Joy’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.
Tag: free read
UKHU PACHA by Andreea Daia
Pahuac rested his head on the sacrificial stone. He would have to go through this if he wanted to find his way back home. Why couldn’t he remember?
Lessons by Carole Glasser Langille

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.
Unprecedented by Adam Kluger
F. 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.
Johnny and Frankie by Nancy Robinette
One 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.
The 3 a.m. Litterateur by Tony Conaway
The 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.
A Weird Duck by Adam Kluger
For some reason, Franz still refuses to answer any of my phone-calls, e-mails or texts.
Not the type of behavior one might expect from a friend of over 30 years.
Week 83 – Rejection, Rejection, Rejection…
At time of going to print I was hoping to have done some performance writing but alas, I don’t know whether or not I have!!
Continue reading “Week 83 – Rejection, Rejection, Rejection…”
My Powdered Friend by David Henson
A few months ago I bought a box of My Powdered Friend, dumped the contents into a bathtub of water, sloshed it around, and went to bed. The next morning I woke up, and there was Steve.
The Bard of Oracle Park by Leila Allison
Oracle 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.
