Tag: life

All Stories, General Fiction

A Thin Blue Line by Anne M Weyer

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typewriterHave you ever read the future in a thin blue line, as you wait in the handicapped stall in the fourth floor bathroom? Your stretched out knees have made a run in your pantyhose, which are cheap and rough and aggressively tight, so you slide out of your worn kitten heels and tug them off to pass the time. Balling them up and stuffing them into the little maxi-pad trashcan uses up about twenty seconds. Pregnancy test seconds, as any woman in the know will tell you, pass even more slowly than microwave seconds. Whether you are bound to be relieved or disappointed or tremulously hopeful and filled with joy, the waiting is the hardest part. Once you know, you know. You can confront that emphatic little mark and all its implications head on. When you know, you have options. “Options,” you whisper to yourself, hoisting up your skirt with the grooved thumb-grip clamped between your teeth.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Better Living Through Better Chemistry by Adam Kluger

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Roderick liked the no-nonsense approach of this new psychiatrist. She went to an Ivy League school and she had an aloof air about her. Sexy too…in a frigid, bitchy kind of way. Roderick wondered if her pussy smelled like mothballs or like his grandmother’s old country house. Her office felt like the interior of the space station from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. You could almost hear the air pumping in.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Lift by Paul Thompson

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typewriterThey recognise each other immediately. At least they think they do – greeting each other with the kind of embrace usually reserved for a reunion, which in many ways this feels like. A few nervous moments pass as they silently try to categorise the person opposite. They both wear name badges and so have no need for formal introductions. They look each other up and down – something normally considered impolite but here it feels acceptable, as though they are merely old acquaintances catching up after a long absence. They share a few jokes about their current predicament, serving as pleasantries before concluding what the other has already concluded.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Humour

Goodbye Wall Street by Edward S Barkin

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A few years ago – actually a few more than a few – I was ever so close to becoming a full-fledged drone in the beehive of modern-day America.  During that time, I was still merely an apprentice — one of many youthful human resource units at the disposal of a large and powerful Wall Street corporation.  My job was to sit at a desk ten hours a day and do various unimportant things.  In return, I received money.  Not that much of it, but just enough so that I didn’t have to worry constantly about how much I was spending.  Forty thousand a year, let’s call it, though it was probably only thirty-eight at best.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Historical

Plumbeck the Fiddler by Tom Sheehan

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Watching every move about the campfire, studying each face lit up by the flickering flames, the fiddler Sam Plumbeck idly held onto his instrument, waiting for the proper moment. Time, he could feel, was pressing down on him; it had different parts that moved in different ways. The stars all the way to the horizon dip were many and miraculous, the horses silent for the most part even though a coyote cry filtered in now and then, and the darkness beyond wrapped them like a giant robe spread under those stars. He had ridden in, apparently aimlessly to all the trail hands, and joined up with them on their way back to their ranch, the promise of music being hailed by all the hands who had delivered the herd, were through with the drive. He alone, out of all these trail hands who had hit the jackpot, knew what was coming down on them. Nothing is supposed to be perfect or fair; at least this side of heaven, or the mass of a blue sky, or the dash of sunlight on a rainy day. And he, just a picker of strings, with not a coin of the gold in the lot having his name on it, could only wait it all out, hoping for the best and only seeing the worst coming up.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Tupperware Party by Rebecca Lee

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typewriterIt started right after college graduation when I ate my degree.  I spent four years working on my bachelors. In a second I had devoured it whole.  Okay, maybe not whole. I took the diploma back to my dorm room, climbed under the covers, and with a fork and knife, cut up the piece of paper into tiny square bites. In a matter of minutes I had successfully done what all the popular girls told me to do in seventh grade.  Like Weird Al, I ate it. I ate all of it.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Go Time by Josie Myers

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typewriterFrank tried to flag down his instructor using a beauty queen wave for the fifth time that day.

“Excuse me, Sergeant Airborne.”

A glare radiated beneath the brim of the instructor’s black cap as he led the troops to the open doors of the Curtiss C-46 Commando.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Dead Man’s Last Home by Michael Glazner

literallystories2014

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Clint’s sleeping body takes a breath, stretches and rolls over. The large man wearing a white coat scribbles notes on his pad while the dim sunrise light peeks through the window. Clint’s body rolls back to its original position. The white coat checks his watch and then checks off a box on his notepad.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Catch of the Day by Tom Sheehan

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typewriterThree of us for dozens of years were tight as a fist. No one could break us up, and a few had tried that on a few futile occasions, even when we gentlemen were fly fishing on one or more of the local streams, dawn afloat, May alive after a harsh winter and a tough early spring. Patterns were set betwixt us, like specialties of the house or garage or personal workshop, toil and turn at obstacles and unfinished tasks were before us who by each one’s choice in life’s work had brought the gifts of ideas and applicable and talented hands to extend those gifts. For each one of us possessed odd and different talents in electrical, mechanical and brute strength applications and peculiar other interests like coin and stamp collecting, scrap book organization and minimal, but touching artwork by a loving touch, family interest passed down from a parent or an older sibling.

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