All Stories, General Fiction

Show of Good Faith by A.L. Ellis

Tiny clots of tissue and intestine trailed down my driveway and snaked around to the backyard.  Before the touch of day, I’d let Shiva out to run free from the house and I.  Two hours later and still no sign of her. She’d usually come back to the front door scratching and whining to get back in; negative 42 degrees had a way of making animals panic.  The cold couldn’t bother me anymore, but the sun still did—it was too bright.  I grabbed a jacket anyway and headed out to look for her.  She had no problem jumping the metal fence around the property.  And when she didn’t feel like jumping, she’d dig her way to freedom.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Who Knows Who Lived in My House, Built in 1742, or Your House by Tom Sheehan

For history and legend sakes, certain attributes, character traits if you will, have to be appointed here at the beginning of This old house (B. 1742), home for more than half a century of my life, and This old room, dressed with computer by me for the last 28 years. Yet I swear thick-cut Edgeworth pipe tobacco bears its welcome as strong as my grandfather’s creaking chair, diminutive Johnny Igoe’s chair. This most memorable compartment was also his room for 20 years of literate cheer, storied good will, the pleasantries of expansive noun and excitable verb, and his ever-lingering poems, each one a repeated resonance, a victory of sound and meaning and the magic of words. Yet be of stout spirit, for the chair mocks time only in the clutch of darkness thick as the eternal void, and the tobacco’s no longer threatening in its gulp.

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All Stories, Science Fiction, Short Fiction

This God is Going to Happen by Leila Allison

Once per year, Vicar meets her child at Altar. The event is a scheduled appointment, and means as much to both participants as an annual dental cleaning had meant to a First Form human being. For whatever reason, Awesome insists on yearly Vicar-class “mother-daughter” contact, which will terminate the year the color of the child’s skin changes from topaz to jet, thus signifying spiritual maturity.  At that point onward, they will neither see nor think about each other again. Vicars are happily solitary beings, in keeping with Awesome’s self-image.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Condition of Absolute Reality by Leila Allison

10:30, Sunday morning, 21 February 1970

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It was one of those little lost lamb spring days that sometimes wander into the dead of a Pacific Northwest winter. The sky was as clear as the devil’s conscience, and the temperature would reach well into the sixties by mid-afternoon. By and by, almost everyone in Charleston would go out to grab a piece of that little lost lamb spring day; for everyone knew it wouldn’t be long until another dreary storm blew in off Philo Bay.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Small Succulent and an Octopus Pot by Anna Lewis.

“We launched the plant conservation study in an abandoned natural reservoir. Fields of sagebrush set against three icy active volcanos. And there I was, naked on the side of the dirt road. Covered in ticks. A poison oak rash burned up my waist. I had four wasp stings.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Homo Sacer and Her Lover by Ewa Mazierska

When Sarah woke up, Thomas was already making coffee and smoking a cigarette. He couldn’t live without fags. He seemed to be anxious to even go to sleep, because this would deprive him of his favourite object of consumption, and he smoked straight after they had sex, like a character in films about prostitutes and their clients. But Sarah did not mind it, even liked it, because cigarettes suited him and after sex she wanted to be left alone. Thomas also liked to eat, and his eyes were always on the best risotto or cherry pie in the city. In the past one would call such a man a bon vivant, but these days this term had an archaic inflection, so in her diary she named him ‘Agent Cooper’. Despite not paying much attention to his health, in his late forties he still looked good. Probably he even looked better in his forties than in his twenties. For her he looked best when he was naked. Most men look ridiculous without their clothes and they try to hide their shrinking muscles, dicks and balls or try to puff them up by this or that means. Instead, he simply liked to spread himself on the bed, as if unaware of the space he occupied or offered his body as a vessel into which she could escape into a different reality.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Skin and Bones by Sherry Shahan

When she was wheeled into the day room, attended by her IV drip, Jack thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She seemed absolutely pure, evacuated of all evil, honed to perfection. Her head was an imported melon covered by the finest filo pastry, stretched and rolled thin. Her cheeks were eggshells. Concave. The hair on her head was shredded coconut. The hair on her body was dark and fuzzy, like the mold on Gorgonzola. Her skin was the color of Dijon mustard – that wonderful brownish tinge that comes from lost vitamins and minerals. She was everything gourmet Jack had denied himself.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Butterflies & Lima Beans by Adam Kluger

“Yeah, so this is not such a big deal…,” thought  Brad Whiskerton, “who really cares if Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable soup in a can (obviously) decided to do away with lima beans in their soup? (according to the back-label’s list of ingredients).

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Woodpecker Telegraph System by Leila Allison

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Elmer Fudd’s laugh speeded up ten-thousand times comes close to describing the sound of a woodpecker beaking the holy hell out of a metal chimney cap. A pneumatic “uh-huh-huh-huh-huh,” with a little “phu-bub-buh-tuth,” thrown in for variety, gives you the soul of the thing. Wikipedia calls this behaviour drumming.

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