Laura came to the door in a bathrobe, wet hair piled into a towel atop her head. Her face was pink as she gestured him inside. “Sorry babe, sorry, lost track of time. I’ll just be a minute, promise!”
Tag: grief
Home from the Dead by Tom Sheehan
Earl Chatsby, six years ceased being a father for real, felt an odd distinction coming into his place of being. The newspaper for the moment loomed an idle bundle in his lap the way it stayed weighty and rolled and unread. Walls of the kitchen widened, and the room took in more air. He could feel the huge gulp of it. The coffee pot was perking loudly its 6 AM sound and the faucet drip, fixed three nights earlier at Melba’s insistence, had hastened again its freedom, the discord highly audible. Atop the oil cloth over the kitchen table the mid-May sun continued dropping its slanting hellos, allowing them to spread the room into further colors. Yet to this day he cannot agree to what happened first, the front porch shadow at the window coming vaguely visible in a corner of his eye, a familiar shadow, or the slight give-away trod heard from the porch floor, that too familiar, the board loose it seemed forever and abraded by Melba’s occasional demands to fix it.
Try, Try Again by L’Erin Ogle
The thing about parallel universes is that there might be somewhere where you exist where you are a better person. But then there has to be another place where you’re the worst version of yourself.
All These Dreams and Tomorrow Too by Leila Allison
Words cannot adequately express the giddy joy I experienced while I stood on the ferry’ s bow, alone with my “escort” (an amiable deckhand twice my size, half my age), as the vessel glided swiftly across the gunmetal Puget Sound toward Charleston, where the Law awaited me with open bracelets. The early spring sun made a lovely show of going down behind the Olympic Mountains–all dreampurple and pastel poetry. It had been ages since I had felt a sunset unfettered by loss. I was was further gladdened when my escort shooed off some fool who had come out of the cabin to capture (thus desecrate) the sunset on his phone. There was a reason we were alone; that reason (also, twice my size, half my age) was inside the cabin holding one of those phony “Blu-Ice” bags to the spot on her meaty chin where I had landed a right cross just a few minutes before.
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Through Amazed Eyes by Leila Allison
It’s three feet farther to hell from New Town Bridge. The city recently installed an eighteen-inch “safety” extension to the pedestrian rail. Since it opened in 1978, at least twenty persons have jumped off the ugly gray span and found death waiting two-hundred feet below in the beckoning Philo Bay Narrows. Northern seas swiftly kill the pain; and when that comforting certainty outweighs the threat of damnation, I don’t see another foot and a half up, and down, getting in the way.
Amy by Darren Nuzzo and Toddy Smith
Under the Same Sun by Astrid Ann Larsen
Geneviève Gueron was as French as one could be. And while her peers were riding up and down the waves of hormonal instability, lamenting one second, rejoicing the next, she was simply and unequivocally in love with her life on the French Riviera. It had taken her some time to get used to the fierceness of the sunrays of the South, as the lack of obscuring buildings or tufts of sky made them bounce right off her white skin which would respond instantly with sizzling red spots. And with each day that passed, the deep yearning for her favourite dusty bookstores in Paris gave way to the undisputable dogmatic truth proclaimed by her parents, who had convinced themselves their new hometown would be kinder to them.
Vestigial by Thomas Elson
What can loosen a bond of thirty years?
What can strengthen what can no longer be made strong?
David felt as if he were living inside his recurring fear begun decades earlier inside a chanked and abandoned farm building off a path hidden by overhanging branches surrounded by unproductive land more than fifty yards from a gravel county road when he sat on the wooded floor with the tip of a rifle barrel stuffed in his mouth.
Another Summer Day by Mitchell Waldman
Sam held the squirming green legs with both hands while Nick held the long scissors, trying to get the blades in the proper position. He prodded the tip of one blade into its mouth, the other blade hanging above the smooth skin behind its raised eyes. With one quick squeeze the steel sliced cleanly through the frog’s skin and the head flew into the air. The squirming had stopped. Sticky red fluid flowed out of the opening and onto Sam’s pink palm. Sam set the body on the lab counter and both boys’ mouths hung open as the frog crouched into its normal sitting position. It didn’t even seem to miss its head. Nick touched the frog with the moist tip of the scissors. The boys jerked back quickly as the headless frog jumped off the table onto the cold gray floor. Not knowing what to expect next, they kept their eyes on the frog, which was now motionless. Their eyes darted from the floor to each other as they stood in silence. A sudden burst of laughter broke through their bewildered expressions and echoed through the empty classroom.
How were they to know?
Chipped Trivets by Elizabeth Swann Lewis
A greeter stood in the driveway wearing a black T-shirt, jeans, a set of Halloween cat ears atop his head, and had pulled a ladies negligee over his clothing. “A smile, that’s what I like to see. That’s why I do this. What a weirdo you say. But you’re smiling. Everything priced over a dollar today half off.”
Roy clutched the handles of the dog-eared backpack slung over his shoulder. “This is my father’s house.”
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