Old Scott’s Mill had given off odd sounds since the day it closed down. Now it gave off a sense of passage.
Tag: life
Guests of Honor by Kirk Windus
“Hey babe, what tie should I wear with this shirt?” I asked, draping a solid pink tie and then a diagonal-striped black and blue one from the collar of my black dress shirt.
The Bracelet by David Henson
I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but can’t think of a good reason not to. Maybe it’s true what my parents say about a teenager’s frontal lobe or cortex or whatever not being fully developed. Anyway, I’ll be back before they’re home. I slip the bracelet over my hand and slide the switch to Future.
Victorian Anthropology by Martyn Clayton
Having spent the previous day stripping layers of old paint off the shop front the last thing she wanted to do today was begin on the interior. But needs must. Her body complained as she dragged it out of bed, Al still snoring contentedly beside her. He was a lazy bastard but to be fair to the boy he’d worked hard the previous day. He’d climbed ladders and brewed up and carried stuff and taken increasingly fraught instructions as she slowly reached the end of her tether. He moved an arm and an eye shot open then closed again, his head being buried further down into the pillow.
The Hell with Hollywood by Edward S Barkin
I’m sitting in my Manhattan psychiatrist’s office feeling so anxious and depressed that my limbs aren’t sure whether they should twitch spasmodically or rest heavy and stone-like inert. But the shrink, let’s call him Dr. Becks (in real life his surname is actually just a different brand of beer), has my fickle attention suddenly. Why? Because instead of talking about how to cure me of my various mental illnesses (the impossible dream) he’s talking about an idea he has to make my all but moribund fantasies of big-time Hollywood success come true. He thinks this screenplay idea that he thought up, based on some show he saw on the History Channel, would make a perfect project to attract the attention of one of his celebrity actor patients – let’s call her Kali Kass (in real life her first name is just that of a different Hindu goddess). And who better to write the initial spec screenplay treatment (i.e., unpaid long synopsis) than me, Evan Breach (pseudonym), the man who has written and directed micro-budget films that have been reviled around the world at tiny film festivals (and even the occasional big one, where at the coyote-like reviewers were waiting to rip him apart with mere words, their fangs dripping auteurial blood).
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Borrowed Fragments by Vince Barry
“. . . ?”
How can you help? Hmm, how can you—
“. . . ?”
My mother? . . . Okay, we can start there. . . . My mother—my mother came from a large family, a very large Irish Catholic family. Do they make them any more? I think not. . . . At any rate, as a boy, a young boy, no more than eight or nine, I would employ the template of the Baltimore Catechism to sort them out and keep them straight—the Faheys I mean . . .The catechism’s set formula, y’see, helped me convey the essential and fundamental content of the Fahey family. Beginning—
Lady Marmalade & The Ratcatcher by Adam
The New York Art Scene was dead.
Music too.
So Morgan Tripfalter did what he had been doing his whole life.
He watched television.
Born in New York City during the mid-sixties, come of age in the gritty seventies and introduced to the downtown scene in the 80’s, Morgan was no stranger to what Manhattan had to offer. The good the bad and the weird.
You’ll Let the Storm In by Nicholas Siegel
A gust of wind blew around the outside of the house as Mike pried the bottle cap off his fourth beer with his teeth. It was a trick one of his old classmates had taught him—a trick he used to use to impress women in bars, but now, domesticated, he only used when he couldn’t find the bottle opener.
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Crimson Memory By Marie McCloskey
Her legs began to go numb as they tingled from her weight. She was on her knees again, scrubbing. Always scrubbing. The chill of the linoleum floor made goosebumps run over her thighs under her pants.
This home didn’t belong to her. She wouldn’t enjoy the benefits of her labors. Mrs. McCormick, or Mrs. Glenn, or Mrs. Whomever Ella worked for that day would come home after she left. All part of the job, you show up, clean, and leave.
Eleanor by Steve Carr
There near the edge of a cliff overlooking a broad open area of grassland outside the town of Wall, South Dakota stands Eleanor’s house. It is a huge wooden structure built in the 1940s and one of the few houses built along the ridge looking toward the Badlands and along the road leading from Wall to the Badlands National Park. It is a weather beaten house, with the remnants of the bright white paint that covered it peeling from the weather-worn wood, and a single slightly tilted chimney of red brick sticking up at mid-roof. There is a wrap around porch, the back of which I was told offers an amazing view of the pink, the beige and purple layers of the Badlands formations miles away, and the ability to see antelope, coyotes and even a few buffalo that roam freely through the tall prairie grass below in summer and a blanket of drifting snow in winter. In the front of the house, leading from the porch to the gravel path that leads from the driveway to the house is a ramp that was built to accommodate Eleanor’s husband who had, later in his years, become unable to navigate the stairs.
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