My wife left me for good this time. She euthanized our dog, an action I believed extreme. Quit her job, salted the flowerbeds, grabbed a suitcase it turns out had been packed for months, banged the door behind her. Didn’t even say goodbye to our boys. Just stared at them for a moment, as if ciphering. Me, she’d learned to unsee. Then she scrammed.
“I’ll grab the corn and you grab the potatoes,” Poncho yelled to Julia. Julia was wearing her wedding dress, full train and veil, to save time. She wouldn’t have to change when they returned.
Continue reading “The Potato Grabbers by Robert John Miller”
Anna was not one to look twice at anything or anyone. Everyone looked twice at her though. They couldn’t help it.
Most people don’t bother looking twice at insignificant details, so unsurprisingly she wasn’t particularly popular. People thought Anna was either arrogant, or stupid, or both. But I knew that when she did look twice at something, even more rarely someone, that look could take hours, it could take days. I’ve spent my whole life waiting for her to look at me like that.
It’s time for another Saturday Special but Diane will come to that later.
So not so much nonsense as normal.
Continue reading “Week 221 – Stereotypical Stereotypes, Norman’s Take and A Saturday Special.”
The police showed her his watch. His watch and wallet, and his wedding ring. No matter how much Amy asked to see her husband’s body, they dissuaded her. None of them actually said that he was unrecognisable because of his injuries but, through the shock and horror of it all, the message was eventually received. She picked up the timepiece she had bought a couple of years earlier. The engraving on the back ‘All My Love Stuart – your Amy’ left no room for doubt. His wallet held some money, his bank cards. His driving licence was missing, that was how they had found her.
Rose Dawkins had a terrible secret. It wasn’t something she had done, per say, but it was a secret, a tightly coiled spasm of shame in her chest, a roiling nausea in her stomach. The nausea, in fact, was related to the secret.
I am a ghost. It’s best to get that out in the open, right away, for the benefit of those persons who still support the notion that the dead cannot possibly communicate with the quick. I am neither the walking nor the talking dead; but I am of the writing dead, whom living “literary types” resent for they feel that they have enough competition in their field as it is.
While thumbing through a magazine in my doctor’s office waiting room I came across a picture of a unique contemporary structure, sitting on a hillside by the sea. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, but it sparked memories of my past. At eighty years of age, I must have many? I hope I do—I think—I’m not sure anymore.
“You going to the disco on Friday?”
“I dunno. The last one I went to was really bad. I ended up sitting in the toilets waiting for my mum to get me.”
“Why don’t we go? We can meet up before and go there together. It might be good, and we can leave if it’s not.”
“Eh, all right. You come over to mine, like, an hour before. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Continue reading “There in the Beginning by Caitlin Mclinden”
This story has been removed at the request of the author.
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