Tag: relationships

All Stories, General Fiction

Guns by Sean Patrick Campbell

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Let me tell you about a few things that have changed since I was a boy.

Back then, there wasn’t a nice big garden outside our house like there is now, only a heap of muck and a puddle of ooze that we used to surf in on the broken-off door of a cement mixer. We’d wreck around in that puddle what feels like all the time, until Ma came out roaring, I’ll brain yiz if ye cross this door mucked! And off we’d dash into the house for tea, kicking off our battered trainers at the doorstep, beating the muck out of them on the wall and leaving them to crust over in the sun.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Coffee Shop Moment by Kevin Koyce

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Feigned screams and contrived hugs all round.  To look from a distance, you’d be forgiven in thinking that these two girls were sharing an overdue and heartfelt moment, borne out of a lifetime of uninvited separation.  They saw each other yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.  To be specific, with the efficiency and punctuality of German engineers, these two girls meet in this same café at 8am exactly, Monday straight through to Friday.  I’ll need to find a new café.  I’d rather not have to do so, as this cafe is a five-minute walk from where I work.  However, before I embark, I may as well enjoy what could be my last morning here and bask in my current surroundings.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Mutla Ridge by Martin Rosenstock

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He lowered the window an inch and the dry air now flowed past his temple. Though he had arrived in Kuwait five days ago, he was still feeling some jetlag edginess. The road stretched out flat and straight. Nature here had the color of an oatmeal cookie, most houses too. Some were a bit lighter in color, like an oatmeal cookie bleached in the sun. They formed an unbroken line right off the freeway, three-story facades with columns and small, frequently shuttered windows. None of this had been here back then. The country had come some way since Mr Sodamn Insane’s drubbing.

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All Stories, Humour

Sophia’s Shoes by Lisa Gaultier

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Gaultier, LisaSophia only owns one pair of shoes. They’re cute, chubby heels, short enough that she can walk all day long relatively painlessly. They’re black, varnished, the kind that attract no attention whatsoever, so it would take you a while to notice. If you meet her in the summer, and you start hanging out, say you take her on a date to the beach, you might notice then, because you’re wearing flip flops (which isn’t a great idea on a first date, your toes aren’t that nice) and she’s stumbling in the sand, tripping, looking quite stupid. It’s alright though because she almost falls and you catch her in your arms like a princess and you both laugh and blush, you say why don’t you take off your shoes and she does, a little self-consciously. Now you feel a little less stupid about your flip flops even if they keep going flip flop. She tells you about being a vet and her scratch and sniff sticker collection, about how in college she auditioned for The Voice but didn’t get picked. By the end of the day you’ve had so much fun her shoes got lost somewhere and you didn’t realise it. You laugh it off and carry her from the beach to the Uber and from the Uber to her apartment, it’s lovely and romantic, you kiss her goodbye and you feel giddy, excited, you think about it at night, but Sophia has no shoes and she’s wondering how she’ll get to work tomorrow.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Metal Box by Tom Sheehan

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It was so damn petty that not one person in the entire family really knew how or where or when the rift began. It was there just as suddenly as the January thaw, being felt, being known, but still in all somewhat unbelievable. And every one of us, to the last thinking one of us, looked to Grandfather John Templemore to perform the cure, re-forge family ties, focus attention to proper matters. Hadn’t that man accomplished, so many times, the near impossible? The wizened little man with the piercing blue eyes that could accost you or lay balm on your wounds. The white-bearded sage who reveled in poetry and masters of the language. The articulate stone mason, his trowel now put away, who knew Yeats better than the classicists. Saturday evenings, on his wide porch fronting on the town, or deep in the pocket of his kitchen, the fire at amble, he it was who took us spellbound into the magic of joy, crowding us with the language.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Killers by Michelle Wilson

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He was a peaceful baby with a face like Buddha who grew into a sensitive toddler: enormous eyes that took in everything and missed nothing. When he fell he cried, but he always recovered after the usual spell of tears.

What a precious child, we thought. Life will be hard on him.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Everything’s Opposite by Jake K

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Everything is opposite.  That’s what I tell my therapist.  Like a snakebite, the first-aid is not to wash the wound.  You suck the venom out because whatever you swallow, your stomach kills.  Or a concussion.  People say never sleep after a concussion.   But sleep is how your brain recovers.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Sisters from Another Mister by Jill Malleck

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Cheryl picks me up at the corner of Queen and Duke on Saturdays at three. It just makes sense, she said not long after we met. I’m going right by there anyway. It was my bus stop to Freeport, only now I lean out of the Plexiglas shelter and give a little wave, so the bus doesn’t stop. Today he pulls in to drop someone off. My face is red. It’s stupid how ashamed I feel about that dismissive wave.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Ooame by J C Weir

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It was almost dark.  “Ooame desu ne,” said Yumiko Sakuragawa barely audible, as she gently placed the final two bowls amongst the myriad of others on the small table, and took her place on the tatami mat floor opposite her husband.  He sat with his gaze fixed through the open shoji doors, beyond the polished pine veranda, out across the patchwork of rice fields, colourless now in fading light and heavy rain.  Two weeks ago he would have said, “It will be a good crop.”  The temperature and the humidity were favourable.  But he had become uneasy.  It was near the end of tsuyu, the rainy season, but the old man in his ninety one years, had never lived through a downpour of unceasing weight.  Such rain is not sympathetic to rice saplings.  Since morning stories he had heard when he was young, that the old people told, of a deluge that washed away the rice and the villages, had come to him.  He nodded pensively.  “So desu ne.  Ooame desu.”  Yes.  Heavy rain.

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