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?
For a pure moment trucker Gene Denport had felt above it all, above dawn at its tatters, above the voice coming at him from day’s edge. King of the throne he was, king of the hill, the road having slammed under him all night long. The 455 horses loose in the Volvo 670’s D-13 truck engine sounded their endless music, hummed under his seat bottom, talked lightly to his wrists; the way a woman might have it, he’d often thought, when the road took the edge off his mind. (Controlled rampage, the voice had said long before he used to think about owning a rig like this Volvo, Earth-mover, star-hauler, space traveler. Piling the superlatives on top of each other would be done at endless ease.)
House-big, highly modified for cruising, like a humdinger Lincoln Town Car in a sense, the Volvo 670 went over the crown of the hill.
He froze on the edge of the seat.
Continue reading “Long Haul Driver by Tom Sheehan – Adult Content”
He’d burned the titles of his hit songs into the planks that formed the stall where he kept his favorite horse, a high-stepping Paso Fino of no particular value beyond the curiosity of its unusual four-gaited step. A short length of pine tacked on the half-door of the stall bore the horse’s name in brass letters, Dominus.
Colin looked about. The stalls and tack seemed unfamiliar. He took a deep breath and smelled sweet feed and hay mixed with the sharper scents of leather and manure.
“What the hell?”
A horse whinnied somewhere across the corral and Dominus stirred.
Got the news straight from the horse’s ass. No fucking around at all. Dr. pull-no-punches, straight arrow motherfucker.
“The cancer done got you, boy. Got you good from asshole to elbows. Not much we can do, but wave to you as you go.”
“How about, chemo, radiation, experimental—“
“How about six to eight weeks to go? How about that?”
Continue reading “Goodbye Blues by Frederick K Foote – Adult Content.”
I catch the sunrise over the bridge every morning before I sit down by the subway. It’s not because I particularly enjoy sunrises or because I somehow find comfort in them. It’s just on my way. That’s it. I live on the other side of the bridge and since most workers get up early, I also have to get up early. I try to hurry over. For some reason it’s easier to imagine us without a home. It’s within the very term homeless. It does happen that someone recognizes me and when they do, they’ll never again share a few coins. The magic is gone. I’m no longer just that homeless man who sits there waiting for them when they go to work, and still waits for them when they go home.
Continue reading “Homes, Brothers and Fantasies by Tobias Haglund”
They call him Stumpy. Not his mum, she calls him by his real name, Ryan, but the others call him Stumpy. Nobody remembers where the name came from. It’s not as if he’s particularly short and he has all his limbs intact. The name seems to have grown around him and there it is.
His limbs are intact but his mind, well his mind is a different thing. If the kids who teased him had possessed a modicum of intelligence it could have been that they realised his brain is stumped but that’s probably a bridge too far for them.
Two men walked towards the elevator. The older man took out two key cards and gave one to his son.
“I promised you that I would take you into the tower when you reached twenty-five.”
“I was fed up asking.”
“Dennis, you have worked hard over the last eight years. I am proud of how quick you have picked up on the businesses I run, sorry, we run. You are my son and my partner and I had to make sure that you would be able to handle what you are about to see.”
His father stepped back and Dennis swiped his card.
