Tag: fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

Hail Caesar! by David Louden

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typewriterI had been at University six months when I got the call to tell me my old school friend Eamon Donovan had died.  Drug overdose.  He wasn’t the partying kind; it was a different kind of drug overdose.  An entirely intentional one.  Eamon was from the north of the city, like me; The Bone.  That particular stretch of hopeless home-front had given rise to a nasty habit of suicide.  In the years I had been out of my working class no-man’s-land I’d stopped counting the amount of associates who had taken the off-ramp.  It had become so frequent that it had been dubbed the North Belfast Green Card.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

Scolley Square by Phillip E. Temples

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I watch her walking down the middle of the street. She stands tall and defiant against them.

Two minutes have passed since I saw her running out of the entrance to the recently renovated Government Center station, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s crown jewel of glass and stainless steel. I cannot fathom why she fled the relative safety of the underground, to appear here in the bright summer sunlight.  To challenge them. To stand directly in harm’s way.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Sleep by Cameron VanderWerf

literallystories2014

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By dusk, he could feel the coming of another sleepless night, so after Helen left for her book club meeting—stooping from the weight of the pregnancy—he left a note on the kitchen counter and walked out the front door. It was a beautiful evening, and maybe that was why he didn’t feel like sleeping. The dying light in the west cast a rusted glow from the horizon, and the air was warm and slow. The only traffic on the road in front of his house was a beat-up brown station wagon gliding past. He watched it disappear up the road, no trees to block his view.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Last Look by Tom Sheehan

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Shots had been fired in Black Limb, a town in the Dakota territory, a bank teller and a bystander wounded, the thief caught in the middle of the robbery, knocked down by, of all things, a woman sheriff with a badge worn on a most prominent chest, dark and beautiful eyes seemingly full of pity and something else the unsuccessful robber managed to draw from her, him the handsome dog, handsome robber George Crown brought to his dusty knees by a woman sheriff, a knock-out sheriff.

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All Stories, Writing

Week 74 – Homer Or Rankin?

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typewriterI’m not a hundred percent sure why I thought on my topic for this week but I wanted to have a wee look at book snobbery.

Should Ian Rankin have less status than Homer? The character of ‘Rebus’ is fascinating and he’s the star of twenty novels. (So many crackers but ‘The Falls’ was superb). And what does it say about popular culture when there are more results for Rebus than Homer in Amazon. And the icing on the comparison cake, if you type into the internet the word ‘Homer’, it is Mr Simpson who pops up before ‘The Iliad’?

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All Stories, Horror

Kensington Gore by Lise Colas

literallystories2014

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His blood reaches out to me across the polished flagstones, pooling in luxuriance half a centimetre from the toes of my new Belle Vivier pumps, as if about to kiss them. A perfect match for their patent sheen, the colour of a good Burgundy too, what a waste.

“Excuse me–” a man in a dark suit touches my arm and I step back.
“Do you know this person?” asks the suit. There is a wire leading to his ear. A woman behind him screams, dropping her chic carrier bag.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Go Time by Josie Myers

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typewriterFrank tried to flag down his instructor using a beauty queen wave for the fifth time that day.

“Excuse me, Sergeant Airborne.”

A glare radiated beneath the brim of the instructor’s black cap as he led the troops to the open doors of the Curtiss C-46 Commando.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Dead Man’s Last Home by Michael Glazner

literallystories2014

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Clint’s sleeping body takes a breath, stretches and rolls over. The large man wearing a white coat scribbles notes on his pad while the dim sunrise light peeks through the window. Clint’s body rolls back to its original position. The white coat checks his watch and then checks off a box on his notepad.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Islands of Bluebell Meadow by Paul Thompson

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typewriterWe reach the housing estate by mid-morning.

The site office is closed for business and surrounded by construction vehicles long since abandoned. Buildings hide behind frameworks of scaffold with empty windows and hollow interiors. Here the recession has spoken with confidence. Construction work has ceased and the estate is destined to stand empty and unfinished.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Catch of the Day by Tom Sheehan

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typewriterThree of us for dozens of years were tight as a fist. No one could break us up, and a few had tried that on a few futile occasions, even when we gentlemen were fly fishing on one or more of the local streams, dawn afloat, May alive after a harsh winter and a tough early spring. Patterns were set betwixt us, like specialties of the house or garage or personal workshop, toil and turn at obstacles and unfinished tasks were before us who by each one’s choice in life’s work had brought the gifts of ideas and applicable and talented hands to extend those gifts. For each one of us possessed odd and different talents in electrical, mechanical and brute strength applications and peculiar other interests like coin and stamp collecting, scrap book organization and minimal, but touching artwork by a loving touch, family interest passed down from a parent or an older sibling.

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