Tag: love

All Stories, General Fiction

I’ll Tell You Your History by L’Erin Ogle

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They never tell you how hard it is to love someone.  Or how hard it is to be loved.

The first person you ever think you love is the shift manager of the restaurant of your first job.  He’s twenty, four years older than you, and you don’t even know him.  He doesn’t know you.   All you remember about this first love, the one you aren’t ever supposed to forget, is that your first kiss was a shotgun hit of weed that turned into tongues and teeth mashed together, that later he vomited tequila in the sink and then you fucked in the spare room of your friend’s house.  You were so drunk you didn’t realize you started your period and it looked like a crime scene, which seems appropriate now.  Anymore, sex and love seem like crime.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Dreampurple Light by Leila Allison

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Whatever happened to the power-chord?
To which my boyfriend lit a bowl

Was A Stairway to Heaven really the greatest song?
Think it over as you pass that on

Said he’d love me till the end of time;
Forever came to stay in 1989

Still, he was never all so great;
For me that bell had tolled in ‘88

Thirty years go by in the glaze of an eye;
Can it be it’s always the promising future that lies?
 

*******

When my sister Tess and I were girls we’d often visit our father’s grave in New Town Cemetery. Although he had died suddenly when I was two and Tess an infant (thus destined to be little more to us than a face in the family photo album and a grave in the cemetery), we’d make time for “Dear Father” because we had agreed that it was the sort of thing daughters should do. I would recite a psalm memorized from Granna Ivy’s Bible, and Tess would lay a hastily clapped-together bouquet of daisies, buttercups and bluebells on his headstone. I recall admonishing her for the frequent inclusion of dandelions to the arrangement, “Those are weeds, numbskull.” Tess would defend the addition of dandelions on the grounds that “Nobody grows daisies, buttercups or bluebells on purpose, either, bonehead.”

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All Stories, Romance

Home by Nancy Nau Sullivan

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I can only see the top of my daughter’s head from where I sit.  She is cuddled up to her furry orange pillow, her hair pulled into a wobbly knot.

“I heard you talking to Alena,” I say.

“Yes.”  She tosses on the narrow couch.

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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, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Memphis by Frederick K Foote

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Bullet Brown sittin at the bar sparked the fire when he tells Tall Tan, “Don’t start no shit and there won’t be no shit.”

Tall Tan, the Collector Man, poured some gas on the spark. “Too late for that. The shit started when you opened your goddamn lying mouth.”

Bullet smiled his gap-toothed smile. “Well, fuck, man. If we gonna do it let’s get to it.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Washing in the Adige by Evan Massey

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Emilio is sitting across from me. I can barely understand his broken English as it mixes with his native Italian tongue. They sometimes overlap. He makes a new language of which I understand very little. He is going on about something, something about a child and a woman. He is talking fast and touching his face and tapping his mouth with his finger. I’m thinking that I am the woman that he is going on about and that he is trying to describe. The child, I do not know. Emilio is talking fast and I’m giving it my best effort.

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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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All Stories, General Fiction

February by Nik Eveleigh

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Some days bring sunshine. Some bring rain. And somewhere along the line life settles in hard as a February sky. Locks down your dreams tight against the iron earth and dares you to object. For such a short month it exacts a long toll.

A bunch of scientists did an experiment once with fleas. They took half a dozen of the brightest and bounciest, dropped them in a jar and screwed on the lid. For a couple of days those fleas launched themselves into almost continually. Eventually, through pain or weariness or both, they stopped jumping so high. They settled on a spot two thirds of the way up the sides of the jar and that was their limit. Even after the lid came off and they could have bounded their way to freedom those fleas kept right on jumping to a place well below the potential of possibility.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic but if that leaden February sky ever clears I wonder how high I can still jump.

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All Stories, General Fiction

It’s My Funeral!by Paulene Turner

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Oh man! That was the Mother of all nights out. What a headache! I can’t remember much about it. Must have been a great night!

But, where am I? In a place with dark carpets, velvety wall paper, fussy gold mirrors. Some woman’s house, I suppose. A sexy babe who whisked me back to her place for a night cap and a game of Hide-the-Sausage. Was it the surfer chick from Bondi in the barely-there bikini? Talk about hot. And the way she rode those waves. I’d better find a mirror to see how bad I look and whether I need a shower. Don’t you hate it when the girl gets her first peek at you in daylight and throws up?

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