Tag: grief

All Stories, General Fiction

The Attic Room by Cris Aboobaker

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In the dim twilight of Charlie’s bar an old man sat at the counter muttering about the weather. Outside, night winds blew up from the sea, salving the day’s heat still rising from baked pavements. It was too hot the old man said, it was too dry; his bones ached, his bowels didn’t move; John, the barman nodded, wiping glasses with a small towel. The barking laughs of other regulars, the clinking of the pool table, the air conditioner’s hum and Bob Montgomery’s measured voice on the TV lamenting another Red Sox loss mixed with the old man’s mutters.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Wrong Road by Cris Aboobaker

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The train rattled through the trench of the tracks, rocking Bill and Lon like children on a carnival ride. With each stop, the Christmas crowd leaked away, clusters of homes seen out the windows dwindled to an isolated few until they were flying past banks of leafless trees and brown fields fissured by frozen marshes, their view widening to the glow of the evening skyline.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Reconciled to Eternity by P.R. Woods

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“Where are you a bishop then?” she asked, eyes darting around his drawing room, drinking in the fur and velvet, taffeta and silk.

“I’m tempted to say Bath and Wells,” he chuckled, perched earnestly on the armchair. His guest had slipped off her shoes and, cat-like, tucked her feet comfortably away.  

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All Stories, General Fiction

Twolips by Gerry Coleman

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“A dream fulfilled is a dream lost.” 
                                                                          —Mickey Lafferty

The year Rosemarie Zuccarrelli moved away from Ninety Second Street to live with her maternal relatives in the Midwest, we were thirteen.

She quickly metastasized into likenesses and lies, was diluted by adaptations and revisions I fabricated to fill forward the missing frames. I did what most teenaged boys did: I played sports, pushed my luck with inaccessible girls, snuck beers, and cheated on tests. I wrote poems. Spare poems I did not share, poems touching upon alienation and nothingness, the depths of the surrounding black and unyielding ocean, and the silence of God in the world.

I idolized her.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Last Number by Arpi Vanyan

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She had done the same thing every evening for three years.

She would pour tea into a cup with a chipped rim, sit by the window, pick up her phone, and dial a number.

The same voice, every time.

“The number you have dialed is temporarily unavailable.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Baby’s Breath by Leanne Simmons

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Peggy Garrett must have been glad that Geary’s had given up on the old way and got a ramp fitted. For years I’d watched her lump poor Jim up the step, the wheels catching on the threshold, before she’d lean forward to see to him, like a magpie claiming a crust. She, always in black with her wispy hair that had turned white the night of the accident.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Judge Me by Ace Boggess

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I have no music in my soul. A man told me that once, full of conviction. No real anger in him, but definitely judgment. I sentenced him to twenty-five years in the penitentiary, and he was back before me on a Rule 35 (b) motion for reconsideration, which I denied. He stood at the defense table in his baggy orange prison-transport jumper, his wrists and ankles shackled, and he grinned at me, biting and cold, a man with nothing left to lose.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Inside the Possum Coat by Patrick G. Roland

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“You scary pretty,” she said, settling onto the lattice bench. She wasn’t her, but she looked at me the same way, as if she knew the part. Ever since Celeste’s funeral, I kept finding her inside strangers. I checked the time out of habit. The second hand trembled near the six. The woman was small inside a brown trench coat made of possum fur, seams hand-stitched with thick black wax taxidermy thread. The woman kept her eye on me, then threw a coin into the fountain beside us.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

James and Pruina by Mitchell Toews

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James put another piece of birch on the fire, the stove hinges creaking with hot dryness as he closed and latched the door. The papery bark crackled immediately to life, curling black and sending smoke and flame up the stovepipe. On days this cold, the single-paned glass in the old cottage windows looked triple thick owing to the rime coating the inner surfaces. He reached out to touch the slick, silvery skein, feeling his fingertips numbing and a rivulet of meltwater running down and then along the underside of his hand. The bottom panes were frost jacketed, those higher less so, the hot, rising air from the stove keeping them clear.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Beside the Dying Ash Tree by Michael Bloor

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Andy put down the phone on his sister, though she was still sobbing intermittently. They’d already been talking for half an hour; he realised that there was no more comfort he could offer, til he saw her tomorrow at the undertakers. And he needed a break to process her news of their father’s death. So, booted and rain-proofed, he headed out the door for a familiar walk beside the river.

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