“But why, Gran, why does everybody have to die?” He was only eight and it wasn’t like the idea was news to him. But it wasn’t something he thought much about until it got personal.
She only shrugged, advanced one of her checker pieces. “Pay attention.”
Continue reading “Gameday with Gran by Shawn Nocher”
She said she saw angels, and repeated it, so I did too, but I still haven’t grasped what it means.
I climb onto my bed, above the covers, and I gaze at the ceiling, yearning to comprehend it. This gray and dirty ceiling has hovered my whole life, floating above my bed. Built before I arrived, still standing after I’ve gone. Untouched, unchanged. Can I imagine a life without its ever-presence?
Continue reading “The Ceiling by Charlie Rogers”
Dad locked my sister Nan and me in the bathroom when he had girlfriends over. This was always late at night, after his shift at Bavo’s Bar. He thought Mother would have taken us when she left. I was twelve and Nan fifteen.
Continue reading “Bathroom Throne by Yashar Seyedbagheri”
Huddled in the dark, the three children shook at the sight of the black horse. It’s head, bashed in from madness, left a bloody smear along the splintered barn wall. It’s body was too still on the dusty floor. For Walter, the blond-haired boy of four, it was just a rigid, mountainous shadow. It frightened him to watch the beast, the devil and his illness finally take hold of the animal. The silence that followed that was unbearable, unclear. Walter felt that something was very wrong but his innocence would not allow him to understand the stillness of the mare. As his unease grew, consuming his little heart, he buried his head into his older sister’s arms for relief.
Continue reading “George and the Horse by Jazeen Hollings”
My doctor says, “Zeeb, my old friend, your remaining days can be numbered in weeks, and not more than four. Then your Black ass is out the door forevermore.”
Continue reading “Goodbye by Frederick K Foote”
The night they announce the divorce, my older sister Nan takes me for ice cream. I’m fourteen, she’s seventeen.
Nan insists I get two scoops. Mint-chocolate chip.
Nan has cookies-and-cream.
“Everything should be a little sweeter,” she says.
“I guess,” I say, hunched over the bowl. “You wonder what would happen if things were too sweet, right?”
Nan smiles, a smile as crumpled as a dollar bill. She has circles under her hazel eyes and I want to tell her something positive. I don’t know what.
Continue reading “More Ice Cream by Yash Seyedbagheri”
The morning sun assaulted every nerve ending in my shattered brain and that same vicious sun illuminated the headline that hovered before my bleary eyes: Bigfoot’s Miraculous Aqua-Baby Discovered. I tried to focus, then I tried to blink it all away. Miserable failure was the result on both counts. I did not conjure clarity, nor did the strange bedroom disappear. I was forced to ask myself that most critical question. Where the fuck was I?
Continue reading “When the Tabloids Ate My Best Friend by Marco Etheridge”
It was the moment of pure silence before we would set the forest on its ear with the roar of our chain saws. The deep woods that morning glistened with long tracts of snowy and scary silence, now and then broken by the creaking of a frozen limb swearing it would fall to earth. At best that fall would be a minor distortion, a minor distraction. Yet again, that creak sounded like a baby in the night, or a wailing or a keening, or, at an odder moment, like a voice given to what has no voice. At attention we stood, my friend Eddie LeBlanc and I, some twenty yards apart, some huge oaks apart, their ugly and monstrous arms clawing at early daylight.
Continue reading “It’s All in the Maul by Tom Sheehan”
The last words she ever said.
I just wanted to know what they were. Call it a compulsion, a thought that nagged at me like a hot plate of my wife’s lasagna when I’d spent the day not eating.
My aunt had passed away. She was the last remnant of my father’s side of the family. My dad died of cancer at the age of 47 when I was eleven. My aunt had just died at the age of 86 (my dad would have been 85), and I really wanted to know the last thing she said.
“You sure make stupid decisions.” she said.
Taylor blinked, maybe even winced a little, but otherwise showed little sign that he had heard her, let alone taken her seriously. It wasn’t that he was deaf or so lacking in ego that he could withstand the insult. No, he was simply too busy to bother, too desperate to rescue himself (and her) from the results of this latest stupid decision, all too aware that far too many stupid decisions had been made and the chickens, as they say, were really and truly coming home to roost.
Continue reading “Stupid Decisions by Wayne Yetman”
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