Mary wanders home and dreams of television. She has all her favourite shows recorded, ready and waiting to be watched. She passes a sign for fried chicken. It flickers overhead, metal shutters pulled up, open for business. At home, Mary knows, there are jacket potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge.
She is more than Fahrenheit, she is electric, not the lightning kind that will blast you hither and yon, but wired, the connections to all of me, my eyes bright and seeing the stars mirrored in the river, almost where they belong, bucket-spilled or tossed across the sky above Vinegar Hill, above all of Saugus… above old Scotts Mill directly across the street from my house, above the Iron Works from 1636 leaving figures and ideas larger than fossils on the land (like the 300 year-old remnant of the slag pile), above Rippon’s Mushroom House where I’m bound to work in a few years like most of my older pals, above Stackpole Field, where I’m bound to play with some of the same pals… and me on top of Theda Burton’s back side and she is bumping and bouncing and being electrically delightful as we are on a Flexible Flyer sled rushing down Bridge Street toward the bridge, halfway fallen into the Saugus River, and provides but a dangerous and narrow passage across one side of it.
Continue reading “Fahrenheit, Electricity and a Flexible Flyer by Tom Sheehan”
On the morning of my ninth birthday, there were voices I didn’t recognize in the hallway outside my bedroom door. Most of the voices were from men, and I thought I could also hear Mrs. Crider’s voice. She was a neighbor who sometimes babysat us, my three-year-old sister and me.
They began to line up long before dawn. First in line was a man from Africa.
His name on the small yellowed sheet he had folded in half, then folded again and placed in the right front pocket of his pressed blue shirt was Mohammad Abbasi. The driver’s license in the brown fake leather wallet he’d bought from a man on the street had his name as Martin Fisk. So did the green card he’d paid fifty dollars for, too many years ago to remember.
Beverly was having a bad summer. If I didn’t dislike her so much, I would feel sorry for her. Her face erupted into a berry patch of pimples as soon as she turned sixteen. Then she failed her driving test, not once but three times. This is especially humiliating for her because all her friends have their drivers’ licenses. When you’re sixteen, nothing is more important than getting “the license.” She’ll probably kill herself if she isn’t able to pass the test before she starts the eleventh grade.
Week 40.
Four-Oh blind forty.
Those of you like me who regularly visit the local Bingo Hall in search of friendship, weak coffee, numbers no greater than two digits and dayglo marker pens, will undoubtedly not have the foggiest idea what the origins of ‘blind forty’ are. Blind forty, one of many colourful phrases bingo callers cry out, such as three and seven, thirty-seven.
Those of you who do know what ‘blind forty’ means will no doubt glow with pride when name-called a nerd, anorak or some other pejorative that implies they possess a vast general knowledge.
Uncertain whether or not I should round off my momentary lapse into all things numerical by declaring ‘That’s Numberwang’, or were I in Wiesbaden, ‘Das ist Nummerwang’ I opted to consult a search engine and was greatly reassured this utterance was not such a foolish notion after all.
Even the German translation of the spoof game show Numberwang yielded 160 hits in 0.57 seconds.
For a long time, it rained. We moved into the house in late October, before Halloween. I was surprised at the rain, how long it lasted. First it was days. The days became a week. And, finally, it had been raining off and on for three weeks. It was almost Thanksgiving. We were drowning. Sammy didn’t care about the rain. It didn’t bother her. She’d say, “nobody cares, Don. This is the Pacific Northwest. It’s gonna rain, OK?” I got up every morning and went straight to the front door and opened it. Rain.
There is only one way to satisfy those who want you sober, and that is by walking away from the comfort of alcohol, and into a room of uncushioned, dark-hearted truths, an act that defies all layers of logical self-defense.
Virginia Quipp had just entered that room, leaving behind the vodka, and the splendid but unwholesome hush of 4 a.m. It was her second day in that room. Her hands didn’t shake and her nausea was only slight, but at eight in the evening, she sat at her desk facing another night of hateful abstinence. What was it about sobriety that zealots found so alluring?
“Well as big Rod once sang, ‘Tonight’s The Night!”
“It’s tomorrow.”
“I know but the joke wouldn’t work! So tonight is the last night of you being alone. I think that was a Heart song. Did you like the one about her picking up a guy for a shag cause her hubby was a jaffa? There is a shit line in it about planting a tree!”
Continue reading “Overthinking by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
Question:
What do you get if you combine a sagacious Swede with a wayfaring Welshman then add a mercurial Massachusettian to a canny Croat and for good measure finish by blending in a bold Brit?
Simples!
Week 39 at Literally Stories of course!
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