Tonight Jack would talk to the ghost. He took to the street. The warm wind is blowing on his face. Splash—pound—Nikes scrape the edge of a curb. Whoa that was close. He lets his mind wander down into his feet. His mind is splash-pound.
Continue reading “Are You Going to Kalamazoo? By Christopher Ananias “
Stuart died in prison.
That is wrong,
Stuart was killed in prison. He was stabbed with a blade between his ribs.
None of these sharpened toothbrushes or pieces of wood or shards of glass, an actual knife. The investigation is ongoing. Some poor dweeb will probably lose their pension over that.
Did Stuart deserve to be murdered? Opinions vary. Some would say he was a bad guy, others would say he did what he did to survive. I suppose it depends on their involvement with him.
Continue reading “Stuart by Hugh Cron – Adult Content.”
Every night the pictures on his lampshade came to life. Rodeo cowboys on galloping stallions threw ropes at the moon.
The boy’s sister once called him “Nutsy-Crackers” because of the strange things he was always seeing. Later she shortened it to just Crackers.
In the middle of the night, he lifted the window (quiet as a thief) climbed out and lowered himself to the ground, praying that the weight of all the coins in his pocket wouldn’t rip through the material. The rest of the house slept.
Continue reading “The Old Fisherman by Joe Ducato”
The Montagues’ and Capulets’ disapproval of an ill-fated union was mirrored by the opprobrium this couple aroused in their Australian families. She was practical and ambitious while he gave imagination a free pass, a kind of poor man’s negative capability. What he wanted to do and what others wanted him to do, were not the same. Feeling hounded, they found work together in the U.S. Always happiest when fleeing responsibility, the sheer glorious relief, he hadn’t faced this fact yet. Without telling any relatives, they left their troubles all behind, or so they thought. When the U.S. didn’t work out, visas cancelled, they crossed the Atlantic.
Continue reading “Death in Damp Bracken by Ian C Smith”
I don’t know why she says what she says but I know she’s crazy and that’s why she keeps a locked chain across the refrigerator door. I pick the lock, same trick every morning. Grab butter. Eggs. Spinach. Tomatoes. Whip up the ingredients. Fry the oozing mess in a pan. Slap the omelet on a plastic plate. The kind of dish that won’t shatter when Mother slams it against the kitchen floor, when her blurred eyes widen at the biting rats that make her panic and scream and clamp down tighter to save the pieces of her scattered life.
Continue reading “Once Bitten by Renee Coloman”
The Introduction
This is my first wrap of 2026. A few weeks away have made me flabby because I am unnaturally lazy. Therefore, like an athlete gone to seed, I will pull on the sweats and attempt to get in shape by writing about small pointless items and work my way into good enough form to intelligently write about this week’s group of stories. All within a few paragraphs. I aim to put a point on pointless, to sharpen its, well, pointy, or at least pointier end, then use it to etch profound wisdom on the corbomite* walls of public inanity. (*Extremely hard and potentially explosive fictional mass invented by Captain James T. Kirk, known associate of Hardcourt Fenton Mudd, a suspected interstellar Jeffrey Epstein of the 23rd Century.)
Continue reading “Week 567- Superfluous Quotation Marks”
The sun rose in the west and coloured the hills. Velvet dark, not quite black… Then burnt umber. Orange-red, limpid platinum. Light gathering.
The hills became distinct; hard, dry mounds the sun reached from, taking hold of the day, making it hard and brittle too.
A party of men came back into the landscape, carrying something wrapped in canvas. They stopped at a freshly dug hole. They laid the canvas bundle down, not too gently, and unwrapped it.
It was a corpse, bones really, hard white chalky bones, dead a fair while. These the men put into the hole, one or two at a time. Then, using shovels and a mattock, they refilled the hole. It looked hard work. The last blows were struck with the mattock by the smallest, oldest man – an Aborigine – and the other men stood about, talking. They were white men.
Continue reading “The Sun Rose in the West by Stephen J Kimber”
Today we present a small tribute to our late friend Tom Sheehan (1928-2025). Tom was a friend of our site since the early days and published an astonishing total of 228 stories with us, by far the highest sum in our eleven year existence. Below you will find links to five of his stories, which will shine a light on the man, who is someone who earned the right to be remembered long and well.
Continue reading “A Tribute to Tom Sheehan”
As his hearing receded into the ethers, Frank’s days filled with numbing despair. He was going deaf, there was no denying it. He’d tried with what inner strength he possessed to stave it off, first by denying it completely like any sane person would do, then by telling himself he was only forty-two, things like this aren’t permanent at this age, of course it will pass.
Continue reading “Hear, Hear by Karl Luntta”
The last time Dave showed up clean, he brought bagels and a joke.
“I had to use the car key to spread the cream cheese,” he said, holding it up like evidence. “Don’t worry. I wiped it on my pants first.”
It was early—gray morning light, barely six—and we sat on the hood of his rusting Civic in the driveway, steam rising from coffee in mismatched mugs. He wore a collared shirt that still had fold creases in it. His hair was damp. He looked awake in a way I hadn’t seen in years.
Continue reading “The Summer He Let Me Be General by Jacob Alexander Cohen”
literally stories 