Well here we are, the holidays behind us, in a brand spanking New Year, which, in my eyes, already looks as fresh as a recently widowed elderly French rent boy cruising the cafes in search of a breathing benefactor. But to those of you who insist on at least benign, if not kind or P.C. expressions–well, happy new year to you and many more I am sure.
Continue reading “Week 462: Rule 17; Necessary Words; A to Z of Needless Words”
I’ll tell you, I saw my fair share of weird. It was par for the course when I was a belief policeman. I never passed judgment.  I once tested a man whose One True Belief was a body part and a woman who worshipped a raw potato. It takes all kinds, but I moved on as long as my detector beeped twice and the OTB wasn’t harmful. If my OTBD beeped only once, I took the heretic to my district HQ. What happened next was outside my control. I told myself my hands were tied.
Continue reading “Scattered Faith by David Henson”
To supplement my pension, I had taken a summer job: crewman and ticket-collector on the Small Isles (Rousay, Wyre and Egilsay) ferry in Orkney – I was the full extent of the extra staff required to meet the demands of the enhanced summer timetable. It’s a fact that when you collect tickets you look at hands, not faces. So I didn’t notice him when he boarded. No car, no luggage, no band, no guitar.
Continue reading ” The Ferryman’s Tale by Mick Bloor”
The spring sea lapped upon the shore of Yokohama. In the city a familiar New Year tune played over a radio. It had been ten years since I heard that song. I mouthed along the words half-remembered from nights when, in drunken stupor, my friend, the poet Sunokaze Heki, would recite tanka alongside the music.
Continue reading “Rosa Rugosa by Thomas J Daly”
I tried to eat an apple whole the other day. I spit it up on the tile, watching as my saliva bubbled atop the cracked checkers. Vince and I laughed hard at this: my attempt, the fall, the wet sound of bruised apple flesh. We stopped only after Vince sat on the wicker chair so hard it splintered. I put a blanket over it and Vince biked home, using his jacket sleeve to gather my spit-stained apple and throw it outside – for the squirrels, he said. Three days later, Mom took the blanket to wash and when she screamed, I told her that Hurricane Nancy must’ve done it. Mom said that wasn’t funny; last month’s hurricane had taken Grandpa’s beloved chicken coop and now he had to buy the factory-farmed eggs they sold at the grocery. I said, “Wow, what an inconvenience!” and was grounded for a week.
Continue reading “I Tried to Eat an Apple by Billie Chang”
I was watching the 1969 Science Fiction flick The Valley of Gwangi on TV last month. It was playing on the ancient Philco set that connects the PDQ network in our sister realm of Other Earth to my home realm of Saragun Springs. The film was the final Ray Harrhausen/Willis O’Brien dinosaur picture. The story involved a thirty-foot tall, psychotic Allosaurus named (brace yourself) “Gwangi,” who somehow managed to reproduce (apparently without a Mrs. Gwangi) and survive at a “Forbidden Valley” in Mexico with other unlikely creatures for at least 145-million years–without, mind you, attracting notice until 1969–that from a reptile with the brain power of a caraway seed.
Continue reading “My Fair Juan G Starring Boots the Impaler By Leila Allison”
Well here we go, we now say farewell and thank you to 2023. And as the year cleans out its desk in the present and moves into the archives, we close it with the last of ten reruns over the past nine days!
Longtime site friend Doug Hawley specializes in making the absurd seem possible. And that talent is extremely present in Half. It begins with an almost religious disease matter-of-factly diagnosed by perhaps the most dubious physician since Wm. S. Burrough’s Dr. Benway of Naked Lunch.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Half by Doug Hawley”
To locate this Holiday Rerun, I had to go way the hell back in the vault to find this wonderful little piece by our own Diane M Dickson. Mary, Joseph and the Baby is truer to the spirit of the occasion than anything you can buy at Amazon and the dialect is musical. Unique but it gets across.
It’s an old story in many ways, but blessed are the poor and meek no matter what the corporations say.
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Mary, Joseph and the Baby by Diane M Dickson”
The saga of site co-founder Nik Eveleigh’s Storm Crow series remains to this day excellent reading. A sort of forlorn hero, whose humanity is commingled with humour and despair. And good old Stormcrow appeared in a Christmas tale seven years ago. Seven years is a magic number as far as time goes, and rest assured that readers new to Nik’s character will agree that the old crow has aged well.
Continue reading “Christmas Rerun – A Crow in a Pear Tree by Nik Eveleigh”
Today’s Rerun is brought to you by the darkside of life. It ain’t aimable Frosty awaiting these children, but during this season it would be an error to omit the truth about the many lives around us in which misery is pretty much a full time experience. David Henson has a way of injecting some light into the darkest of places, which should be a quality found in Christmas.
Continue reading “Christmas Rerun – The Real Bad Snowman by David Henson”
literally stories 