Tag: free reading

All Stories, General Fiction

Stranger on the Gradient by Tom Sheehan

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Duncan Coffey felt a mild agitation. At first, he marked the subtle change as curiosity and then, making small measurements, corrected the assessment. A retired rewrite man for The Saxon Sentinel, he was frightfully aware that his capacity for surprise had long fled him. Odd moments told him he might have another person sharing his skin. This was one of those odd contemplations now working on him. His old fishing pal Ed LeBlanc used to say he had bitten off more than he could chew in this life, dwelling too often on little things, getting hung up in details, losing the big picture. “Duncan,” he offered a few times, “You could choke on a blade of grass and lose the whole thing.” He’d never explained what the whole thing was, but Coffey got the meaning.

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All Stories, Latest News, Writing

Week 263 – ‘Fucking Statistics’, Various ‘Fuck Offs’ And A ‘Fucking’ Joke. – Warning – Don’t read if you are offended by swear words – (Oh that may be a tad late if you’ve already read the title.)

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Here we are at Week 263.

I’ve been wanting to do a feature on this subject for a very long time but every time I tried to write the post it sounded like a Chronic Tourette’s Sufferers Convention.

Continue reading “Week 263 – ‘Fucking Statistics’, Various ‘Fuck Offs’ And A ‘Fucking’ Joke. – Warning – Don’t read if you are offended by swear words – (Oh that may be a tad late if you’ve already read the title.)” →

All Stories, General Fiction

When People do Bad Things by James Hannan

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8 am, Wednesday, and Chris waited for his mother. If only there was some way to stop her. Just because she had borne him nine long months, gotten up to him in the middle of the night in the years directly after, suffered his tantrums in the years after that, sent him off to school with a fresh packed lunch each and every day, saw to him as a teenager with his sullen silences and raging hormones, and helped him get a job and out into the world, she thought she could still intrude.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Blue Glacier Beer by Tom Sheehan

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And so, it had come to this… nothing would ever take him from his steely promise to extract, once and for all, total redemption from his old pal and teammate, Greg Lumbada, payment of the highest order, Amontillado on the instant air. So be it.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Priorities by Penny Faircloth

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When I was about seventeen years old I met myself in a downtown park sitting alone on a concrete bench in a small amphitheater. I was not skipping school—I did not do that kind of thing. And anyway, it was summertime. It was an ordinary summer day with oxygen blue sky vibrant behind the office towers with revivifying sunlight. The few trees were green, the leaves glossy and stiff with chlorophyll-rich fibers respiring life. Either side the park, steady sparse traffic rolled by in opposite directions on one-way streets. When I came upon him there, I did not recognize the man life had made of me. I was about thirty years old in that malingering guise. My seventeen-year-old self was with a friend and nor did he recognize me. But I may be forgetting, I am grown older … Even I, who saw so clearly, have become confused about what is what and contradict myself at every turn; at every remove, remove myself further from myself. Soon I will be unable to return to who or what I always was, and my dissolution will be complete, as is the way of all flesh; as is the way of all that may be said to exist. Do not believe me, see for yourself. It’s more miraculous than ever you might imagine. What is more miraculous than anybody could ever imagine? What is? Exactly!

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