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.
1.
After my wife died, I volunteered on a crisis line. “You must keep clear limits with callers,” said Marilyn the training coordinator. “Don’t under any circumstances interact with anyone in person.”
I didn’t tell her that my boundaries were non-existent. That’s why I lived mostly alone.
Lost and found.
That’s where Kathleen would go if this had happened at a big box store, her carelessness broadcast over the loudspeaker. Instead, she lost something precious in the snow, in deep, cold, silent snow. Beautiful, but impossible to search — unlike the hard floors and ordered aisles of housewares and sports equipment, toiletries and toys.
Emma was pissed off. She hadn’t seen him since he got out of jail after doing a weekender. He’d been huckled for theft and fighting with the security guard who caught him. She knew Sean’s logic only too well. Getting done for the theft was fair enough but the fighting was the guards fault for catching him.
Continue reading “Daddy’s Girl by Hugh Cron – Warning Adult Content.”
Hunger growled in him, clamoring for attention. The old man went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard. There was one can of soup. Chicken noodle. A bowl and a spoon sat in the old man’s dish drain next to a small pot, the perfect size for heating soup. Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the leaves of a shady elm tree and filled the kitchen with dappled light.
