Tag: relationships

All Stories, Fantasy

The Dancing Bear by Jack Paton

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Miss Margaret McTuckleberry is incredibly tall, incredibly thin, and incredibly strong. Strong enough that, if she wanted, she could pick up a troublesome visitor to her pub by the scruff of his neck and throw him out of the front door from several paces, sending him sailing straight over the porch and onto the gravel just outside “The Dancing Bear”, perhaps the toughest and most notorious pub of all the pubs in perhaps one of the toughest and most notorious counties of the entire United Kingdom, the county of Kent.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Beneath Your Skin by Rose Banks

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You weren’t yourself, that night.

Usually, when you got back late, you went straight to bed. I’d wait for ten minutes or so, until you’d finished clattering about up there, then creep up the stairs and slip into bed beside you. And then lie awake, staring at the ceiling. Listening to the clock. Tick. Tock. Trying not to wonder where you’d been, and with whom, and what you might’ve got up to.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Distraction by Sharon Hajj

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Distraction by Sharon HajjIn the morning, I like to bury my dreams under the pillow so I can immediately check my to-do list:

  1. Go to store for soy milk, oatmeal, and dog food
  2. Buy paint and stencils for bookshelf
  3. Make an appointment for a mammogram
  4. Call and wish Mom happy birthday
  5. Dump your belongings in the trash

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All Stories, General Fiction

Winter Solstice by Jon Beight

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I sit in silence amid the scattered, worthless rubble of what were the symbols of your life’s bright flashes and triumphs that you hold so dear. These shattered remains lay in tribute to unbridled, hate-filled rage, spawned from the union of betrayal and deceit.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Stripped by Hugh Cron

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Jane couldn’t keep her clothes on.

She’d been arrested a few times on public decency charges but when the authorities witnessed her prison togs repelling themselves from her, the charges were dropped.

She was referred to experts on everything but there were no experts on spontaneous clothing removal by the clothing itself.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Lost Notes of a Carpenter’s Song by Tom Sheehan

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His name was Amos Clark, 75 years old if a day, and on one of those days at the little decrepit house where the dowser used to live, this kind-looking man with a beard came carrying all he owned on an A-frame on his back. He set his A-frame on the ground and looked at the small house needing much work on the outside and quickly imagined what the inside of the house looked like. Old muscles, in a twist of memory, began to move under his shirt.

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All Stories, General Fiction

A Poet’s Conversation by Tom Sheehan

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This conversation is with old red wine that brings you, brother, out of surging daylight to fill the doorway like a mailman with a bad letter or telegram. Specters leap out of this old mixture, the blood of grape, the fine chalk it paints teeth with, a whole day of sunlight collared in a tumbler, a red sunset too far away to tell where. You went off to that sunset once, around the corner of the barn tipping toward its knees and Sam Parker’s garden paving the ripe earth all way to the Lovett house sitting white as a pepper-mint down the lane.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Ghost Hats by Marco Etheridge

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Grace Walsh stood on the platform of the train station, imagining the dead. The tracks and platforms of the Bahnhof were cut into a hillside. On the far side of the tracks, the earth was held back by a concrete wall fronted with rough concrete pillars. The wall was the height of two Irish women, more or less. A graveyard crowded the brink of the wall, almost spilling over onto the tracks below. Above the concrete edge, Grace could see headstones adorned with bright splotches of flowers. The Viennese tended their dead well. At least you could say that much for them.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Old Fisherman by Jerry Guarino 

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Tony carefully looked over his choices.  Should I go with live bait or a lure?  The sky is clear today.  No cloud cover means the fish will be able to see me casting.  A shiny yellow plunker will catch the sunlight and attract them, but a live minnow will attract their smell.  All right, I’ll start with the plunker.  Continue reading “The Old Fisherman by Jerry Guarino “ →