All Stories, General Fiction

A Left-Handed Woman by Ann Harper Reed

Frank noticed the couple when the Antique Collective shop doorbell clanged. Even to this day, he expected to see his wife June pass through that door as the bell reverberated. The couple came inside. She a bit mousy and dressed with some expense to look like she shopped at thrift stores; he was in expensive clothes meant to look expensive with a smartphone glued to his ear. They were the kind of patrons the collective needed to survive. They were the kind to admire his craftsmanship, while still needing furniture and having the revenue to purchase.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Music of Lana Jardine by Harrison Kim

Lana Jardine always told me she’d be taken in the rapture, when God would gather up true Christians just before the apocalypse.  She accepted Jesus as her Lord and Saviour, so she’d never burn in hell.  “I confessed my sins,” she said.  “And he saved me.”

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All Stories, Fantasy, Short Fiction

Small God Syndrome by Leila Allison

Part One

Gwen Cooper, the volunteer Weekend Caretaker at New Town Cemetery, was raking leaves one fine autumnal Saturday morn’, singing a groovy song first heard on The Brady Bunch called Sunshine Day:

“I just can’t stay inside all day

I gotta get out, get me some of those rays

Everybody’s smilin’ (sunshine day!)

Everybody’s laughin’ (sunshine day!)”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Daddy by Naga Vydyanathan

“Kausalya Supraja Rama Purva Sandhya Pravarthathe …” – the mobile phone whirred to life, blaring the famous verses of Guru Vishwamitra, scaring the wits out of the guileless night. Murthy shifted in his bed, extending an arm out to silence the phone. It was 4:30 am, a.m. brahma muhurtham, the time deemed ideal for meditation and yoga by the Hindu scriptures. In all of his sixty plus years, he had, without fail, adhered to the strict regimen of starting his day at the brahma muhurtham. However, the last few months were only making him increasingly aware of his growing age. What was once a disciplined routine, now required all his resolve to keep its tag.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Seeds by Peter O’Connor

Her nose took the impact, it canted left and snapped perfectly at the bridge. Her mascaraed eyes watered until her vision became a myopic smudge. She staggered, tripping on the raised step between lounge and diner. (A design feature she always hated but he insisted on.) ‘It will define the individual spaces’, he’d said. Another blow staggered her.  She remembered her Interior Design professor screaming ‘NEVER BREAK THE FUCKING SPACE,’ as he came in, on, or often just around her slut of a best-friend flatmate. That exalted mantra had stuck, her friendship hadn’t. Her fingers skittered along the edge of the kitchen top, too cold, too polished, nothing to cling to, to hold, to grasp. Her father’s words came to her, ‘you can’t trust stainless steel,’ he’d say, ‘unnatural stuff, use wood, wood has an inherent trust, copper an earned one, stone, who the hell uses stone nowadays?’ He always chuckled at himself when he said that.  He also warned her. “Look for the comfortable, the homely, ‘hugge,’ as the Dutch say. No cold marble, no hard granite, no slippery steel and definitely no injection moulded impervious shiny plastic. An interior, my gorgeous girl, is a mirror of soul.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Young Man Who Said He’d Never Eat Chocolate Again by Tom Sheehan

Today it all came back. Once again, on another brilliant dawning, the Western Yetness still calling me, I woke with a toothache. A stupendous one! In half an hour, despite quick brushing, the stimulator poked here and there, gargling, all proving useless, the ache remained in force. It was, without a doubt, the chocolate again, or the mere thought of chocolate. I knew I was weak to most any candy, and to chocolate in particular, right from the beginning.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Generative/ Iterative/Evaluative by J. Bradley Minnick 

These are the last days and unfinished pages of a dissertation on Pragmatics and Features of Sex, 1998—Beth says—expected by her committee members in two weeks, or at-most, a month. Her defense is in three weeks, but she doesn’t think she’ll finish. She says she’d happily quit and work in a bank or in a mall selling perfume behind shiny counters—spritzing the stuff on eligible men who will buy it from her with hopes of getting laid. She says even if she quits, she will continue her work, untethered and uncriticized and make her own study of the language of love, its features through natural conversations, speech acts, implicatures, while managing the flow of reference and the theories of the mind. Then, Beth pauses. But it’s still too big, she says. It’s always too big.

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All Stories, Fantasy, Science Fiction

The Eternal Bob by Lewis Braham

Bob the same backwards and forwards existed. In every universe in an upholstered mustard colored armchair watching the Eagles who were no goddamn good and why did they ever let that guy Michael Vick be their quarterback? In the Farrago quadrant, 34th century, he was known as the constant and studied in advanced quantum mechanics classes, but was unknown to lesser beings in our 21st.

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