This is it. I have nothing left to say. I have no new thoughts. The words “Stop, Stop it, Please Stop Please Stop” ring out in my brain blaring again and again every time something new enters my mind. An alarm I cannot silence, a desperate prayer I cry out endlessly. I don’t think I’m talking to him; I think I’m talking to me. Violently begging my brain to stop firing, misfiring the way that it does.
Continue reading “Whiplash by Bryn Ledlie”
The odor is an eye-gouging, throat-punching combination of sour milk served over steamed shit, with a dab of honey. Like the killing fields of Gettysburg in 1863, scorched into an indelible stench.
“This is atrocious, Leo,” I bellow through the deafening grind of the gigantic truck’s engine. “Can’t you smell it?” I’m kneeling in a puddle of something brown and viscous, trying and failing to latch a chain onto a brimming green dumpster.
Continue reading “History in a Trash Heap by Mark Fellin”
As an infant, I sought nourishment in bottles, draining milk with frightening speed.
Thirty-four years later, I still need my bottle, except this time they hold Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and the weight of credit card debts. They hold things I shouldn’t have bought to feel like a bourgeois dandy, antique bookshelves. Old lamps that glow and create illusions of home and communion. The bottles hold awards I pursued and barely missed, than missed big time, numbers, tempers lost over teaching philosophies and politics. Apologies I can’t speak. A life of could-haves, all laid out before me, scattered puzzle pieces whose counterparts are long missing.
Continue reading “Bottled by Yash Seyedbagheri”
And another one for the fairer sex (I’m probably not allowed to say that these days, am I?) So, another one for the people who we used to call the fairer sex (there – smiles with satisfaction at how WOKE I am!!) Leila has chosen this piece by Ms Field and this is what she said:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Workplace Harmony by Rebecca Field”
Hi folks here we are at Week 319.
This was one of those weeks I had no idea what I was going to write, but a quick look at the paper with a can of lager and I saw my inspiration. (For all you anal types out there, it was me who was drinking the lager and not the paper – And yes, I know, I should have sorted the sentence which would have stopped me typing this pish!)
Continue reading “Week 319 – Too Much Variety, Diane’s Enthusiastic Observations And A Development That Would Make Satchmo Cry.”
I have yet to meet my new housekeeper. She comes highly recommended from, well, shall we say an intimate acquaintance of mine. The agency is headquartered in an anonymous building along the industrial riverfront where, if the amateur historians are to be trusted, a loose affiliation of second-rate magicians used to gather during the Depression to practice their dark arts. Like those illusionists, my housekeeper finishes her duties and vanishes with remarkable punctuality moments before I arrive home from my office at the graphic design firm.
Continue reading “The Disciples of Baphomet by Kevin P Keating”
Eddie Kidney lived in a Jiffy John in downtown Buffalo. Kidney was not his real surname, of course, but it seemed to fit so that is what we called him. Besides, Eddie liked having a last name and smiled when anyone referred to him as Mr. Kidney.
Continue reading “Eddie Kidney’s Thanksgiving by David M Robinson”
I always feel awkward in social situations with strangers. I guess everybody does. But for some reason when I find myself at that point, my reaction is beyond control: I start lying like a madman.
Continue reading “Submarines, Like Ships in the Night by Steve Sibra”
A.M.I. (Adverb Mass Index): 45.74% (last reading, till it blew)
8 December
James Thrurber’s Birthday
I was at my desk avoiding my latest work of innovative genius by attempting to see the world the way James Thurber must have–with one eye shut and the other peering through a monocle devised from the punt of an unwashed pint. A childhood accident blinded Thurber in one eye; soon after sympathetic ophthalmia set in and slowly drained the light from the other. Yet before darkness fell for keeps, Thurber became almost as well known as a cartoonist as he was a writer.
Continue reading “Everyday I Ro Ro Ro in Zee Hay by Leila Allison and Daisy the Pygmy Goat”
Nick stares at pennies glimmering in the fountain by City Hall. Watches the shadows and sun mingle with water, a turquoise dream.
They seem to beckon him, these neat metal circles with Lincoln’s face. People throw them in all the time, trying to fulfill wishes, so his sister Nan says. She says they wish for stupidity but Nick can’t blame them, even if wishing seems like a waste.
He reaches in, slowly picks up a small handful of pennies, feels their weight. People hate pennies, but they add up to so many things.
Continue reading “Desperate Cents by Yash Seyedbagheri”
literally stories 