I saw a little man riding a child’s bicycle in Berwyn, Illinois, outside Chicago, on the sidewalk, along Roosevelt Road. He was carrying a guitar; this was the first thing that caught my attention. The guitar was strapped over his back. But it was also slung down partly across the side of his body so he could cuddle it with one arm while he steered the bike with the other and pedaled the small pedals with his small legs.
Continue reading “The Old Guitarist by Dale W Barrigar”
Poisson Regression by JJ de Melo
Sweat sticks me to the couch. Like a bug in fly tape. The windows are open, but I only have one fan. It barely helps. I’m breathing hot soup in my apartment and I want out. To leave. Take a walk. But it’s not safe. Not yet.
Continue reading “Poisson regression by JJ de Melo”
Patsy flipped his eggs in the small frying pan, sizzling on the coils of his portable electric burner. Thin bacon smoke hung in his room. Can’t let that old bat of a landlady catch me cooking. He walked five steps to the room’s sole window, pounded the frame to break the ice seal, and opened it. Rochester’s mid-winter night air hit him like an arctic blast.
Continue reading “Patsy’s Last Gig by JD Clapp”
Sarah parked in the small lot beside Lava’s Bar on Lower Main not knowing what to expect. The ancient and industrial part of Wailuku looked the same as it had when she was a kid: non-descript dingy buildings, narrow alleys with the odd apartment sprinkled in, a snuffling dog on the corner. Despite the post-sunset, orangey sky, the area emanated an enticing melancholy, a feeling she remembered from the seat of her dad’s tow truck back in the early seventies en route to the junkyard, stereo shop, or TV repair. But now, there’s a bar! Maybe there was always a bar—or bars—here, but bars weren’t on her radar in those days, obviously. She’d always been curious about the dusty, mid-island pit of industrial Wailuku, compared to the tourist-dotted beaches in Kihei, where she had grown up a mere ten or so miles away.
Continue reading “Lava’s Bar by Marisa Mangani”
In her dream she was speaking a language she did not know and had never heard before and when she woke to the half-light and strangeness of her room some words of it were still on her tongue. There was a dry and bitter taste in her mouth and her fists were clenched. Her body ached as if she were a traveller returned from some far off border of the world.
Continue reading “Borderland by David Calcutt”
She’s there, behind the bar as I walk in. Immaculate white blouse, tucked into a pair of faded jeans. 501’s. Belt buckle tight at the waist. Blonde highlights in a short bob, cut into the neck. Silver ear studs. Big white teeth as she greets me.
Continue reading “Nicky by Graham Mort”
I am a horologist.
Secreting myself in this mid-American city of lost souls, I specialize in the art and science of timekeeping. I have been at my craft for more than a century.
The filth in the street, horses and their droppings that smear the city in a perpetual stink, damnable new cars and incessant street noise have become unbearable, as has the lack of civility and morality. Men in terrible pain limp along the streets only able to stand with crutches, leg braces, and wooden limbs. They are the fortunate ones who survived the war.
Continue reading “The Last Horologist by Arthur Davis”
My doorknob is low. The door is regular-sized, just upside down. But I know that can’t be true because the windows are up top. So my new theory has been that the door was sawed off, like a shotgun. The point is my doorknob is lower than most and is demonstrative of what’s inside: a very small apartment. Or, as I like to call it, “My hallway by the sea.” Because I live in a beach town.
Continue reading “Scarf in the Dark by Crockett Doob”
Today, the monster steps into the world. Today, unhooded, he is seen.
He has done this for many years now, ever since he began to understand the possibilities Halloween offers him. For one night, the town is transformed, becomes a wonderland of the ghoulish and grotesque. A town made for him.
Continue reading “The Monster And The Boy by Jaime Gill “
“You got old early.”
Hannah didn’t need to finish the thought. She’d already said it so many times, and then, when she got tired of saying it, she left. But even when she came back to pick up this or that, she sometimes would say it again, maybe for old time’s sake. “You got old early when you lost your job and started spending your days getting way too wrapped up in the neighbors’ business.” I never had a good response, even though clearly I had plenty of time to come up with one.
Continue reading “Your Grief Doesn’t Interest Me by Simon Nadel”
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