Tag: free reading

All Stories, Horror

Baby’s Breath by Quinn

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Charice went to check on Nate after having laid him down for a nap only twenty minutes ago.  She had an almost obsessive need to check on him, which the online forums she frequented said was normal for a new mother. She found these social media groups to be just as helpful as they were harmful. There was a lot of information not based in science that made its way around. She found the support of other mothers to be the most helpful. To find reassurances in the words of other moms. Despite her enjoyment of the groups she was taking a break for the day after nearly getting herself worked up over someone being rude on her post mentioning Nigri, her cat, having taken a liking to the baby. They raged in warning her against the cat hurting the baby, against toxoplasmosis, and one nut told her the cat would steal her baby’s breath while he slept. While Nigri had been very interested in baby Nate since Charice had brought him home, quite the opposite of how she thought she would be, she didn’t feel there was anything more than curiosity of a new creature inhabiting the home.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

Sawbones by Edward N McConnell

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Tom Kenner sat looking out the window of a waiting room at the Columbus Orthopedic Hospital. He had been through the magazines but, dog-eared and dated, they couldn’t hold his attention. “Maybe staring out the window will make the time go more quickly,” he thought. It didn’t.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns: Paper Lined Tables by Rachel Sievers

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The two things that stand out for me in Rachel Sievers’ Paper Lined Tables are displacement and expectation. A hard to face big problem is usually addressed through an unrelated smaller trouble, and waiting for something is often better than getting that something. Mostly, the things most wrong in our lives are impossible to articulate without receiving negative pushback from a person associated with the woe. And dreaming of a best pal dog without accounting for how you will deal with the uptick of chewed slippers, barking and dogshit in your life can be stressful.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 386: What’s It All About, Five, No Four Works of High Fiction and the A to Z of Buying a Round For the Unsteady Jukebox

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What’s It All About?

I’ve begun my fifth year of feeding the little gray menace in the header–Misster Andy Hisster. Andy is in fine health and continues to live the pirate life even though I constantly offer him different situations. Off and on for the last few months, Andy has had a sidekick; a young Tuxedo Cat (also pictured–goody, I see he was photobombed by my device) first named Patch, but after an exchange of enlightening interoffice communications with Diane, I now call him “Alfie”–as in the ne’er do well portrayed by Michael Caine.

I’ve always been suspicious about Alfie during the six months or so he’s tagged along with Andy, for me to feed under the hedge. Alfie never shows up when the weather is bad nor does he ever appear to have slept under the building, covered in cobwebs like Andy often is. Andy is indifferent to personal grooming, which is unusual for a House Cat, but not unseen in the ferals. Alfie is a dandy. Never a hair out of place. Fop.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Ben by Hugh Cron – Warning – Adult Content.

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Before Ben knew it he was sixty.

He wasn’t sure if that bothered him but it was now forty one years.

He stayed in what he called his ‘But and Ben’. He loved the old bed that pulled down from the wall. Ben reckoned that there was a cure for cancer within it’s mattress but he didn’t care that there might have also been a hundred different types of lurgey living within the confines of decades of dead skin and bodily fluids. It was quite comfortable.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Gone by Robert Steward

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The first place I search for Mum is Sainsbury’s. It’s the first shop that pops into my head. Maybe she needs ingredients for a cake or something. Though the last one she baked stirs up images of a smouldering mount Vesuvius. She forgot the eggs. I whip through the supermarket to the beep of the checkouts, panning every aisle, even the frozen food section. But she’s not there.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Quick Death of a Lottery Foe by Tom Sheehan

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Murder, when it comes in pairs, causes echoes. The push and pull, the cause and effect, the what and why, bounce off every surface. The sound jangles and makes intrusive inroads into daily and otherwise common sense. When one of the victims is a small account part-time drunk, bar room stentorian, an ex-jailbird, and the other is Doyle Hapgood, Harvardian, Commissioner of Police for the City of Boston, there is resonance, there is reverberation, and the black ink of headlines runs red.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns: Walk on By by Jane Houghton

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Even the stars will go out, one by one, the great and the small, at entropy all will be done. And such is the case with Margot, a small star in the show business sky, yet a first magnitude sun in Jane Houghton’s Walk on By. This is a fine example of parallel writing. The current story nurtures the backstory and both resolve together in a bittersweet, even uplifting conclusion.

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