Tag: Short Fiction

All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Absolutely, Positively, Have to Be There Overnight by Todd Mercer

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Commotion from a rumble strip woke me up when the car I was in drifted from the road. The Kid Who Thinks He’s Grown was driving. We both snapped to alertness, there outside Carbondale. It was after 4 a.m., and we had a dawn appointment in Branson, Missouri.

I tried to steal another hour’s sleep, since the Kid always tells me he’s got things under control. But after working all day and now driving through the night, he must’ve needed to talk to stay with it. He asked, “Why are we even out here handling this?” He truly didn’t know, but he never needed a special reason to do his job well. He always seemed glad to be included.

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All Stories, General Fiction

In A Place Far Away by Dianne Willems

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I was looking for a place to die; somebody recommended Brooklyn.

 Man that’s a good first sentence, John reveled. Maybe the best. Definitely one of the few that had stuck by him all these years, resting in his subconscious. Although I can still recall by heart, he thought, the following: I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Chirstian because of Owen Meany.

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General Fiction, All Stories

Ministry of Other People’s Sons by Susmita Mukherjee

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Every respectable nation has a Ministry of Something Important. The Republic of Grand Intentions had a Ministry of Agriculture, although its farmers regularly demonstrated outside it with empty sacks; a Ministry of Labour, where very few people had ever laboured; a Ministry of Health, which advised citizens to remain healthy while hospitals ran short of beds; and, naturally, a Ministry of Peace, housed in the largest government building in the capital and consulted mainly on ceremonial occasions. It also had a Department of Necessary Sacrifices, an institution so indispensable that nobody could remember when it had been established. Its official responsibility was to explain why sons had been sent to distant borders, daughters were working in factories producing military supplies, villages had been reduced to rubble, and bread had become a luxury. Above the entrance, in letters of gold, was the departmental motto: YOUR SUFFERING IS PROOF OF YOUR PATRIOTISM.

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auld author, Short Fiction

Auld Author – The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson – An essay by Leila

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Bill Bryson has published a vast amount of books and might be as rich as a writer can get save for Stephen King, but I won’t hold it against him. I do not know if he has ever published fiction but I do enjoy his well written non-fiction. especially a book he wrote about Australia and today’s subject: The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got to Be That Way.

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All Stories, Humour

The Bread Roll That Nearly Brought Down A Plane by James Blindell

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The Flight

The flight in question was operated by FunFly, Europe’s largest screw-them-with-hidden-costs-for-which-they-did-not-originally-budget airline.  It had a long, proud history of disappointing already pessimistic customers, exploiting staff, fighting the good fight against governmental consumer rights protection, and facilitating the ruin of poorly-led destinations across the Mediterranean.  FunFly’s owner, Charles Wilson-Wright, who could be generously described as a proper bastard, was an ageing tax exile whose favourite hobby involved fanning the flames of anti-immigrant/asylum-seekers/people-not-like-us sentiment in the country he had left for dust.  This particular flight, FF738 Manchester to Alicante 10.45, was legendary amongst flight crews.  Union recommended training for the flight consisted of a month in the Middle East conducting peace negotiations, a season working on the bar at any of England ‘s football clubs, and a less-lethal restraint training course with the Metropolitan Police.  FunFly currently offered a day course on upselling perfume and tobacco. Two of the three scheduled flight attendants for the flight had pulled a sicky and so two reserves had come from the emergency pool, having been beaten almost to a pulp in the staff selection battle royale. The third FunFly enforcer for the day was

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All Stories, General Fiction

Bolt by James W. Morris

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Lightning strikes kill about two thousand people per year. The bolt itself is only the width of your thumb, yet it carries 100 million volts of electricity, and runs hot—around 54,000 degrees, which, by the way, is five times greater than the temperature of the sun.

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All Stories, Humour, Short Fiction

meet the lilligits by Leila Allison

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There are no insects in Saragun Springs. Strangely, it is not a prohibition enacted by the realm but it is a choice made by the bugs themselves. Insects and Spiders do not speak, of course, but whenever the tiniest mite faces the possibility of crossover, the little bogey demurs and selects to remain at home–so we figure it is at least an instinctive move. Consider it infesting the Devil you know sort of thing. I’m willing to do that because the possibility that our realm fails to meet a Maggot’s standard is a vexation I will do without.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Story of Jimmy Gray by Gerry Coleman

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“What the people believe is true.”
—Nanabush, Son of the West Wind, Grandson of the Moon

I was a story I told myself.

My body required mechanical help with inputs and outputs, causes and effects—the purpose of one function needed to be fitted to the function of a higher purpose, from swerve of nerve to bend of bone, synapse to neuron across the junctions electric.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, Short Fiction

Week 607: Behold The Anti Hamlet

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It has been long believed (and I think correctly) that Hamlet is the acme of roles for actors (nowadays the ladies are giving the melancholy one a go themselves). Actually that doesn’t matter much, because the character is so complicated that gender is secondary, and the shape of the production can be re-configured easily enough. Of course this is not a status of acclimation, many feel that Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock is the top of the mountain (I like Will’s Falstaff best myself)–so, far be it from me to put up too much of a fight against that idea. Yet let us go with Hamlet because I have arrived at the character I consider to be as far away from Hamlet in gravitas as Kim Jong Un is from the Nobel Peace Prize. The Anti-Hamlet. Who is no one other than James Robert Walton–better known (or unknown) as “Jim Bob” of The Waltons.

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Crime/Mystery/Thriller, Short Fiction

A Courier with Morals by D. S. Stewart

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Rasmus Dreyer eyes the edge of the macadam, screening the underbrush, the rows of apple trees, the delectable fruit that deer like to forage. It’s from the roadsides where the deer come, darting from the shadows in a shattering second, frozen by fear, leaping through the windshield onto the lap of the driver. The high beam shovels away the darkness, the road spanning over rolling hills, upstate, its post-carded portraits of redwood farmhouses, and white picket fences. Only Pleiades and Saturn provide company and those colliding black holes scientists are constantly clamoring about, making him feel small, insignificant.

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