Tag: Mystery fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

A Flower for a Lost Grave by Andrew Johnston

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It’s right rare that someone asks me to take them down a road I don’t know – been traveling the backroads of Teyach going on twenty years, and the only ones I don’t know are those little sandy, marshy stretches in the inside. Figures that’s where the lady wanted me to take her. She wasn’t much of a talker, wouldn’t even give me her name. She just sat there in the passenger seat with her eyes fixed on the horizon, those dried up flowers crinkling in her grip. Not that I didn’t try to make conversation – drive mile after mile through silt that’s aching to swallow your tires whole, and you just have to say something, even if it ends up being to yourself.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Strutting Hog by James Hanna

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The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.

                                                                           -Bob Dylan

You are alive to the moment—nothing more. And the moment is not alive to you. The shrunken path you walk, the fogbanks swirling around you, the overgrown forest that slows your stride offer neither cheer nor condolence. Rather they make you feel perishable, as though you have stumbled here in your sleep.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Stillness of a Garden Broken by Marco Etheridge

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Jakob Pichler cherishes his quiet mornings and the green stillness of his garden. His neighbors have gone off to their day jobs, leaving him in peace. The only traffic that passes the garden gate is the occasional old woman walking a tiny dog. Jakob lights his morning cigar, settles back, and lets his mind wander over the infinite possibilities the morning offers.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Lost Notes of a Carpenter’s Song by Tom Sheehan

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His name was Amos Clark, 75 years old if a day, and on one of those days at the little decrepit house where the dowser used to live, this kind-looking man with a beard came carrying all he owned on an A-frame on his back. He set his A-frame on the ground and looked at the small house needing much work on the outside and quickly imagined what the inside of the house looked like. Old muscles, in a twist of memory, began to move under his shirt.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Pool by Elizabeth Appleton

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Steam played across the water’s surface in lazy swirls, nudged by the breeze and stretching away like cigarette smoke.  Behind the hedge, lips pressed to her kneecap’s polished, taut surface, she could taste salt on her skin and, somehow, it mingled with the vision of dragon’s breath steam above luminous water to punch a sudden ache in her throat.  Smelling chlorine, she longed for the sea, for sand that grew cool as she dug her feet deeper, and her father’s hand on her bony, eight-year-old spine, walking her towards a quiet tideline.

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