Tan Son Nhut Airbase, South Vietnam, 1968: 10° 46’ 5.99” N
Sweat stained the underarms of his short-sleeved khakis and dripped from his upper lip. But after six months in Nam, surviving its hot-and-wet and hot-and-dry seasons, Jeremy didn’t notice. His mind still wandered the jungles of the Central Highlands, in the teak forests, hunting the enemy and sometimes finding them.
Everyone has played watching games. I’d taken it a step further. I played dead games. I visited cemeteries and I gave five of the dead my thoughts on their life.
I don’t know when my game changed. I wasn’t making up the stories anymore. I’m not exactly sure when the visions changed from imagination.
…They had no input from me.
My older sister Nancy and I love funerals. We go at random every weekend, ingratiating ourselves into the crowds, the friends, the family. We pretend to weep with the mourners, while we absorb things with the coldness of detectives, me in an oversized suit, borrowed from Dad. Nancy in one of Mother’s nice black gowns. We love the darkness, the garb, the somberness. The people gathered together, mothers and children, cousins, nephews, people with connections we cannot fathom. Being so close to darkness, a kind of whirl, excitement. We don’t know dead people, the wildness of loss. Mother and Dad are divorced, but that’s different. They wear fedoras and lavender and false civility. Even our grandparents still live, regaling us with tales of meeting Teddy Roosevelt and other trivialities.
Continue reading “Funeral Crashers by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri”
Laying the Groundwork for a Hit
Composing a Hit
wikiHow, “How to Write a Hit Song”
Barry sat on the bed as he read the letter.
“Well that’s old Jim away.”
“Your granddad?”
“Yep.”
She sat down and put her arm around him.
“Are you okay?”
“I suppose so.”
Continue reading “The Odd Legend And Fuck All Else by Hugh Cron – Warning Adult Content”
I can’t think about my brother William without cringing from guilt. What a terrible childhood he had. None of us loved him or tried to make him part of the family. He was just someone who shared space with us. Which was a tragedy. For him.
David
I just don’t know! What’s this world coming to? A security guard who is nothing but a slip of a girl. It’s not right.
But no matter. It’s the shopping centre’s problem. I have to admit that it’s nice that they give me my breakfast. But in saying that I’m paying them enough. She does check on me, I’ll give her that. But surely that should be a man’s job?
Christ. Almighty. Aunt Nell. Aunt. Fucking. Nell.
Bloodshot, enflamed eyes – well, eye: the right one. Skin like crumpled autumn leaves. Fleshy folds beneath her chin, dangling down like an over-spill tray on a coffee machine. A red, bulbous nose, courtesy of the ‘bloody rosacea’ that plagued Aunt Nell her whole adult life and transformed her nose into a beetroot.
It had happened. The unthinkable. The thing that she had been dreading for four years since finding out. She was morphing into Aunt Nell. Weird, you might think, turning into her aunt; turning into her mother would be more like it. A natural progression. What happens. This was what she found out: Aunt Nell was her mother. More on that can-of-worms later.
Why do Southerners romanticize dreck? They positively gush over everything in sight, including the weeds covering the telephone poles along the highway. Kudzu, an invasive weed, is treated like gorse. Southerners are proud of it, like everything else. Kudzu is nothing to be proud of, but Peter Taylor is. Light in August is something to get excited about. Tennessee Williams knew a thing or two, but is he invited to the Liberty Bowl? What of Eudora Welty?
Guess again.
You feel it in your soul when the notes swing low and tumble over themselves after a hovering vibrato. The brass sax breathing warm air from wet lips, waiting to create a new feel.
literally stories 