I am cursed with my very own personal psyops helicopter, a flying machine that takes me anywhere it wants to go, no matter how much I beg it to leave me be. Matte black, of course, updated constantly—the latest sensors, time travel, you name it. Highly sensitive to excruciating shame, humiliation, and social embarrassment. Fully automated, sentient, and merciless.
Continue reading “Helicopter by Marco Etheridge”
Neither Mr. Dunner nor I knew which now-gone relative carefully placed the photographs in the chimneys. Had it not been for Mr. Dunner’s care, we wouldn’t have known the photographs existed. All that I know for sure is that Old Da, my grandmother, took up each newly discovered photograph and studied the emergence of her former self (portrayed in various instants), but there was more to it than that. I’ve come to believe that all the while she was either healing or dying, and I expect we were both waiting for some coda of presentiment.
Let’s go back to the beginning:
Continue reading “Most of the Things He Remembered Took Place Long Before He was Born * by J Bradley Minnick”
An agitated, grey man is staring, confused at a post box. His pet spaniel is stubbornly pulling at its lead, trying to continue its walk, but is being firmly ignored.
Continue reading “Listen to Elliott Smith by Joel Bryant”
Once more I see myself, 11 years old, standing at the corner of the lane, and gazing through the wire-mesh fence. My three companions stand beside me. It’s late summer, early evening, the sky a bold and ever-deepening blue, the day seeming to go on without end. But gathering in the alleys and in the eaves of the houses, around the doorsteps and the feet of the lampposts, shadows are thickening, and already a scent of autumn sharpens the air. And before us, harbouring its own shadows, stands the witch house.
Continue reading “The Witch House by David Calcutt”
Every morning, the Archivist arrived just before the sun burned off the smog. He rode the elevator to the fourth floor of the Memory Tower…the east wing…Department of Significance. The lift doors opened and he unlocked his office with a key labeled VANITY in scuffed gold.
Continue reading “Ecclesiastes by Zark Fekete”
This is my confessional right here. Instead of an old wooden box full of stale air, I sit on a rickety old concrete porch at a rusty metal table with a stained-glass top. I always stay in room 107. The seashell wallpaper makes me want to die, and the air stings with the putrid stench of vomit, but this room has a perfect view of Main Street. This motel is the only part of this hick town that’s worth a damn. I fill my glass ashtray, stained yellow with wear, with cigarette butts as I spill my sins and people watch.
Continue reading “Confessions 1:07 by Kendra Yvette”
On those windswept weekday mornings, asphalt driveway crusted with snow, my father would get up early, put on his secondhand boots and an old coat, and exit through our front door into the blue hour to get the motor running. That fifteen-year-old station wagon would stall if not warmed up properly and might not start again. My father would sometimes have to push it down the hill to get the engine going, my younger brother Bill and I sitting quietly in the back seat, the smell of alcohol already on my father’s breath.
Continue reading “Those Snowy Mornings by Gil Hoy”
Returning from the bathroom for the second time that night, her eyes heavy with sleep, Helen squinted down the dark hallway at the faint white glow coming from the kitchen.
Did I forget to turn off the light? she wondered.
Continue reading “Helen’s Kitchen, 3:30 a.m. by Brian Clark”
On this first day of May, I return to the abandoned farm I once owned and stand in a pasture now overgrown with creeping jenny vines and clumps of brilliant yellow buttercups. Slatey gray clouds collide above me and fold into each other in a birdless sky. A whispering breeze ruffles the tops of the leafing red maple trees. Half a century ago, I found an abandoned narrow-gauge rail track set on hand-hewn locust ties at the back of the farm. I was unaware of their presence until months after the purchase and could only guess their purpose. Shuffling several ideas, I thought they might have been used to bring wheeled carts of fieldstone or firewood to the bottom of the hill. Or, perhaps maple sap to boil in large vats for spring syrup. I enquired at the local historical society and asked my neighbors, but no one had an answer, only more guesses.
Continue reading “The Narrow Gauge by Ed N White”
“She was reckless and calculated. Sharp but dreamy. I think she was lost. Overcome by the world’s endless configurations.” A wave of chills swept over me. Papa was only eloquent when talking about her, so I tried to soak it all in–every syllable, hand gesture, intonation–to paint a picture of her in my head. Papa never even showed me photos, because as he said, “It’s in the past.” I had stored a few features such as angular nose and fair skin in my reservoir until then, but those were surface-level. I had been yearning for characteristics to vitalize the shell of a person in my head.
Continue reading “Remnants of a Silence by Saul Brauns”
literally stories 