“All hail the long-dead coal baron and builder of our city!” Mayor Giovanni announced at the erection of Captain Rumsby Calvin’s fibreglass statue back in 1973, at the 100th anniversary of the mining development that changed our farming town of Satilano into an industrialized and prosperous mid-sized urban area.
Continue reading “The Entrepreneur of Chaos by Harrison Kim “
The spiced cool air blowing through the car vents comes laced with wood smoke. It is a scent that weaved its way into the fabric of childhood alongside that indoor fireplace, which had been a burning city, or a burning home, or a burning bridge, or any burning spectacle I felt should be extinguished during games of heroism in the autumn and winter months.
Continue reading “Leaves by August Miller”
Edmund’s wife, Wendy, had been unconscious in hospital for weeks, but no doctor could diagnose her illness so they discharged her to recover at home, with Edmund as her sole carer.
As Wendy lay still as a mannequin in her queen-sized bed, drawing in short imperceptible breaths, summer flooded in from the streets outside. Sun splashed through their bedroom window, as leaves on trees glowed a robust green, and birds danced on the tips of trembling boughs.
Continue reading “Open Window by Tim Frank”
The Future
Predicting the future is big business. Aging psychics are falling aside, usurped by new frauds (you’d think the veteran charlatans would have seen that coming). So, it may never be too late to make a fortune by lying to people. So I open my crystal ball and see:
A distant evolutionary jump that will announce itself with the first and only generation of children who will unanimously call bullshit on both Santa and the “true meaning” of Christmas.
Continue reading “Week 416: Crystal Ball Vision; Words of Now; Big List of Dopes 2023”
How do you know how much space is left in your head? What if all the ads for floss or McDonald’s on YouTube means everything you cherish is forced out of your brain into the stratosphere sending you Neolithic?
I had been dining in Ma Mabel’s bar for three months before I saw Bimpe. But nobody spoke about her. They all spoke about Ma Mabel. Yet it seemed no one knew her. Her bar was on Moloney Street, near the police academy. It wasn’t too far from my workplace in Marina. Everyone came to Old Ma Mabel’s bar. Different people, from various walks of life, Lagosians troubled with Lagosian problems – financial worries, overbearing bosses and cheating spouses, not to mention the long lines of traffic that lined Third Mainland Bridge every other day. No one knew Ma Mabel. Her bar had been near Kam Salem for longer than I remembered. Some of the patrons said she had died, others said she was an old woman confined to a wheelchair, and only came out of her house at night. She was elusive, a poor imitation to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. I doubt she had Gatsby’s boundless charm though.
Continue reading “Beside Kam Salem by Adédoyin Àjàyí”
What most disturbed Ben Sykes about his present situation was how it had crept up on him: Ben had lost his home, his wife, and he had thrown away his job. He wasn’t able to say which one thing brought him to this—the world was certainly a more complex and complicated place than placing blame on one thing. If it wasn’t for his ex-mother-in-law, Mrs. Edna Ferbish, allowing Ben to stay with her, well.
Continue reading “A Pebble at Dawn by J Bradley Minnick”
To some, hindsight proves a faithful if fashionably late companion. Though it often offers questionable advice, reflexion is more tolerant than people, each of whom seems keen to speak of subtle feelings Chas rarely recognises. His, ‘I’m just angry’ stock response fails to satisfy those in search of his finer feelings.
‘Sad–’
‘No space for sadness when you’re angry.’
Continue reading “As Ever, the Nun by Antony Osgood”
I’ve had a problem controlling my temper my entire life. It started when I was young. If I didn’t get my way there’d be hell to pay. I used to get into a lot of fights. A few times I even ended up in the hospital. And that all happened before I got out of grade school. Fortunately, over time, I was able to change. What happened? I wish I could say that I had a simple answer or a magic formula, but it really just came down to wanting to do more with my life than spending it being a pugilistic jerk who settled his arguments with his fists. At least I never used a gun.
Continue reading “Storm Clouds by James Bates”
This double tribute to his hometown is Tom at his best, and we feel that you will agree with that assessment.
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Walk a ways with me, here by the Saugus River and the Old Iron Works, where I played as a boy, where arethusa bulbosa (dragon’s mouth orchid or swamp pride) waits for spring and new reeds to hide the young of red-winged blackbirds, where indentured Scot servants worked off their passage, where Captain Kidd brought his treasure to bury on Vinegar Hill (not found yet by boy or man), all leading me to say: The Hour Falling Light Touches Rings of Iron (at the First Iron Works of America, Saugus, MA): You must remember, Pittsburgh is not like this, would never have been found without the rod bending right here, sucked down by the earth. This is not the thick push of the three rivers’ water hard as name calling… the Ohio, Allegheny, and the old Monongahela, though I keep losing the Susquehanna. This is the Saugus River, cut by Captain Kidd’s keel, bore up the ore barge heavy the whole way from Nahant. Mad Atlantic bends its curves to touch our feet, oh anoints. Slag makes a bucket bottom feed iron rings unto water, ferric oxides, clouds of rust. But something here there is pale as dim diviner’s image, a slight knob and knot of pull at a forked and magic willow. You see it when smoke floats a last breath over the river road, the furnace bubbling upward a bare acidic tone for flue. With haze, tonight, the moon crawls out of Vinegar Hill, the slag pile throws eyes a thousand in the shining, charcoal and burnt lime thrust thick as wads up a nose. Sound here’s the moon burning iron again, pale embers of the diviner’s image loose upon the night. Oh, reader, you must remember, Pittsburgh is not like this.
(On back cover of the book, “Small Victories for the Soul VII.” Wilderness House Press, 2019 and Back Home in Saugus.)
Image: Banner Pixabay.com
Saugus Honor roll image from Wikicommons images
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