Something got in the way should apply only to happiness. I’d rather be a happy peasant than a genuinely depressed monarch. So in that regard it doesn’t matter if you are working the door or have it held open for you.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Revolving Doors by Sharon Frame Gay”
Positive Thinking
We will celebrate our eighth anniversary next month. Anniversaries and birthdays usually make me queasy because I view each as another item to be checked off a Great To Do List whose final task is “Die.” But I will allow that there is maybe, perhaps, seemingly and possibly an element in my personality that could be improved by wise advice, Vitamin Jesus or even a sunnier attitude brought about by better chemistry.
Continue reading “Week 398: Positive Thinking; The Week In Rocktober and Sing, Little One, Sing Like the Wind”
I had been hoping to be invited into The Posse for some time.
If you are too young to remember, or have been asleep for many years, here’s how we came to this. The world has always had serious divisions, not the least the USA, but disintegration here accelerated with the ravings of a former president whose name I don’t use. He died of a heart attack screaming “I’m the president’ while being questioned during his 2022 trial for various and sundry financial crimes. Soon thereafter, led by his sons and daughters, true believers were convinced he didn’t die and would soon return to save the country. Cult 45, as it became known, began to plague politicians at all levels of government with arson, death threats and kidnapping. Politicians aligning with Cult 45 were treated likewise by the enemies of Cult 45. Those opposed Cult 45 were called Anti45 by their supporters, and spelled derisively Auntie45 by Cult 45. The country was further divided by an Endemic, worsened by many variants. Mask or not, vaccine or not, the country was violently divided. As government was forced to protect itself, the business of governing the masses was left behind.
Continue reading “Killer Killer by Doug Hawley”
My father seeks help from the psychics, their names a litany, a liturgy. Padre, Maria, Esmerelda, Christin. They promise good fortune, alignments of the planets. They promise to vanquish his opponents. To vanquish bad luck. And he has so much, at least in his opinion. There’s the divorce from years ago, something that still simmers. I, his only son, didn’t become a lawyer. I up and left. I became a writer, a marker that to him conjured garrets and begging for food, and not victory, conquest. He tried to amass a coterie of girlfriends from abroad, each one coming in from distant lands, snatching a green card and the possibility of things. They called him prophet, valiant lord, but those were only obsequious platitudes.
Continue reading “Psychic Promise by Yash Seyedbagheri”
If she hadn’t looked at her phone at the exact moment she was crossing the road she would have…
Continue reading “A Game of Consequences by Sandra Arnold”
The dusky light had gone out. The blinds lay beige and dull with no sky behind them. Only the phone screen remained, and the quiet waves, and the suckling embrace of a hotel mattress. He shifted and pressed send.
Continue reading “The Souvenir by Nick Satnik”
The wind came up the river joyous as a boy riding a new bicycle and Harry Guahagan hustled to get his paint ready, the pale blue in the gallon can looking exceptionally good to his trained eye as he stared at the expanse of blue overhead from one horizon point to the other, the Saugus River running beside his house being the axis of the whole circumference of his existence. He was giddy at the thought of carefully applying a new coat of paint on his house; for god’s sake the insects had made a mess of his most recent paint job, the pale blue besmirched in so many places, but unbelievably in his mind the damned birds jamming the river were probably more at fault than other creatures; rabbits and skunks and an odd dog or two, he knew, had no responsibility in creating this new mess. It was nearly choking him.
Continue reading “The Mess for the Sages by Tom Sheehan”
Long-time friend of the site and excellent writer David Henson has sent us a submission for the Sunday Feature – thank you David. The lovely Leila has been the mainstay of this feature for such a long time that it is brilliant to see her with her own Literally Rerun.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Time and Chance Happeneth to All Gods by Leila Allison”
-Prologue-
Ineffable Is As Ineffable Does
With a peaked roof topped by a small brass eagle, the “Caretaker’s Cottage” in New Town Cemetery is a seven-by-nine rectangle that stands long side up. A few years back the City of Charleston had money left over in the Parks Department budget; two thousand dollars was allotted for the creation of ten incomprehensibly cheap signs to mark various “historical sites” throughout town. It was one of those mystifying expenditures that governments make to discourage the expectation of competence. One of the signs stands in front of the rectangle. It says: “Former Caretaker’s Cottage.”
Outside being the ancestral home to untold generations of Grey Squirrels, the building is a tool shed added decades after the cemetery was founded in 1902. New Town did have a live-in caretaker once, but he dwelled in a long since razed house that stood at the foot of the hill in which the cemetery is seated. But the extremely typical Charleston city employee tasked with the sign job had to put something on the one set aside for the cemetery–so she pulled a fiction from where the sun never rises and literally engaged a sign maker (her fiance–who reaped a thousand percent profit). In fact, nine of the ten signs placed throughout Charleston are similarly procured fictions–with the other being only true about Hartsville, Tennessee–the boyfriend sign maker’s hometown.
Continue reading “The Caretaker’s Cottage by Leila Allison”
Fuck me Ah’m pished!!
…How much shite can Ah talk tae myself?
Dae ye ken, Ah pride mysel’ oan it!
Ah look at this photo of you ma auld gran and Ah ken Ah can tell you things. Ah fuckin loved ye and ye spoilt me rotten!
Continue reading “Bravado by Hugh Cron”
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