All Stories, General Fiction

Superman meets Hitler by Julie Howard

typewriterJoy’s eyes were stinging from the stench of urine. She was hoping it was from her mother’s three tiny dogs, but suspected the mutts weren’t the only ones who’d been incontinent.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Lessons by Carole Glasser Langille

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Setsuko was twenty years older than me but she looked my age or younger. When I was first at university my brother came by and started talking to me when Setsuko was giving me a violin lesson in my practice room. He thought I was performing in front of a friend.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Unprecedented by Adam Kluger

typewriterF. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote,” if you are strong there are no precedents.”

Manfred Gogol lived “off the grid” and was a person of many small mysteries, like Gatsby.  Gogol’s wealth wasn’t money, though he somehow had acquired plenty of it from a mysterious trust fund that was established very early in his life. It was, in fact, his enviable ability to be completely mobile, free, unattached and without any marked responsibility whatsoever that was most singular.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Johnny and Frankie by Nancy Robinette

typewriterOne thousand and three green squares from one end to the other.  Lime green squares, match the lime green jello, match the lime green curtains, match the lime green creamed peas. You get the picture. I’m sure the nurses wonder why I wheel slowly up and down the corridor. It’s the number. One thousand and three. Where’s the symmetry in that? I demand order, discipline. So I count again. To confirm. You wouldn’t think that such a detail would matter in the grand scheme of things, but these days, that’s about as grand as my days get. I enjoy uniformity. Regimentation. Forty years in the military will do that to you. “Career Army” they used to call me. Married to Uncle Sam. I wonder how Lorna felt about that.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The 3 a.m. Litterateur by Tony Conaway

typewriterThe snow reflects the moonlight and the sound of my boots.  “I am,” I mutter to myself, “Zhivago, tromping from Yuriatin back to Moscow in the unforgiving Russian winter.”

She has a chain link fence around her place.  It’s little more than waist-high; meant to keep her dogs in, not people out.  In my condition, it only takes me about fifteen minutes to traverse it.  After several attempts, I manage to fall on the inside of the fence.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Bard of Oracle Park by Leila Allison

 

typewriterOracle Park has one tree. It’s a little non-fruiting cherry that seems nervous because cherry trees usually grow in numbers. They typically line parkways and chatter amongst themselves like a backstage gaggle of pink-clad chorus girls. By itself, however, a cherry tree seems fretful. Now, a lone wolf oak is expected—for it has a greedy nature that sucks up the best of the soil and hastens the death of the grass around it. But not the cherry; they are used to sharing resources as though they are swapping garters and smoking off the same cigarette. One suspects that without intervention the little cherry in Oracle Park may die of anxiety, or from overdosing on too much sunshine and minerals. If this one survives, it will most likely grow to cast an uneasy shadow.

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