Tag: general fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

You Will Remember Everything by JC Freeman

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At the age of five, highly gullible Lewis Coughland had fallen prey to his older cousin, Vicki. She had convinced him that since he hadn’t been baptized that he and all he loved would go straight to hell upon the Second Coming unless he took “counselling” from a good Christian (i.e. Vicki) who had a direct line of communication with the All-mighty. Since it was “too late” to do anything about the baptizing (which “forbade” Lewis from shaping prayers of his own), nine-year-old Vicki had graciously volunteered herself to serve as Lewis’s go-between in all matters Heaven and Earth; all Lewis had to do in return for this service was become Vicki’s personal slave. The counselling had been big on tough love and discipline. A typical session went as follows: Continue reading “You Will Remember Everything by JC Freeman” →

All Stories, General Fiction

The Day Off by Patty Somlo

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Jorge Mendoza was the last man to receive a call. As he picked up the phone, he was still debating whether to go to work or not. If he went, what would the other men think? If he stayed home and lost his job, no one in the valley would hire him. And if he got deported, he would lose everything.

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All Stories

The Pitch by Patrick Winters

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David hadn’t been feeling up to doing a whole lot of anything as of late, so when his doorbell rang, he decided to just stay in bed. Whoever it was would go away after another try or two, and he could go right back to just staring at the wall in so-called peace. But after another dozen or so rings, it was obvious that whoever had come by his apartment wasn’t going to give it up.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Thelma and Addie by Kathryn Lord

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“Jeesily H Christ, son of a bitch,” Addie muttered, not exactly under her breath, as she jockeyed her walker through the maze in the dining room. Why’d they have to cram so many goddamn tables into here, I can’t imagine. Heading for an empty one, she banged her walker into a chair, threatening to send both flying, pulled out another, aimed her butt in the general direction, and plonked into the seat with a thud.  Sometimes she pushed out a loud fart on the way down, just for the fun of it.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Horror

Reward For My Toes by Nyx Bean

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>Craziness on Westwood Ave

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>Hey everyone, hope your day wasn’t as nuts as mine! Stick with me, you gotta hear this one and I need to ask you guys a favour.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Shaking Hands by Debra Brenegan

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April counted the change into his hand – it was shaking.  He pocketed the money, then leaned his backside against the smudged glass door, pushing it open, his gloves held against his side with his elbow, all while fumbling out and lighting the Marlboro.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Day in the Life of a Sandwich Artist by Tom Roth

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I got up from the floor and glanced at the frozen lake. In the morning, the sunlight streaked across it like bright scribbles of yellow crayon. I saw yellow spots all over the cabin.

“You got a little too mcskunk last night,” Wiley laughed, pressing empty beer cans to his chest. Wiley was big. His body was shaped like a bulb baster.

B was small and just flushed the toilet. “Mcskunkess is up. How ya feelin’, bitch,” he smiled as he walked toward me. B had a patch of frizzy hair that looked glued to the top of his head.

“Um,” I said.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Soldier’s Crusade by Tom Sheehan

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The cowman Oliver Weddle sat his horse on a small hillock, looking out over his ranch, the grass running off to the hills, Texas itself stiffening his backbone as it always had. He tried again to count the help he’d need to get the ranch back in prime order after his return from the war, wishing that some of his command had come along with him when he separated from the service. They were good soldiers, good riders, and courageous and loyal to the duties; but had their own visions of search. Three foremen in a row had failed him and their mission, one or two of them he suspected had complicated issues on purpose. So glaring were the failures that they cost him a good deal of his money. Now he was contemplating what would happen if he did not get a good man for the job.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Siege (a novel excerpt) by James Hanna

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Tom Hemmings, a college dropout restless for adventure, had hired on as a guard at The Indiana Penal Farm—a medium security prison covering 20,000 pastoral acres, most of it farmland and sycamore forest. He had not expected the job to include a manhunt, but a month later he was deployed on one. Assigned to a two-man shotgun team, he was ordered to pursue a pair of escapees along a bounding stretch of whitewater while dog handlers kept pace on the opposite shore.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Out in the Turkey Pen By Leila Allison

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Reader Advisory:

The Union of Pennames, Imaginary Friends and Fictional Characters (UPIFFC) now requires the anonymous employer of an associate penname to give the latter a yearly performance review. This event usually occurs in the sort of establishment where the wait staff all have the personalities of unpurged butter clams. As it goes with PR’s throughout the observable universe, the employer typically leads off with the employee’s strong points as a method of Trojan-horsing in darker observations. Sadly, for the employer, the penname has access to each and every of the former’s thoughts while the employer remains as clueless about the penname’s wicked ways as ever. To put it plainly, the whole thing goes to hell from the get go, and the only thing that I as Leila Allison’s employer get from our conversation is a tingling headache and bewilderment over the fact that my alias has the social graces of an irked thirteen-year-old child.

However, I may have gained something useful from this year’s face-to-face. I now present the missive that my penname scrawled on a stack of cocktail napkins not long after she dropped the pretense of pretending to listen to me—But I’ll give her this much: she writes awfully damn fast. Unfortunately, my headache has prevented me from reading it; and it may also be true that I only wish for it to be known that I have had nothing to do with its construction, just in case it too goes to hell from the get go.

Respectfully,

Ms. Allison’s Employer

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