Tag: free read

All Stories, General Fiction

A Thin Blue Line by Anne M Weyer

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typewriterHave you ever read the future in a thin blue line, as you wait in the handicapped stall in the fourth floor bathroom? Your stretched out knees have made a run in your pantyhose, which are cheap and rough and aggressively tight, so you slide out of your worn kitten heels and tug them off to pass the time. Balling them up and stuffing them into the little maxi-pad trashcan uses up about twenty seconds. Pregnancy test seconds, as any woman in the know will tell you, pass even more slowly than microwave seconds. Whether you are bound to be relieved or disappointed or tremulously hopeful and filled with joy, the waiting is the hardest part. Once you know, you know. You can confront that emphatic little mark and all its implications head on. When you know, you have options. “Options,” you whisper to yourself, hoisting up your skirt with the grooved thumb-grip clamped between your teeth.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Better Living Through Better Chemistry by Adam Kluger

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Roderick liked the no-nonsense approach of this new psychiatrist. She went to an Ivy League school and she had an aloof air about her. Sexy too…in a frigid, bitchy kind of way. Roderick wondered if her pussy smelled like mothballs or like his grandmother’s old country house. Her office felt like the interior of the space station from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. You could almost hear the air pumping in.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Lift by Paul Thompson

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typewriterThey recognise each other immediately. At least they think they do – greeting each other with the kind of embrace usually reserved for a reunion, which in many ways this feels like. A few nervous moments pass as they silently try to categorise the person opposite. They both wear name badges and so have no need for formal introductions. They look each other up and down – something normally considered impolite but here it feels acceptable, as though they are merely old acquaintances catching up after a long absence. They share a few jokes about their current predicament, serving as pleasantries before concluding what the other has already concluded.

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All Stories, Latest News

Week 76 – Pen Names, Nicknames And Shame

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typewriterI was wondering about protocol with pen names this week. If there is contact from an author to us regarding writing, should we refer to the person by their pen name? I’m honestly not sure. Historically most people had a pen name because their gender was getting in the way. Now-a-days you would hope that isn’t an issue. I suppose something that is politically loaded or against a hierarchy, you could understand the person wanting to be obscure. But let’s be honest, it is difficult to hide, not only your views in this day and age but you, yourself. There is a camera, a microphone or some twat on Facebook who is always willing to spill the beans.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour

Goodbye Wall Street by Edward S Barkin

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A few years ago – actually a few more than a few – I was ever so close to becoming a full-fledged drone in the beehive of modern-day America.  During that time, I was still merely an apprentice — one of many youthful human resource units at the disposal of a large and powerful Wall Street corporation.  My job was to sit at a desk ten hours a day and do various unimportant things.  In return, I received money.  Not that much of it, but just enough so that I didn’t have to worry constantly about how much I was spending.  Forty thousand a year, let’s call it, though it was probably only thirty-eight at best.

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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, Fantasy

Elves by Frederick K Foote (contains sexual content)

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typewriterIt’s 2:30 am and Charlotte and I are wide awake holding hands in our new bed in our new house. This is our third sleepless night in our new home in the West Virginia wilderness.  It’s the howling, hooting, chirping, scraping, squealing night noises that keep us from sleeping. There’s a sudden scraping sound on the roof and the sounds of a cavalcade of creatures marching above our heads.

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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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