Short Fiction

Week 402: I Love You, But…The Loved Week That Is; An Invitation and a Veterans Day Act of Remembrance

Latest Big Idea

I heard Stevie Nicks’ Edge of Seventeen for the hundred-thousandth time on the radio this week, and hated it a little more. There’s a Classic Rock station that is played in the warehouse near my workstation, and that despised tune intrudes on my thoughts an average of three times a week. Once upon a time actual human beings designed playlists, now they are done by programs. These programs are flat out poorly constructed for they only select material already heard to the saturation point. Same old same old. Never any happy surprise memories.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Fat Pussy by Midori P. Yeung

Bubba is such a fat pussy. The bulk of her belly drags along the floor when she walks with her four short legs.

We describe Bubba with all the words we are no longer allowed to use on people.

But Bubba doesn’t care for semantics.

She circles around my legs and demands more snacks. Her soft hair tickles my skin and gives me a kinky mix of annoyance and comfort.

‘Bubba, I’m working.’

If you say so, she jumps on my desk and curls up on the laptop in front of me. She’s very fond of laptops; the electrical warmth comforts her tushy.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Seeds by Peter O’Connor

Her nose took the impact, it canted left and snapped perfectly at the bridge. Her mascaraed eyes watered until her vision became a myopic smudge. She staggered, tripping on the raised step between lounge and diner. (A design feature she always hated but he insisted on.) ‘It will define the individual spaces’, he’d said. Another blow staggered her.  She remembered her Interior Design professor screaming ‘NEVER BREAK THE FUCKING SPACE,’ as he came in, on, or often just around her slut of a best-friend flatmate. That exalted mantra had stuck, her friendship hadn’t. Her fingers skittered along the edge of the kitchen top, too cold, too polished, nothing to cling to, to hold, to grasp. Her father’s words came to her, ‘you can’t trust stainless steel,’ he’d say, ‘unnatural stuff, use wood, wood has an inherent trust, copper an earned one, stone, who the hell uses stone nowadays?’ He always chuckled at himself when he said that.  He also warned her. “Look for the comfortable, the homely, ‘hugge,’ as the Dutch say. No cold marble, no hard granite, no slippery steel and definitely no injection moulded impervious shiny plastic. An interior, my gorgeous girl, is a mirror of soul.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Young Man Who Said He’d Never Eat Chocolate Again by Tom Sheehan

Today it all came back. Once again, on another brilliant dawning, the Western Yetness still calling me, I woke with a toothache. A stupendous one! In half an hour, despite quick brushing, the stimulator poked here and there, gargling, all proving useless, the ache remained in force. It was, without a doubt, the chocolate again, or the mere thought of chocolate. I knew I was weak to most any candy, and to chocolate in particular, right from the beginning.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Generative/ Iterative/Evaluative by J. Bradley Minnick 

These are the last days and unfinished pages of a dissertation on Pragmatics and Features of Sex, 1998—Beth says—expected by her committee members in two weeks, or at-most, a month. Her defense is in three weeks, but she doesn’t think she’ll finish. She says she’d happily quit and work in a bank or in a mall selling perfume behind shiny counters—spritzing the stuff on eligible men who will buy it from her with hopes of getting laid. She says even if she quits, she will continue her work, untethered and uncriticized and make her own study of the language of love, its features through natural conversations, speech acts, implicatures, while managing the flow of reference and the theories of the mind. Then, Beth pauses. But it’s still too big, she says. It’s always too big.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Memoir.by Kristen A. Schmitt

When I started putting the words on the page, I didn’t know what it was. An exercise in letting go. A reflection of memories. A way to make myself understand what it was, what I had been through. I never thought of the consequences, of letting anyone else read what I had written.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns – Colours by Amanda L. Wright

There are at least a dozen memorable lines in Amanda L. Wright’s Colours. The main thing that sticks with me is the lament (and I paraphrase) that if they had gone to war to protect the British way of life, then the war was lost long ago.

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Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 401: A Dirty Slate; Welcome to YES-vember and What’s On Your Wonderwall?

Tableau de rasa is Latin for “a clean slate.” In philosophy it describes the unmuddled mind of infancy, which is soon spoiled by life. I was once one of those overly polite people who’d write “As you know…” or something equally cagey before sneakily defining a term that I figured maybe only half the readers already know. This of course presents an unwinnable situation for the polite person. I have always seen condescending people as jerks while patronizing types are smiling jerks. In my mind you cannot patronize without being condescending but you can condescend without being patronizing. So, if anyone out there smells either on my breath I apologize, but it might be an aid to know that I consider condescension slightly less rotten than patronization.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Sea by P O’Connor

The loose hall board, if you rocked heel to toe, sounded like someone drowning, that bastard son-in-law he hoped. He tried to silence him with new copper nails along its length. For a while it worked. But one evening the gasp returns, quieter now, pitched high. His weighted heel brings his wife, grasping a breath before sinking under a swirling sea. His toe raises her sea-washed face and she gasps again; help me, John, I have her.

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All Stories, Fantasy, Science Fiction

The Eternal Bob by Lewis Braham

Bob the same backwards and forwards existed. In every universe in an upholstered mustard colored armchair watching the Eagles who were no goddamn good and why did they ever let that guy Michael Vick be their quarterback? In the Farrago quadrant, 34th century, he was known as the constant and studied in advanced quantum mechanics classes, but was unknown to lesser beings in our 21st.

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