I was looking out the front window, watching the snow fall, waiting for the mailman to come with my disability check. Jesus, the snow is sticking now, and my tires are bald. I needed to deposit that check today. I was out of food, running low on whiskey, and I still owed Mrs. Schmidt half the rent for this little shithole of a duplex. Fuck my life. Then, I got the call.
Continue reading “Alterations by JD Clapp”
“Follow me,” a broad-shouldered woman wearing a name tag that said Deborah told Jade.
Jade followed her through a glass door, past a man working a register, and down a hall lined with half-open boxes.
Continue reading “Hannibal, Missouri by: Amber Bell”
“Killing a snake is the same as having a snake”
– Joan Didion
A large, clay and plaster likeness of Saint Patrick, holding a crook and pointing at writhing snakes on the statue’s base, dominated the right side of our church. He was wheeled in face up on a donkey-cart, wenched upright by strong men when St. Patrick’s Church on Ninety-Fifth Street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was built in 1847. “Black Forty-Seven” my dad called it.
Continue reading “Snakes in The Garden by Gerald Coleman”
Ginny was raised on violin lessons and minimal parental supervision. The combination very nearly landed her in a windowless room in the detention center in Brooklyn, and if Callum hadn’t gotten away with the dogs just when he did, even his street smarts might not have saved her.
The day Didi realised her husband had curated a nice little world of half-naked digital women for himself, it was almost time for her to attend her weekly lunch with her girlfriends. She was unable to progress towards the front gate. Instead, she stared at her reflection on the surface of their garden pond, built by him and for ten years, her delusional confirmation he was happy. She looked at her liquid face and wondered what she’d done wrong.
Continue reading “What Matters by Shivani Sivagurunathan “
A short story by T.C. Barrera
from the on-going series yet-to-find-a-home,“Counting the Birds”
“Eli… Listen… Long as the vents blow cold and the wine stays colder, these motherfuckers don’t give a fuck, alright? How much are ya thinkin’?”
“You are not here to become a man, because to become a man you must first learn the rules of love,” Vikram Paya, the best of us, began on the first day of the Dhoon School Weekly Newspaper class. “No, my old sons of Bombay, my riotous banchods of Delhi, you fish-eating Bengalis, and the rest of you celestial bodies, suburbanites, the few villagers—you are here to go to better places, because, after all, The Dhoon School is but a waiting-place for Cambridge, for Oxford… for the lucky few of you—here, you will not learn to be great men but exemplary boys…”
Continue reading “The Rules of Love by Arjun Shah”
Tom Mitchell had lived alone for longer than he could remember. His wife, Lily, had passed away a decade ago, and their children had long since moved away, caught in lives of their own. The house, once filled with laughter and warmth, now echoed with a quiet, unrelenting stillness. Even the walls seemed to breathe differently, like they were holding their breath, waiting for something – or someone.
Continue reading “Shadow by T H White”
“No one’s going to be looking,” he snapped.
He heard her sigh but didn’t turn to look. After a moment, the sound of her struggling up the embankment and the crashing of undergrowth came to him as she made her way into the bushes that covered the upper slopes.
Continue reading “Breakdown by Matthew Roy Davey”
Evelyn stared out the kitchen window willing herself to ignore the breathing coming from the living room. It was a wet labored breathing. She wiped the last dish and set it in the rack. Another breath was pulled from the lungs in the other room.
Continue reading “The Breather by Rebecca Petty”
literally stories 