We are quiet, motionless and sad faced at home. Sometimes I smile just to startle you. I wonder if you still love me or if I am a particle you depend on to avoid the throb of loneliness.
We once argued, both of us so angry murderous thoughts surrounded our minds. You smacked me until I stumbled backwards against the wall, my eyes malicious with hurt and resentment. When the shock was over, I giggled and staggered towards you. “Do that more often. I love the devilish feeling it provokes.”
They vanished. One by one. The first to disappear was Pedro Nogales. Jaime Morales said he couldn’t imagine why his cousin Pedro had taken off like that. Without a word to anyone. Even more puzzling, everything that mattered to Pedro, including his favorite wide-brimmed straw hat, a black leather-look jacket he’d saved months to purchase and a shiny red polyester shirt he wore to birthday parties and dances, had been left behind.
One night in a cramped office I was contemplating suicide while entering food prices into a restaurant database. I’m a manager and my neck and lower back were throbbing and aching. Scroll, click, type. My eyes felt like they were bleeding. Someone knocked on the door.
Continue reading “Can I Still Work One Day a Week by J W Kash”
It was a day he learned too much about himself when the judges announced his drawing, 1st Place, and he heard the applause, and that night at the party, drank whisky for the first time, and loved how it made him feel. He was eighteen, and in a few more years, he flunked out of community college, and kept drinking anyway, until his wife, a local girl who gave him a son, left him after tolerating more humiliation than most women, but oh, he wasn’t done yet; it took until he lost his job as a used car salesman even though if he’d been sober til noon it would have been overlooked. He had nothing left, and sat in the common, and told passerby’s that life was unfair, and the townspeople knew who he was, and his story was nothing new.
Did you ever wonder what it would be like to be a newt? To reside peaceably in an aquarium, rising every so often for a gulp of air, catching a worm in your thin amphibious mouth and being generally content? I often think about that. This is about a time when I thought about it a lot. It was the summer when I worked as a student intern at a senior center near Brighton Beach. I was pursuing a social work degree at Hunter College, and sharing an apartment in downtown Brooklyn with two other graduate students. It was a lonely time for me, and I kept several spotted newts in a terrarium for company, and a five disc CD player that I had on continuously when I was home to ward off the isolating silence.
That morning, a May Saturday, when Fernando “Fred” Norstrand first put on the police uniform, solid blue deep as a line of defense, bright buttons shining gold-like running down the front straight as ideas cemented in his mind, his wife stood in the bathroom doorway in open admiration of the new spectacle. He had only recently taken off a Navy uniform, discharged from service because of injury. They loved each other that morning with a new and silent abandon, their baby son still asleep, the day already lopsided in their favor, and the man of the house about to start a new job. He had been appointed as a special policeman of the town, assigned to the lone local theater to keep the kids in line, Saturday being the toughest start of all; popcorn, noise, kids away from parental control, let loose from their homes, very different from the few homes he’d visited during Pacific duty and the home he had grown up in.
That’s new. I sit in front of the green, perched on the verge. Broken car pulled up behind me, half jacked, tyre removed but not replaced. Puncture. Should’ve bought that new spare. Little white balls float through the air like gulls, wobble in the breeze before landing on the trimmed grass. They pick up the flag, one hits and the other hits and the last hits. They put the flag back and move on. More balls sail across the sky, more flags are hoisted.
and you won’t tell him will you? she said
Brandt Colson silently watched his frenetic daughter as she flitted from room to room in her usual style, talking about ten different things at once and fussing over details and generally majoring in the minor. Brandt noticed the bored and frowning, mostly grown boy, his grandson, as he stood at the front door leaning against the wall. The boy took no pains to hide his sullen, brooding, teenage impatience.
She stopped flying around the room and paused in front of the chair. Brandt looked up. “Plenty to eat and all laid out. Your list is on the counter. Sure you feel up to it, Dad?”
“Feel fine.” He replied. The stroke was jumbled memory now.
*The names in this blog have been altered to protect the innocent — not the guilty.
Email One — 23 December 2015.
Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…
In actual fact Twas the night before the night before Christmas, when an email landed in the Literally Stories inbox. Attached to the email a short story for our perusal.
Standard acknowledgement email is dispatched by yours truly.
All well and good.
Christmas came and Christmas went. New Year beckoned. New Year came and was soon spent and the story we received 23rd December continued to languish in our gmail account.
Forgotten. Unloved. Unread.
9 January 2016 — Email Two.
A standard rejection email is sent out to a much-loved LS published author, *Gertrude Ponsonby.
11 January 2016 — Email One
Email One is unearthed by the same buffoon who forgot to bring it to the attention of fellow Editors. Sincerest apologies email is duly dispatched to potential LS author patiently awaiting a reply:
Sorry *Engelbert — we somehow failed to flag up your story for reading… we will read it and get back to you very shortly.
12 January 2016 — Email One
Email is sent to the author of unloved, abandoned, forgotten story to tell them it is no longer unloved and will soon have a home at Literally Stories.
14 January 2016 — Email Two
A standard rejection email is sent out to the much-loved LS published author, *Gertrude Ponsonby; the same author who received the same email for the same story five days previously.
Oops!
Later that day
Much loved LS published author replies with typically pithy good humour:
Continue reading “Literally Stories – Week 56 – A Tale of Two Emails”
It shoulda been okay. Tommy told me it’d be fine. “You worry too much Davey. You’re as bad as a whinging woman. What about this and what about that. It’ll be fine.”
Well, I ask you – “As bad as a whinging woman” and him supposed to be my mate. My best mate. Anyway what could I do then? I had to go along with it didn’t I?
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