Everyone in this place talks about Dr. Redd. I had never wanted to talk to staff because (1) my spies would get wind of it, (2) Dr. Redd sounds crazier than the patients here and (3) he might get suspicious. Nurse Bealer, who looks like Charles Laughton on a bad day, convinced me to go. She just wanted me off the ward for an hour or so.
Continue reading “Visiting Dr. Redd by Constance Woodring.”
James Joyce would have understood Amber in Fiona McGarvey’s Kenny Women. He would have understood the social circumstances of the ugliness that finds her as well as her lassitude toward it. Although the story is hard going, it is rewarding due to its honesty and the quiet strength of McGarvey’s prose.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Kenny Women by Fiona McGarvey”
Here we are at Week 340.
The year is flying by.
It won’t be long now to those dark endless days of the end of days.
Listen to me being all positive!
Continue reading “Week 340 – Legends Never Die, The Only Advert Worth Seeing And Alternative Words For Actual Events. (Allegedly)”
You know, sometimes people die because of inattention. That’s what happened to Zelda May Crawford, the community activist. Zelda was down on 7th and Broadway just a yakking away on her cell. Poor Baby stepped in front of the number 10 crosstown express bus. Splat! And that was that.
Continue reading “Dead Certain by Frederick K Foote”
He has come out of a dread silence and given himself a name; Saugus, he says. He bleats like a tethered goat to come out of that coming, to be away, dense spiral to the core of self, to the mountain call, bird arc across such slopes of pale imaginings.
Continue reading “A Salutation to My Saugus, Embassy of the 2nd Muse by Tom Sheehan”
Wattle’s life had a rough start. His mother died during childbirth, and his father was in Louisiana State Penitentiary. His first home was a run-down orphanage in New Orleans. At age fifteen, the institution closed, and he was thrust out to fend for himself. Wattle had learned many skills in survival, but he had never gone to school. So he enrolled in a state college on a paupers grant. After several years, he earned a bachelor’s degree and found work with a non-profit serving the homeless in Baton Rouge.
Continue reading “Wattle & Daub by Tim Hildebrandt”
Once, the coffee shop walls were sunshine yellow. It was a yellow that to Nick evoked the shape of sweet dreams. Dreams that whispered and took him by the hand. Dreams he couldn’t get facing white walls, six months ago. White walls that faced other white walls, with faceless neighbors who never made themselves known.
Continue reading “Welcome by Yash Seyedbagheri “
One day many years from now. Or wait.. Maybe it was many years ago? I guess it doesn’t very much matter.
Well, One day, a small creature not so old, yet also not so very young, its mottled furs pointing this way and that, its feet opened and sore, its body shivering, weak from its life’s long toils, cold from the inclement elements, but most of all hungry; so very hungry, hungry from days-
(Or was it years? Perhaps. That too does not much matter now.)
– without nourishment, came upon a beautiful tree.
Continue reading “The Apple by Simon Berling”
I’d rather that antlers grow in than have a child. Although it’s probably for the best that a person who has no children should feel that way, not everyone is so blessed. In an even more sinister conception, a combination of buyer’s remorse, potential Munchausen by proxy and our dear pals depression and fear drive this week’s rerun, The Thing by Dianne Willems. It is a simple tale of a complicated state of being, which I believe happens often, yet a shame enforced secrecy persists to the point of causing tragedy.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – The Thing by Dianne Willems”
Hugh is on a well earned holiday this week. This leaves me alone in a room, thinking of what to do for Week 339 at 3:56 A.M. on a Thursday morning.
The cursor is blinking, and my mind is its usual unsteady and fearful self. Writing is like life, I go from here to there and make it up on the spot, then return to edit the mistakes later.
Yet there are always some things I miss and never fix. For instance, the fatuous simile in the previous paragraph.
Anyway…
When I was a child we lived in a house that had secret rooms. Actually, the secret rooms were crawl spaces above the eaves–one at each side of the attic, accessed through pull out shelves. Only persons the size of your standard six-year-old (or so) could move around comfortably in the crawl spaces; only persons of six (or so) have enough imagination to consider the places the Christmas decorations wind up secret rooms.
Continue reading “339- Secret Rooms, Incidental Blonde Bashing and Results From the Tiny Wildcat Division at the Feline Olympics”
literally stories 