Tag: relationships

All Stories, General Fiction

The Inescapable Touch of Sunset By Leila Allison

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The atavistic avatar dropped from space:

“I did it only to see the look on our face.”

1

On his way across the short overpass that unofficially connects Corson Street to Torqwamni Hill, Holly glances down at a small house below. It’s an ugly little fist-like rental that had gone up during the Second World War—as had countless others of its kind in Charleston. Like the caw of a crow or a bit of dandelion fluff getting stuck to your cheek, this house exists only in the moment you share with it. Yet nearly thirty years gone by, the same house had once unclenched and gave Holly a touch of honesty; thus it had it had earned in his mind its own small history.

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All Stories, General Fiction

All Saints Day by Tobias Haglund

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”I used to live up there, in the red house. My window was just behind the oak tree and I stared out during the night, over this graveyard. I guess you can imagine how I’d fantasized.  Wandering ghouls and vampires. Back then only this lamppost existed. Not that one or the one after. This lamppost was like a lantern, a lonely lantern in the dark, and during damp autumn nights when it was dead silent I snuck down here and stood next to it. Heard only the flickering sound of the lightbulb. The hedges were walls all around me. And when a wind flew through the branches and when someone visited the graveyard, I hid in the bushes.”

Erica pressed out a mint from the candy tube and ate it. “Time to go?”

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Hermit of Breakheart Woods by Tom Sheehan

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Over millions of years ago Breakheart Woods, between Saugus and Wakefield in Massachusetts, had been bookmarked by boulders and blow-offs and earthly cataclysm, and to this day, somewhere in its innards from those first struggles of granite and earth fire, from violent fractures and upheavals to be known again only at the end of it all, was a cave, a cave as dark as a heart, a cave that once, I believed, pulsed with a heart. Now we were searching for that cave, in earnest.

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All Stories, Romance

Meeting of Minds by Raymond Hopkins

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People have asked just how it was that Sandra and me got together in the first place. I mean, it seems a bit unlikely, if you know what I mean. After all, there’s Sandra, small, educated, a right stunner that makes men choke on their beers at first sight, a snappy dresser that causes men’s eyes to wander rapidly southwards in the hope of even better stuff below, and a helpless looking nature which she uses to good effect when she wants somebody to do something for her. Not that she needs it, as she is quite capable of looking after herself whenever there is nobody else around.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Feather Cap By Paul Handley

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Ry thought his heart was shattered beyond repair.  Five weeks before he was leaving for college his girlfriend of fourteen months broke up with him to date some creep she met at an under ages show.  Ry’s uncle, Lee was visiting from Meridian, Louisiana.  Ry never understood why, but the family never went to visit him.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Hello, Tom. by J. Edward Kruft

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We were all friends once. The three of us. Till she caught the two of us together. And when I mean to say together, I mean together not just in the biblical sense, which was true enough, but together as in in love. That was our big secret of course, and when Rose found out, understandably she wasn’t having any of it. I suspect she’d always known Tommy and I were jerking around together behind her back, which I don’t think she minded as Tom says she never was one for sex too much anyway and she probably figured us doing what we did took some of the pressure off her. Maybe. But the look she got when I finally had it out with her that day over at the park, on that little wooden bridge that crossed the little creek that more than half the year was dry, and I told her outright, and she pushed me off that bridge and said she’d see about that. That day, the creek wasn’t dry.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

So, Where Are You Now by Jeffrey L Higgs

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The distance between the house and the cliff isn’t long, nor is it short.  The distance is the distance. Years ago flowers bloomed here in ever increasing numbers, filling the landscape.  Their lithe youthful necks stretched upwards basking in the warmth of the sun’s rays.  But no more.  Time’s passage stole the flowers beauty and they began a slow, steady decline.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

A Hundred-year-old Man By Leila Allison

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Sighs, echoing laughter, and half-remembered faces that belong to all-forgotten names gather in the pooling shadows of Corson Street; the ghosts gaze at Holly More as he walks alone in search of a hundred-year-old man. No matter how much money Charleston pours into the “revitalization” of the Corson district, its ghosts remain stubborn and continue to luxuriate in the riches of the poverty into which they had been born, thus lived, and brought home from their graves.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Forgotten Tomorrows by Wylie Strout

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I wondered where the wonder went.  Another bottle of wine, another moment gone, carelessly misplaced along with the forgotten tomorrows.  I picked at the bandage above my eye.

I thought of the millions of self-help books I had read.

“Allow yourself to go to a different place, a better place, in times of difficulties.”

“Embrace your inner child.”

“Breathe.”

“Be kind to yourself.”

“Stay positive.”

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All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

The Back Side of Sight by Tom Sheehan

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In the bedroom, upstairs, front corner, blind amid the toss of linens he had known intimately for seven long years, in touch with passing traffic and summer conversations when the windows were open, Jack Derrick lay in the middle of sound, in the middle of darkness. His left leg, or most of it, set upon by diabetes and the perfection of the surgeon, was elsewhere; his right hand was stained by nicotine, the index finger and close companion yellowed as shoe leather, and those fingernails bore fragments of that same deep stain. Gray, thin hair, most of it about his ears except for one thatch above his forehead as if an odd bird, at length, would roost there, drooped like fallen stalk. The stubble of his beard sprouted as off-white as an old field of corn waiting the last reaper.

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