The cobbled streets bloat, filled with petrol fumes, birds’ droppings, and old receipts discarded by office workers returning home. A clock chimes seven times.
Tag: free reading
The Hanging Mum by Melissa Prideaux
Mum opens the windows each morning to let the birds in and closes them at night to keep the darkness out.
Olivia’s Escape by Ed Kratz
Olivia squeezed the handle of her wheelchair so hard the veins stood out on her bony wrists.
A Secret Study of Jack Wilkens, Drunk by Tom Sheehan
Early evening light, what was left of it, spilled near Jack Wilkens in his one lone room in the big house, a house once flaunting and imposing in its stance, now cluttered like an old shed forgotten in a back lot, debris its main décor. Despite his reputation as the town drunk, a ne’er-do-well from the first day, an inveterate crank, there had been an instant and subtle attraction between me and the old codger, an attraction without early explanation.
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Literally Reruns – The Dumb by Doug Hawley
Leila tells us this rerun was just waiting to be chosen – this is what she said:
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Week 237 – Empty Shops, Eternal Drinking And Three Big Baws For Your Granny
Another week has rolled into the distance and here we are at Week 237.
My home town has now over 150 empty shops, that is very sad.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least twenty pubs that aren’t here anymore and that is even sadder.
I miss all the pubs and one shop. ‘Drawrite’, was a stationers.
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Sisters from Another Mister by Jill Malleck
Cheryl picks me up at the corner of Queen and Duke on Saturdays at three. It just makes sense, she said not long after we met. I’m going right by there anyway. It was my bus stop to Freeport, only now I lean out of the Plexiglas shelter and give a little wave, so the bus doesn’t stop. Today he pulls in to drop someone off. My face is red. It’s stupid how ashamed I feel about that dismissive wave.
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The Caste of the Executioner by Virgil Barrington
I
It was unseasonably damp in The Skirrid Inn on the night of 17th June, 1724. A tremendous storm had struck during the day, clearing the early summer humidity and setting the scene for a dramatic couple of days in the small town of Knaresborough.
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Ooame by J C Weir
It was almost dark. “Ooame desu ne,” said Yumiko Sakuragawa barely audible, as she gently placed the final two bowls amongst the myriad of others on the small table, and took her place on the tatami mat floor opposite her husband. He sat with his gaze fixed through the open shoji doors, beyond the polished pine veranda, out across the patchwork of rice fields, colourless now in fading light and heavy rain. Two weeks ago he would have said, “It will be a good crop.” The temperature and the humidity were favourable. But he had become uneasy. It was near the end of tsuyu, the rainy season, but the old man in his ninety one years, had never lived through a downpour of unceasing weight. Such rain is not sympathetic to rice saplings. Since morning stories he had heard when he was young, that the old people told, of a deluge that washed away the rice and the villages, had come to him. He nodded pensively. “So desu ne. Ooame desu.” Yes. Heavy rain.
Flesh of An Unwanted Fish by Tom Sheehan
Armand Tollbar remembered everything Clara said, on and off the pillow, in the bedroom and out of it. These days that had become a tough assignment for him, for while the memories were rich and repetitive, he now knew, deep down in his body, without a paucity of doubt, that the river was getting polluted. For the two of them there had always been a minor division: she loved the house, he loved the river.
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