“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).
Tag: love
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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I’ll Tell You Your History by L’Erin Ogle
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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The Leaving by L’Erin Ogle
Carly’s hair is falling out. She leaves gold strands everywhere, Gretel’s nightmare version of bread crumbs. We don’t talk about it.
The Dreampurple Light by Leila Allison
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.”
Home by Nancy Nau Sullivan
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.
The Wild Heart Rose of Alaska By Leila Allison
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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Memphis by Frederick K Foote
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.”
Washing in the Adige by Evan Massey
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.
Snakes & Lasses by Christopher Stanley
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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