Laughing out loud.
Rolling on the floor with laughter.
Smiley face.
This last one was from Barb and Trevor’s heart-felt like supernova.
The night was going well. He was being charming, funny and confident. His body language advertised a great catch and a man who should be forgiven one honest mistake.
Right! The story is done. A long stand in the pissing rain waiting for that bird. Fecking camera in the fecking phone pish. What twat thought of that? I bet it was some weirdo with an ear fetish!
OK now the easy bit…Oh fuck I do make myself laugh.
When I visited the back door portal to Literally Stories Friday morning charged with the task of ordering random words into something a little less random my first thought on typing Week 38 was; Is there any significance to the number 38?
In short. No significance.
The best ‘fact’ I came up with was it is the probable year of the marriage of Claudius and Messalina.
Fascinating.
However if you add ‘th’ to 38 and then parallel, too, the plot thickens into something almost but not quite significant, as you now have the 38th parallel. The demarcation between North and South Korea. An imaginary line that also passes just north of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, all of which makes one wonder how newspaper columnists survived before the advent of the internet search engine? None of which leads me to this week’s litany of literary marvels that began with The Aviator.
“This truck is so old, Chief Sitting Bull drove it to his senior prom,” I said to Larry Kicking Bird as he got onto Highway 18.
“Quit your bad mouthin’ on my truck, James Eagle. How on earth do I get to Sioux Plains from here?” Larry asked.
“Easy, easy. Sioux Plains is pretty close to where Sitting Bull grew up. Put your truck on cruise control and it’ll remember where Sitting Bull’s senior prom was.” Larry sped up to about 80 miles an hour, but not long after, a cop tailed us.
God help me. God help me be patient. God help me harness my anger and control my paranoia. I don’t want to go off on Carol again. Night Hawk completing weather analysis for scheduled high-speed run in forty-six hours, twenty-seven minutes. Alright, I take a deep breath, and I clear myself for take-off for a fifty-minute flight in the turgid air of psychobabble.
I open the door and start to greet Carol, Major Greer, but there is a linebacker looking white dude with blond hair and a neat little beard. Where the hell is Carol? This is her office. Did I get the time wrong or maybe the wrong day?
“Major Harris, I’m Doctor Clark. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
It was said that the Grove Café was so cheap that the Health Department had to bring its own cockroaches. It occupied an abandoned Bank of BC storefront on Denman Street in the west end of Vancouver, a mixed neighbourhood of the snotty middle class and the grubby poor. The café is gone now. The lease ran out, the landlord raised the rent and the Grove ceased to exist. The storefront sits empty now, and though he’d never admit it, the greedy landlord laments the loss.
Continue reading “A Miracle on Granville Street by dm gillis”
English Wells fought the Pumquich River for forty years, moving his will ever by degrees at it. “By God, Miriam,” he often said to his wife, “I’ll go at it until I drop, most likely. What you work for, you get. You get what you work for.” English, lacking funds or worldly promise, wanted to steal more land from this side of the river, to push his small estate out over the river’s run, to claim energy’s due.
December sweeps her dead hand around my throat. My capuche swooshes open and I come to life in the morning hour rush. A beggar scratches the furrows between the cobblestones outside the metro station. When I get close to him, the automatic doors open and the warm breath of the subway hits me. He looks up at me, then back down again to the cobblestones.
I walk out on to the escalator, a boy runs past me, then a girl, then another boy. The latter boy shoves the girl when he rushes by her, down the escalator. She yells, but keeps going. Yesterday the fungus to the right was green, but today it’s covered in white foam.
The subway train comes in and I get on. It’s full, so I stand. I can always tell which state the country is in by looking at the adverts. Education, insurances, job seminars and cheap groceries. I’m reminded of what the prime minister said; the lowest unemployment rate in Europe by 2020.
Promises aren’t worth much to the poor. That’s why the adverts look the way they do, and why the beggar scratches the furrows of the cobblestone.
I gave him what was left of my hand because he asked for it with such a kindness; he even called me miss. It was the kindness you forget about when you run out of family and end up in a home off the soggy edge of the Everglades. Rosecliff, they called it, to make it sound less like swamp muck. I didn’t know how well I could stand anymore until that man, the father of the head doctor, told me we were leaving for somewhere better. You don’t get feet to disintegrate like mine unless you traveled, and traveled I did, and travel I would. All that man had to say was please, you know, before I remembered how to walk again.
Literally Stories have had picks by a bunch of lovely editors, let’s also have a bunch of picks from an unloved editor. Before I go on I just want to clarify, I’m not picking the ones already picked, which are all great.
Unfortunately to choose one is to disregard another. My lovely better half comes from Belgium where they have a saying: To choose is to lose. It’s why their Food Menus are endlessly long and why the food arrives with an uplifting pep talk; Better luck next time, Brussels sprout.
I’m rambling on, so let me take the advice from the boy with the snotty nose which is: Start with the picking!
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