He heaved and cried uncontrollably.
Snot bubbles.
His mom told him not to be unhappy as he buried his face in the desk while lightly holding her wrist.
“Think of the good times you just had and will have in the future —and you can always write something about it”
He always got emotional when someone he loved left him.
Continue reading “Men without Women by Adam Kluger”
She wants to meet on Friday at a restaurant.
We have to talk.
About what I wonder.
Could it be that after all these years she has had enough?
Enough of buying groceries and cooking you delicious meals
Enough of walking in the park
Continue reading “A Final Thing by Adam Kluger “
We went to a local theater production of Little Shop of Horrors. The talking plant looked like a guy in a beanbag, and the singing was off-key. I didn’t mind because I was with you. After the show, you mistook shasta daisies vs. ox-eye daisies at the restaurant. I chuckled and suggested you should learn your flowers — a modest proposal.
Continue reading “Say It With Flowers by David Henson”
Alan stepped out of the shower, singing that he wasn’t going to work on Maggie’s farm no more. He threw on some clothes and headed off to the baker’s for a couple of Aberdeen Rolls (‘rowies’), well-fired. En route, he picked up a copy of the Saturday edition of the Press & Journal (‘Start the Day with the P&J’).
Continue reading “Keeper of the Snowy Owls? by Michael Bloor”
My son Jamie brought me to all my treatments at the hospital in Danvers, a 7-minute drive for him as he says for more than three years (I am loaded with many ailments of various kinds) and I always noticed a lady who brought her father for his appointments, but dressed as though she was going to a ball, a fancy dress, and a marvelous pair of legs that could dance her across Broadway in her day, being the knockout she was, and carried yet a boatload of her beauty into a few years of time.
Continue reading “Just for Now by Tom Sheehan”
Charlie felt her stomach sink to her toes as she pressed her trembling finger against the weathered doorbell. It was 2 a.m. His shades were drawn. Maybe he was asleep. Please, God, let him be asleep. She clutched his novel to her chest, smothering the cover reading ‘Melting Hearts’. Such a stupid, sappy title for a Molotov cocktail. She hadn’t even remembered to put on shoes when she grabbed her keys and fled. The fire of rage roaring in her chest during the drive over had smoldered into ash the moment she’d unbuckled her seatbelt. Now, she cowered barefoot on his shadowed stoop, gasping as the hall light flicked to life and the door before her creaked open.
“Charlotte?”
Continue reading “A Familiar Conviction by Maiah Jezak”
Ray Dragon’s writing career had fallen hard after his first book, Loving Them Madly, in which Ray detailed the gruesome murder investigation of three young women near the Oberlin College campus with a vivid imagination; now, he was running dry. He wrote a series of travel articles for This Our World, in which he only traveled with a mouse and Google, but the magazine failed before he got a check.
Continue reading “Out There by Ed N. White”
Cass had been on the Cold Case Time Travel squad eight years when I replaced her partner, Hoss. We’d done things differently in Present-Day Homicide so I shut up and listened. Cass was a pro, by the book mostly–she could even fix the damn machine! And since no other towns could afford the traveler fees, we’d be in ’60s Harlem one day and ’30s Greenwich the next. I’m guessing they brought me in for the Harlem cases. Brothers don’t tend to open up to two pale folks from the future. Of course, they weren’t supposed to know we were from the future, but occasionally our Era Lingo implants malfunctioned.
Continue reading “Baby Blues by Jack Powers”
A ring of strawberry lipstick circles the smoothed edge of the blunt as she passes it to me, and I try, I really do, not to imagine what it would be like to kiss her—to taste the berry directly from her lips instead of getting my hit secondhand from this pineapple flavored cigarillo wrapper.
I’m unsuccessful.
Continue reading “Acid Drop by Samantha Barrow”
It was the second day of our trip to Madrid. We were in a restaurant not far from Plaza Mayor with the massive stone walls whispering the secrets they knew, trying to eavesdrop on ours. We had almost finished the bottle of Cava, I was a little dizzy from the alcohol and too high on you, my friend. You watched me with those magnet eyes of yours, a wicked smile played on your lips, and I was asking myself if you’re even real.
Continue reading “We Were Everything and Nothing by Lydia Baham”
literally stories 