It is far too quiet for a room with two people, a room where the brush of bare feet on wooden floorboards struggles to fill the air. A room where dim, flickering shadows writhe unbidden across the wall, called forth by a candle sputtering futilely in the corner. It is the silence of empty air where people ought to be, and the bar is fully brimming with it.
Continue reading ” The Girl Who Does Not Exist by Kaela Li”
“Have you spoken to him too?” the man asked.
“Huh?” The boy didn’t even take his eyes off his comic book, only putting it down to quickly light a cigarette. “To that old guy? Yeah.”
Continue reading “A Choice, Through Time by Anatoly Radimir”
The old woman would still be alive if she had just stayed inside.
Stefan clawed at his sweat-soaked blanket. She haunted him every night. Damned locals. It was their own fault. If they didn’t sabotage the supply lines, the soldiers wouldn’t need to requisition food from the villagers. Requisition. Steal. Stefan didn’t care. He was hungry. Her farm looked abandoned. The doors on the dilapidated barn came off the hinges with little more than a pull. Inside there were an emaciated cow, two goats and a few chickens. Pathetic. Stefan balked when Ivan ordered him to search the attic—he was sure to break his neck if the stairs collapsed. But orders were orders. One bag of wormy grain. Wasted effort.
Continue reading “Hunger by Shawn Eichman”
Dimac looked again and the white house at the end of the lane was pale yellow. He tried to find a simile, then a metaphor, and was lost in the miracle before him. The change had happened in the blink of his eyes, and it unnerved him so that he closed his eyes, waited for the white shingles to settle back into place, become their proper selves, as if he could say that about shingles, and opened his eyes.
Continue reading “The White House at the End of the Lane by Tom Sheehan”
The morning is cold and dark and quiet. The roads are nearly empty, strange for a Monday, even at this early hour. Victor Fetter watches the clouds, purple against the leaden sky, while he listens to the familiar rattle inside his mail truck. He thinks the clouds look like rain, and he is pleased. Rain means fewer people, fewer eyes, fewer conversations. He can go about his business with his head down, without fear of interruption, the way he likes.
Continue reading “Follow by R B Miner”
Clutching my holdall, I slipped into the chantry of an early fifteenth-century chapel. It was late at night, and the only light in the chapel was provided by half a dozen flickering candles that created disturbing shadows on the walls. I was interested in the tomb of a medieval knight and his lady and although I had never felt comfortable in the presence of death, even in the daylight hours, if I had come during the day, I would have been spotted by the sacristan and asked to leave.
Continue reading “The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place by Tony Dawson”
Forward Foreword
Versatur Circa Quid!
No less an authority on speaking one’s mind than Mark Twain knew that the artificial concept called Free Speech is best left to the dead. That’s why many of his franker observations on God and the human condition were held back from publication until well after Twain’s employer, Mr. Samuel Clemens, joined the ever growing legion of Spirits (which currently outnumbers the living thirty to one), in 1910. I, Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender, know all about the sweet freedom of death, for I have been a member of the Spirit world eight years longer than Mr. Clemens/Twain, which means I am free to “overshare” with impunity.
Continue reading “Hannah and the Homophonic: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical by Leila Allison (with a forward foreword by Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender)”
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Charleston’s sleepy New Town Cemetery had once been the center of a controversy. For many years Town was spelled ‘Towen’ on the fancily etched marble dedication obelisk located just inside the main gate. The unique spelling was on purpose because the wealthy widow who had donated the land for the cemetery and paid for the obelisk wanted it that way. She claimed that it was the name of the Welsh village of her birth. Despite more than a century of weathering, you can still mark her unpronounceable name on the obelisk, but, oddly, not those of the local big shots who’d presided over the cemetery’s plating in 1882.
Continue reading “Towen Meeting by Leila Allison”
A gecko named Keeler escaped her enclosure about twenty minutes after Renfield had brought her home from the pet shop. Keeler didn’t care for the transparency of her new digs and decided that her happiness lay in a blended existence with the walls, furniture and such in the haunted Stoker-Belle household. You see, Keeler didn’t think of herself as a gecko; she self identified as a Karma Chameleon.
Continue reading “The Karma Chameleon and the Diplomaniac: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical (Season Two Opener) by Leila Allison”
A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical by Miss Renfield Stoker-Belle, Noted Supernaturalist Featuring an Appearance by Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender And a Futile Forward by Leila Allison
Futile Foreword
It’s a fallow and disconsolate world in which we live. Even here at this side of reality populated mainly by Pen Names, Imaginary Friends and Fictional Characters, you’ll find more Juggalos per square inch than persons with sustainable IQs contributing to the gene pool. The pain of it all becomes clear on the day you look in the mirror and correctly suspect that the best years have gone by. You gaze into the reflection of your suddenly cautious, peering avatar and wonder what happened to the footloose, laughing face who had been looking back at you every day up through yesterday. It seems impossible that this paradoxically “new” used you has ever had an interesting thought in her life; or that she had even at one time tolerated the Juggalos–as long as they stayed upwind of her location. Continue reading “Zippy and the Zephyrling:”
literally stories 