“You expect me to speak to the Archbishop? Your ideas are somewhat radical Father. For you to get on in your career you need to know how to play the game.”
“Radical? I don’t see it that way Your Grace. I think we could do a lot of good. We would build bridges. We could now bring together two sides once and for all. We need to do this, not just with our religions but with them all! But we can start with what we know.”
Continue reading “The Perfect Personification Of Religion by Hugh Cron”
Pahuac rested his head on the sacrificial stone. He would have to go through this if he wanted to find his way back home. Why couldn’t he remember?
“Ahhh.” The palm reader sighed heavily. Such was his power that we all exhaled lightly with him, and then leaned forward to hear what would come next.
In May 1726 Voltaire sailed up the Thames, London-bound. He was thirty-two at the time, a scrawny Frenchman with a big mouth. Everyone was after his ass. Back in France he’d had a run-in with someone called the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, got himself arrested, and was graciously allowed to leave the country in lieu of becoming a full-time resident of the Bastille. It was a fine day and it made him fall in love with England. The King was out on his barge, a thousand little boats were in his wake, and some music was being played. Was it Handel’s “Water Music”? Let’s say it was so that you can understand what Voltaire felt that day. Later he saw some fat merchants in town and thought he was in paradise.
Chester McNaughton Connaughton, aptly named for both sides of the family, landowner in the new world, squeezer of pennies and nickels at the very corpulence of coin, embarrassed at times by his own good fortune where his roots had once been controlled and ordained by potatoes and turnips or the lack thereof, gazed over the latest acquisition of a two-acre parcel abutting his prime abode and wondered how he could best utilize it. Mere coinage, he had early assessed, would apply the jimmy bar under Carlton Smithers and separate him from the land in their town of Saxon, not far from Boston. Carlton was old, alone, susceptible. It would be a piece of cake. It was, subsequently and as he had forecast, a swift steal, and papers and proper process moved the property under the shield of his name.
There was an old woman and a nurse in a room. The old woman sat in a chair holding a cane. There was a tray in front of her with a plate nearly full. The nurse bent over and wiped her face with a napkin. The nurse believed when old women talked about their lives it’s a sign they’re about to die. Miss Macintosh started doing that, and it was making the nurse anxious.
“How about you eat some of your peas?” coaxed the nurse.
For more than a month that horizontal plane, the cold, hard iron blade of the sea, has scythed around this lonely spite-filled ship, the Meeuwtje, the Seagull. Our only constant: that unwavering edge. If only we would come to it and tumble off into the void.
I am consumed with the vilest thoughts; acidic loathing, a derision that stoops my shoulders. This sinful, wind-blown bastard-mongrel pack with whom I share this stinking pile of creaking timber, rope and sailcloth!
Continue reading “Cold, hard iron blade of the sea by Shane Bolitho”
‘I’ve read your tales of India,’ he said, as he sat in my study at Rottingdean, ‘so I thought you might like to hear my story.’
I’d answered a knock at my front door just as my study clock struck midday, and found the man standing on the doorstep. He had looked cold, and oddly distracted.
‘Can I help you?’ I’d asked.
‘My name is Jabez Carter,’ he’d told me. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you.’
Continue reading “The Visitor’s Tale (a ghost story, after Rudyard Kipling) by Robert V. Stapleton”
When my father came home from work and said we were going to a concert I was thrilled. It was to take place upstate along the Hudson River in a town called Peekskill. To get out of our stuffy Brooklyn apartment at the end of summer was heaven-sent. I didn’t know dark times were swirling around us.
“You’re going to love the concert David. Paul Robeson is going to sing,” said my father.
“Are you sure Frank? You saw what happened the other night,” said my mother.
“It will be fine. More of us will be there and we can’t let them get away with this can we? After all this is America,” he said.
Spring 1938.
Lars said to Miranda, “Understand this…” and left the table.
A series of explosions shook the six storey building but did not deter Miranda’s study of him; his untidy egress.
Through the narrow living space towards the sash window, she watched him go. Observed him at the window and after a time wondered why he found what was on the other side of the glass – a post-siesta pre-bombardment tableau in the still spring air – more compelling than whatever it was she supposed he intended to spout next.
If indeed there was more.
literally stories 