Tag: loss

All Stories, General Fiction

I Would Tell You What Time it Was by Steve Loschi

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I don’t understand why the boy wears two watches. Plus, they look really expensive. I just don’t get it. I myself can’t hold onto watches. I buy them and forget to take them off, which means when I shower or swim- both of which I do quite often- they get destroyed. I had a watch for two days once before I looked down in the middle of a breast stroke and saw the inner face fog up. I cursed under water and bubbles of regret rose to the surface.  I’ve never been good with watches and now this child, as he is only about twelve years old, comes into my pottery studio with two watches on his wrist. One, I’m quite sure, is a Rolex.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Lamentation by A.E. Herting

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Even the sky grieved. Gray and bleak, the wind cried out in lamentation, sending leftover pockets of old snow onto stark marble gravestones. Mourners passed by, eyes forward, each lost in their own world of respectful sadness. They walked along in silent groups, no one engaging in small talk or forced levity. Their task was much too grave for such normal pleasantries.

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All Stories, Latest News

Week 159 – Censorship, Statistics and Odd-Shaped Balls

Nik

There’s been a good deal of debate around LS towers this week about censorship. Self-censorship to be slightly less vague. The conscious and unconscious decisions made by authors to tone down content to be entirely more accurate.

Swearing is the main culprit but there are others – and in most cases what it seems to come down to is the ability (or inability) to separate author and character.

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All Stories, General Fiction

End of the Road by Richard Ferri

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I sit up in bed when I see the headlights of a car arc at the end of the driveway, pause for a second over the mailbox, and then stop in front of my house. I reach across the bed to wake Susan before I remember she’s not there.  Mine is the last house on a rural cul-de-sac in upstate New York. Sometimes in the summer, late at night, I get kids making out or drinking beer at the end of the road and if they make too much racket I walk up with a flashlight and ask them to move along. But it’s early morning, the week before Christmas, the kind of dry cold air that pinches your nose shut in the time it takes to check the mailbox. No one is drinking a 40-ouncer this morning. The newspaper guy used to drive by at this time of morning and slide a paper into the box, but I cut that off six months ago, when Dylan deployed. Some things you don’t want to know about. The headlights extinguish, and I can see the glint of the car chrome in the early morning moonlight. I slip my feet over the side of the bed, find my LL Bean moccasins, wrestle into a flannel robe, and turn on the light to go downstairs.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Wild Heart Rose of Alaska By Leila Allison

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Only the dead know how to live;
Only the poor know what to give

Only lovers pray for rain;
Only dreamers strive for pain.

Jean More committed suicide on 21 May 1977. She exited life via a dozen Quaaludes and a pint of hobo wine. Jean was thirty-seven; her final action made an orphan of her seventeen-year-old son, Holliday.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Loss by Phillip Smith

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My cat is dead.  I know it even though I’m not looking at his still body.

I know this without having seen him.  I’ve been unemployed for four months.  For the past 121 days, when I’ve been home in the afternoon, which has been for most of them, Mittens, my cat, has come downstairs at around two o’clock to beg me for supper.  It’s now five after two.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Aref and the Hermit Crab by Phoebe Reeves-Murray

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Hundreds of hermit crabs wearing toothpaste caps as shells shuffled through the dirt at the construction site, dirt so full of broken glass that it sparkled even at night, even with no light. Aref knew probably only he saw that seemingly infinite sparkle, just like he knew the hundreds of hermit crabs were really only one because you’d never find that many crabs wearing toothpaste caps for shells.

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All Stories, General Fiction

From One War to Another without Choice by Tom Sheehan

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I’d lost a brother and remember the headlines, newsreels, songs of bond-selling, gas-griping, and movies too true to hate, the settings of World War II. Those days found the whole Earth bent inwards, imploding bombs, bullets, blood, shrieking terrible bird cries in my ears only deepest sleep could lose if it ventured close.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

Snakes & Lasses by Christopher Stanley

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Jock’s folding his pyjamas back under his pillow when he hears it. A low, growling hiss. His twin daughters are elsewhere, probably playing in the walls, so it’s just him and the mannequin dressed as his wife in the bedroom. He’s searching for the source of the noise when the duvet shifts on the bed. It’s a slight movement, like wind-ruffled marram grass, but it’s something. Carefully, he pulls back the covers, revealing the green and yellow-chevroned scales of a king cobra.

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