He stood in the doorway of her sewing room, saying nothing, rocking back and forth on the threshold. She had been expecting him, but it was the alternating squeak and swish of his rocking that caught her attention, “What time do you have to be there?”
Continue reading “Almost There by John Bubar”
Ed liked to blame the couch, though there was more to it, but that part didn’t help.
What Kaitlyn did, she went out and spent four thousand dollars on it, and then when they delivered the thing it didn’t fit in the elevator. Ed watched them try removing the little ceiling panel, which he didn’t even know came off, but even so they couldn’t angle it in.
Continue reading “Adverse Possession by Ted Gross”
The clouds moved quickly over the tops of the cypress trees. A storm came over the horizon and the sky darkened. They drug up the jug lines, checked the last of the crab pots, and made for the river. John jumped in the dark water, pulling the lilies from the rudder. He turned the engine on and off as the bay boat bobbed through the duckweed. Following the light, they came out of the back of the bayou, and the branches looped over the path and hung low for a while, then opened up to the Mississippi. The carp were leaping out of the water. The boat sat low and John drug his hand through the wake. The spray kicked up into Ellie’s face.
Continue reading “The Last Good Day by, Thomas Allen Hayden”
The summer of our wedding my bride Claudia VanderMeer and I leased a split-level duplex on a dead-end street in a close-in gentrifying area of south central Austin, a quiet, in-transition neighborhood of young families and senior citizens and dogs. The opposite side of the duplex was occupied by the owner/landlord, a white-haired University of Texas professor who we figured was gay. We were fine with him being gay (perhaps we even wanted him to be gay), both for philosophical reasons and as a counterpoint to our conspicuously heterosexual, pre-children, pre-jaded bliss.
Continue reading “Quality Photos by Steven McBrearty”
His wife smiles as she looks over at him, slipping her hand over top of his. They sit in rented beach chairs not far from where their three small children are playing in the sand. Digging up ‘rivers’ for the sea to flow into and filter out of. Sand castles that are hastily built and quickly moved on from. Splashes in the cool surf washing far enough inland to get their ankles wet.
Continue reading “The Wave by D J Roosh”
“Let’s have intercourse.”
“…excuse me?”
She trailed her fingers over the wooden table. Bought at some drift store a million years ago, for a buck and a half. He still liked it – a memory.
“Listen”, she said, “let’s face it. The marriage is dead. There’s nothing for us to do anymore. Except intercourse.”
Continue reading “After the Fall by Dianne Willems “
Beth dies the night she packs her honeymoon suitcase. She folds a red-fringed shawl and places it carefully on top of her clothes. She zips up the suitcase and wheels it to the front door.
“I’m good to go.”
Her husband, Pete, walks into the room.
“What do you mean you’re good to go? Where are we going?”
“Oh, Pete.”
From sunrise to sunset, Jill was a good-time girl.
She was hot stuff, longing to live large in high cotton, and Jack—was Jack—a jack of all trades, a master of none, living on the edge looking for face-to-face horizontal celebrations.
Continue reading “Jill’s Idiom Odyssey by Frederick K Foote”
It was her father who first showed her. If you pointed your arms straight at two very distant points, features in the landscape, or clouds, or stars, you made yourself the centre of the universe. Everything was drawn into you, you were the fundamental point of a triangle, whose hypotenuse, a funny word at first but easy to remember once you had said it two or three times, could shift between any pair of objects, the sun and the moon, two trees, the chimney on top of the neighbours’ roof and the tv aerial on the top of her parents’ house, any two things, anywhere. It really didn’t matter, it was still a triangle, because of the one fixed point, and the two others.
Continue reading “A Call To Arms by Julian Walker”
Adam likes to trade celebrities. He says it makes him feel a little better after someone he particularly revered has died.
Continue reading “The Shrew’s Tale by Simon Nadel”
literally stories 