Numbers (Part I) by Leila Allison”
I don’t think anyone could have missed the inspiration for week 139!
There was a wee bit of a stramash this week. The fight between Mayweather and McGregor was another one I didn’t see as I only have council TV.
I used to enjoy following the boxing, but now that Sky has monopolised everything I see very little. I think Sky is going to be like Skynet from ‘The Terminator’ films and it is the beginning of our end. But to be truthful, no-one will notice as they will all be watching the varied box-sets that are available. Dying in front of the TV is now more of a certainty than pneumonia!
Continue reading “Week 139 – Pugilism, Diggstown And A Vagina With Teeth.”
Back in 1949 or 1950 when I was six or seven, my grandfather took me on my first trip on ‘the Slave Road,’ ‘the Hidden Highway,’ ‘the Nigger Byway,’ ‘the Devil’s Footpath,’ or ‘the River Styx Trail.’ All these names and more for a narrow, dark path, a little over a half-mile long, that saved almost a mile and a half between our farm and Corn Row Road. The “Row” was a dirt road, where our black friends and relatives lived.
The entire world had gone mad. Completely bat-shit crazy which was really saying something in this over-sexed, social-media crazed, smartphone obsessed cesspool that made up modern life. Douglas Garuder had long been a man whose time had passed him by. Hell, he still had an ancient flip phone with a long, spidery crack up the screen. Not that he ever used it. Since Joan had passed away some five years ago, there really wasn’t anyone he cared to talk to. Most of the time if he even remembered to look at the damn thing, he always expected her to call, reminding him to pick up eggs or some other mundane item at the grocery store. That feeling was always followed by the crushing, black sadness that he would never hear his wife’s voice again. At least not in this life anyway.
Liam paces the floor of his “study” which is a bedroom in the home that he and his wife Eileen are renting. The new addition screams its head off. He wishes the thing would shut up. Not the thing. That’s terrible. The girl. The baby. They cry constantly, babies. They cry because they’re infants, then they cry because they’re teething, then they cry because they’re in the ‘terrible twos.’ It seems different names for the same dreadful screeching. He has no idea why anyone would have a baby. He has no idea how he ended up with one.
The garden has faces. No one has seen them except me. At night, after serving my boss and his family dinner, I sneak outside to see the Dracula orchids, the Coxcombs and Proteas. “My friends!” I bow to them. “Forgive me. Everyone is in a bad mood. I too am in negative spirits.” The Dracula callas started speaking recently. One night they told me I looked like a corpse who wept himself to death.” I went to my assigned room, looked in the mirror and watched my tears turn yellow in the lamplight.
Continue reading “Facing a Garden Full of Faces by Ashlie Allen”
Fred Furk is mowing the grass when all asudden KABOOM! Next thing he knows, he’s spread out on his back clean across the yard. Lucky Girl, his Black Lab, is licking his face, and Doris is standing over him. She’s moving her lips, but he don’t hear a thing. Then it all goes dark again.
Continue reading “The Lightning King and Lucky Girl by David Henson”
Yet again I start with our wishes going to innocents caught up in madness!
Barcelona has become another victim of a sickness we are struggling to cure or even cope with.
Continue reading “Week 138 – Peas, Classification And Funny Tasting Orange Juice.”
Daniel crawls through a mixture of mud and clothes. The pungent smell of jet fuel and acrid smoke fills and burns his nostrils. There is something else in the air. Something he tastes as he breathes: a human smell. He spits, before he continues to crawl past open suitcases and broken, twisted pieces of metal. He hears the sound of a gas issuing from somewhere, the crackle of a fire, and then a woman’s moan. He looks over his shoulder at the fuselage. He hears another moan. He stands, turns, and staggers back to the wreck.
Continue reading “Third Closest to the Sun by Thomas Wadsworth”
In the dream, all I had to do was keep going until I got to the center of the city and then turn right to get to Grand Central Station. Before that I had been in L.A. where some cultists were convinced the world was going to end in another two days. They saw the signs in the street and were all standing around and pointing at a string of lights laid out in a certain way. My boss, Steve, thought they were crazy. He, or someone else, was telling us about a new service, a van set up as a portable office at the airport where you could sit for a while and do your business. Someone handed me a pile of photos which Steve wanted to see so I handed them to him and he found one of himself and his wife and there was a visible reaction that showed me they were very close. Before that I had been standing on my lawn and about a hundred noisy kids were living next door and someone had come by to replace my cell phone and he wanted to know if he should remove the loudspeaker. The further back I went the more complicated the dream got. In any case it must have been Steve who sent me to Grand Central. He liked to have us exercise, so there was someone else from the office out walking too, a woman, but she turned off where there was a fork in the road, following an arrow, while I continued straight through, catching green lights all the way.
Continue reading “This is the Way the World Ends by Fred Skolnik”
literally stories 