Tag: loss

All Stories, General Fiction

Patience by Ed N. White

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Without thinking, she started smoking the day he left, nearly thirty years ago. It was just something to do when he walked away. She constantly sat at the window, hoping, peering, and smoking. One cigarette lit from the other, with the smoke dragged deep into her lungs. Everyone said that was a bad thing to do, but she still smoked, and most of them had passed away. She kept her hand outside to let the smoke drift into the clouds and considered it a signal, a beacon he could follow home. The ash burned close and scarred her fingers, so little pain remained. The pain was all in her heart.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Dial 1 for Heaven by N J Delmas

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A red phone box stands alone in the middle of a field. Long grass and wildflowers surround it and little else. I make my way over; glad I’m wearing my wellies. I avoid the cow pats along the way and bat a couple of flies from my face.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Chalatenango, 1983 by J. Paul Ross

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Warning: Extreme content – see tags.

Running.

Gasping.

Retching, the son of Olayo Mejia charges toward his village amid the stench of burning wood and searing flesh. The odor is heavy and it is moist and it fills the valley beneath him in a haze of squalid yellows and heavy browns. It covers the fog-laced treetops and mingles across the terraced fields and, as gunfire again bursts over the Salvadoran hills, its reek grows sharper with every footfall and every wild swing of his arms. Its taste lingers in his mouth, its fumes choke his lungs and he wants so much to pause and catch his breath. He wants to fall to his knees and weep in terror but he knows he cannot, for the helicopters are prowling above him, the smoke is billowing high into the morning air and his home is very far away.

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All Stories, General Fiction

March by Sarp Sozdinler

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March was a bitter month for everyone involved. Jodi was born into one, like Eric Clapton, her childhood idol. In another March, thirty years ago, Clapton’s four-year-old son ran into a hole in the wall. The hole was supposed to be a window, but it had no glass on it. A scream tore through the house, and the mother understood right away that it didn’t come from the boy; the boy was busy plowing through the air, down fifty-three floors.

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All Stories, General Fiction

At Sea by Andrew Bennett

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In the muted afternoon light that leaked through the curtains high on the cellar wall the old man, sweaty and disoriented, reached out from a nap he had not planned to take. He lurched forward and tumbled headfirst out of his recliner and up against the television, two feet in front. He cursed himself. 

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All Stories, General Fiction

Lonely Ghosts.by Rebecca Disley 

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Syd walked along the narrow path of flattened grass between the gravestones just like he always did. On his walk home from work, on his way to the shops, on lonely days couped up at home watching the rain pour down his window panes he came to the graveyard. He walked through the melancholy bluebells that lined its edges, past balloons tied to pristine headstones and sad teddies left in the middle of graves to keep the dead company until he got to Liam. To the black marble with his date of birth and death, the little line etched across the bottom of it that was meant to sum up his whole life. Who he was. What he was. But it couldn’t, it was too small. Too dull. It blended in with all the other messages on all the other graves but nothing about Liam had ever blended in.

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All Stories, General Fiction

At the Zoo by Gil Hoy

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It’s late in the afternoon in late October. I’m at the zoo with my ten-year-old son, Elijah. His mother, my wife Sally, chose our son’s name. Sally comes from a religious family and goes to Mass daily. Elijah’s staring at the elephants, the largest land mammals on earth. One of the three is particularly massive. He has a huge head, large ears, and a long trunk that is sucking up drinking water from a ​big puddle of rainwater​. My son and I have been coming here most weekends as of late. Ever since I lost my better paying job and Sally started working part-time. I’ve been coming here since I was a small boy. Elephants have been a main attraction here for as long as I can remember.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Universal Absorbent by Phoebe Reeves

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The City found itself with a problem: what began as a natural hole in the earth where Its citizens had thrown away their evil had helter-skeltered into a voracious toxic Abyss. The City thought it could wash it away by pouring water down the hole, but that only made the evil float to the surface. It had heard about an Angel that was sent to another place to deal with the problem of evil and that that place had finally (and stupidly, so thought The City proudly as It would never be as stupid as that Other Place) destroyed The Angel and that microscopic pieces of The Angel drifted about the land wreaking vengeance.

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