Tag: life

All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Siswana by Ntombi K

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It was a Monday morning. A village hen clucked at the assembly, looking for its youngling. The school principal, Mister Rakobo, went off with the hen, leaving the assembly divided into several assemblies. The Mocking Birds choral conductor raised a hand, calming the sopranos and tenors that were going this way and that. “Whose mother is that?” inquired some. “Someone must have stolen money or something,” speculated some. “A family death? A bullying case?” Some concluded that this was not the case.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Dark Return by Tom Sheehan

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Wonder had him in its grip and worked him over, tossing him into past years as clean as a pistol shot. More than half a century flipped through his movie mind, stopping whenever he wanted, at whatever spot and breaking loose the sounds, the smells, the fingers touching, the skin knowing again, rocking him with total recall. He saw again the older woman who paraded nude behind a window, who finally beckoned when he was on the way to school one day, calling him on to manhood, and to silence and war, and to the eternal draw.

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All Stories, General Fiction

West 86th Street Time Machine by Patrick M. Butler

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Two days ago there were still those who went about saying that Peter was a false Tsar, perhaps the Anti-Christ himself.  But then, just as the hour of three was being struck, two long, thin clouds joined in the form of a cross above our village.  It was a Friday according to the new reckoning.  Marina, the serf girl, was the first to see it.  She fell to her knees and crossed herself, then ran to tell the priest, my father.  If he was drunk, as usual, he was nevertheless quick to realize how he could use this “sign”.  Were the rumblings of those who opposed the Tsar to go unchecked, the soldiers would soon be set upon our village to leave behind the smoldering remains of peasant huts and bodies swaying from scaffolds.  So I was ordered to toll the bell which summons the peasants to the village square where my father put them on their knees in witness to this miracle.  Such a voice he had!

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All Stories, General Fiction

Tempest by Frederick K Foote

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It is horrendous out here! like God’s troubling the waters. I’m by my lonesome in my eight-foot Jon boat with my ancient, three-horsepower motor. I don’t have time to worry before the storm’s crushing me. I have handled rough water on this lake before with the same setup. At worst I would just pull ashore anywhere I could and seek shelter until the storm passed. But not this time. The storm erupts so suddenly, the clouds overwhelm the sky so quickly and pervasively that my visibility drops from twenty miles to about three hundred feet – like God switched off the lights.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Trip Home by Steve Sibra

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This Story is Dedicated to the Memory of Buster Dunlap

***

It was the summer of 1974, after I got out of high school. We were getting the machinery ready for harvest, and my dad was always in a hurry when it came to the process.  Get the grain cut as soon as it was ripe, get it in the bin or hauled to town, out of the field, out of harm’s way before the wind or hail, wiped out an entire year’s work.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Superheroes in the Real World by Frederick K Foote

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Every other year my children, Martin, Malcolm, and Harriet, and my seven or however many there may be grandchildren, vacation at our family home outside of Palmyra, Virginia in Fluvanna County.

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All Stories, General Fiction

What Gloria Said By Jon Beight

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It just sort of came out.

They were sitting on the couch. Dave was watching and laughing at a screwball comedy where, during their honeymoon, the hero and his wife get their signals crossed. She winds up in Bermuda at a four-star hotel while he finds himself with the Inuit eating muskox somewhere near Greenland. Somehow, they reunite.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Pulling Strings by Tom Sheehan

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He had awakened with the itch on his face, from a lone and long hair floating across one eye and one lip, or was it a cob web, a remnant, a silver runner of aerial flight? It definitely was cob-web thin, a filament, a gossamer streamer, light as thought, but not the thought of a spider like the one he had seen eye to eye above his camp bed as a kid. That one hung on such a silken, thin, lone strand that almost wasn’t there. He had always believed he had smashed that black-eyed spider into space with the magazine he had been reading earlier.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Garbage Man by Rachael Peralez

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The note reads:

‘Dear Garbage man, Please make sure you get ALL the trash out of the can.

Thanks! The Brewsters’

I stand there just holding the damp piece of paper. The A-L-L scrawled in all capital letters and underlined. The exclamation mark after the ‘Thanks.’  I look over at the white house nestled among the pruned Spanish oaks and ball the note up. The bathwater rain makes rivulets of space between the white maggots humping up my arms as I hoist the cans in the back of the truck. They feel muscular and clean inching their way under the cuffs of my gloves. My back burns, and the smell of cat urine puffs out of a half-tied bag as it smacks the bottom of the compactor.  I grind my teeth and think about how Mrs. Brewster’s wrists must be so silky and warm. About how her perfume would just touch the air around my nostrils as I bit into her heavy breast. A drop of my sweat would fall in the deep divot between her collar bones and how she would moan about how strong I am. How powerful my arms are.  I pound the side of the truck and give my driver the thumbs up. Next house.

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