It has been a busy week. No denying it.
Publishing five stories on the site as is our custom plus preparing to launch Literally Stories — The Anthology: it could be said we gave Ground Control a run for its money.
I am not Major Tom. Neither am I sitting in a tin can but I am feeling a little odd today.
Strained.
Nothing that a breeze through this week’s literary line-up won’t put right.
She wore juxtaposition the way a cubist wears a turtle-neck sweater.
Continue reading “The Loneliest Goddam Midnight of Them All by dm gillis”
I asked her if she was from Russia. She said “Ukraine,” but I was too embarrassed to ask if that was in Russia so I just nodded.
She hand-washed my blouses, and I loved her for that. I wanted to share the five habits of healthy living with her, but I didn’t know her well enough at the time.
· Never eat anything bigger than your head
· Stay away from dairy
· Drink lots of water and always add a flavor packet
· Don’t eat the things you want the most
· Train for a full marathon
Hawaii is known for its near perfect weather, but a new report from the University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant program states that islands in the Pacific might be unrecognizable in the coming years as climate change makes them hotter, arid, stormy and even disease-ridden.
Huffington Post 8/28/2014
Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.
Nuclear Emergency Tracking Centre
Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I am flooded with painful memories of what my life was like before moving to Poplar Hills. I remember especially the sounds of quiet: crows quarreling in the trees, the drone of bees, the occasional concert by a mockingbird. These were the sounds of peace. And they are absent from Poplar Hills, although I search for them often.
The room felt cold, the curtains around each bed swaying slightly in a draft that seemed to come from nowhere. Dennis walked down the centre aisle, the soles of his work boots sucking at the floor. He stopped at his mother’s bed, stood at the end of it, waiting.
His mother eventually opened her eyes, the act seeming to take some effort. The skin of her face was slack and grey, seeming to have shrunk since the last time he visited. ‘Dennis…’
Scouting locations for the 2015 Literally Stories Editors team-building weekend — or jolly as the vernacular would have it, is as you would imagine a thankless task, especially when the phrase ‘shoestring budget’ overstates the resources at your disposal.
A three-man ridge tent (for five) with en-suite latrine in the second week in December is hardly Glamping but should at least concentrate the literary mind.
Abii. Vidi. Unde digressus sum.
I went. I saw. I digressed.
The door was unlocked and he was taken into the room.
“We’re right outside if you need us Doc!”
The two guards watched as he sat and then they left.
Living in a mouth is precisely what you’d think living in a mouth would be: wet, aromatic, and exhilarating. It’s cozy and rent-free in here. She’s not a big talker, so it stays as dark as Anchorage, Alaska during a typical winter. I sleep well. I bathe in her saliva. I nibble on specks of food that dangle from the roof like edible stalactites. When she’s wrecked and raging on a Friday night, getting blitzed on gas station wine, blaring Linda Ronstadt, we both stumble into el diablo’s embrace. When she peeks at the mirror while applying lipstick, or washing her face, I pop out and wave hello.
Mount Carmel Road was a quiet dead-end in the north of town. In the middle of the night when the war in the Far East was over and the radios blared the news, all lights went on in all the houses on that blind street, except where the card game was played. Many of the neighbors were solidly indignant about that turn of events on VJ Night, two Mount Carmel boys would not be coming back from the mad Pacific, which most of us only saw in Saturday newsreels at the theater.
This house was a dark house on a dark street in my town that, with some lesions and scars, hangs on to a place in my memory and will not let go. Tenants and landlords hardly leave scribed notations of a dwelling, thinking all things will ferment, dissipate, and eventually pass on. Fifty years or more of recall usually get dulled, terribly pockmarked, or fade into the twilight the way one ages, dimming of the eyes, bending of the knees, slow turns at mortality. But this one rides endlessly in place, a benchmark, a mooring place. It resides as a point of time, a small moment of history colored up by characterization of one incident.
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