There it was, in black and white: Cecily VanDeGroot, dead at 88. Rich. Well-known. A good-sized family who’d want a good show. One I could give them.
Damn. “Services provided by Eternal Rest.” Lo’Retta had beat me out again. Early bird gets the worm.
And so do the dead. But we don’t tell the customers that.
Continue reading “To Sleep Perchance to Dream by Stephen J Matlock”
Bailey and I met two years ago. Since then, we’ve found comfort in quantity, since quality failed us before, and so many times. We found each other on the same platform we often fiddled with—two people fighting the conventions of monogamy at the time—fed up with a pattern of receiving the short end of the stick in previous partnerships.
Continue reading “Neither of Us Are Boyfriends by D.T. Mattingly”
Starry-eyed couples who take moonlight strolls along the Sea of Love do so at the risk of their hormone-driven happiness; for the beach along Sea Of Love is littered with “Globsters”–those unidentifiable, high smelling, amorphous sacks of putrescent goo–which, to paraphrase the words of the Munchkin Coroner, are not just really dead, but are most sincerely dead.
First, the powers-to-be, as Ransom Kegler called city hall and its tight-fingered allies, the politicians and the developers, had squeezed a piece of land out of him and were going to make money on it. They had cut him out of the profits when, post-sale, they had engineered a zoning change. The profits of the change promised to be immense. He had come alert too late, but it was better to come up breathing than not breathing at all.
Now, on top of this damn thievery, he was put on the spot by, of all persons, his youngest grandson Talbot with a barrage of questions, so simple coming and so complex moving on.
Continue reading “The Knock on Ransom Kegler by Tom Sheehan”
The cat was fat.
It was a fat cat.
Enormous and relaxed like a giant Panda on Quaaludes.
Robert got up as he did every school day morning to his six-fifty alarm. Liz, his wife, was still asleep. She didn’t get up until seven. He woke his son Jonathan to begin the process of supervising him for getting ready for school. As the boy reluctantly dressed, Robert went to the kitchen and took his blood sugar. It was high, so he cursed under his breath and thought about all the bad things he’d eaten the night before.
I work for the federal government.
Federal.
Government.
I don’t know what that means.
Yes I do. It means pushing this broom from one end of the hall to the other ─ this end to that end ─ when it’s dark outside. Like now. I don’t like the dark, but these humming lights always work. If they don’t, I must report them to my boss. Mr. Shapiro.
Report them.
Does that make me a reporter? No one likes reporters.
Jackals. Hounds.
I hope the humming lights never burn out.
Amanda would lie awake at 3am, swept under blankets, watching the darkest bedroom corners twist and snap spines and smile. And then she’d get up, and start the day like nothing happened. Like she didn’t know what it was like to be beckoned, to be wanted.
Squirrel Pen Diary: First Entry
Last Wednesday morning I entered Our Lady Star of the Sea church during mid-week mass. While two dozen or so senior citizens went through the ancient, dusty rites (monotonously administered by an equally ancient and dusty priest), I rose unseen and snuck upstairs to a small balcony that communicates with the church’s attic. I climbed atop the guano splattered stone rail that hugs the balcony and balanced myself on one foot and held the other out as though I intended to take a seventy-foot step onto the marble walkway below. After I had done all that, there wasn’t much else to do except wait for someone to notice me.
Hello again one and each.
Another busy and interesting week at LS and, as always, a few unexpected twists and turns.
It goes without saying that we’ve had five more brilliant stories (more about those in a bit) but we’ve also had a whole host of wonderful submissions that have already filled up slots for the next few weeks.
That last line requires context – or perhaps perspective – in order to carry its full weight. A theme we’ll be touching on quite a bit over the next couple of hundred words I suspect.
Continue reading “Week 175 – Perspective, Invective and Uncharted Waters”
literally stories 