You need a fierce imagination to get along in Hell, and yet creative thinking is not appreciated here, and change is practically a dirty word to the old coots who run the place.
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Tag: Short Fiction
I Love You More by Harrison Kim
A hollowness opened in me as I entered the house, a space within a space, as if I already sensed what had been lost. In the TV room the stuffed toys lay piled almost to the ceiling, their little heads and tiny eyes facing up. A whirring in my ears began, from the space within a space, “hello?” I said and the sound disappeared. Where were the cats? I paused at at the stairs to the second floor. The steps up seemed staged, like a movie set, “Follow us, the show’s about to begin,” said the hollow in my head. I went to the kitchen instead.
“I will not give in yet,” I thought, though that hollow space signalled over and over again “this is not going to be good.”
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The Softest Hands by Tom Sheehan
World War I was more than 20 years down the drain for most people, but Tommy Heffernan was looking up, with a slight discrediting look on his face, at Tim Kiely the bartender who was talking to or, more to the point, entertaining three drinkers sitting at his bar in Kiely’s Pub. The 2 o’clock sun bounced off Highland Avenue west of Malden Square and tried to come in through the windows shaded from years of accumulated cigarette smoke. Like always, Kiely couldn’t whisper; too much beyond his control, too much audience pull.“I know you boys come all the way from Somerville to hear the stories that grow from here. They come, glory be, without warning, like a knock on the door, trick or treat. For instance, take that lad down there at the other end of the bar, Tommy Heffernan, Colum’s boy. He was scorched in France, really bad. WW I’s green stuff they say. How many years ago’s that? He’s not worked a hard day since he come home from the Kaiser’s playground and might never work a hard day in all his life remaining, though the boy can put away a pint or two with the best of them. This I’ll tell you, though, that this lad, sick or not, for whatever ails him that the gas brought too close, has the softest hands in the whole world. Watch out for the cards in his hands, or a needle and thread.”
He tittered with his half laugh.
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Literally Reruns – Ladybird by Joy Florentine
Joy Florentine has the singular distinction of providing more content to the rerun feature than stories. Still, to date, her first LS story is a wonder of brevity and displays what a flash piece can be, other than short.
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Week 378: A Failed Attempt at Method Writing. And a Successful Saturday Special For Decoration Day
A Failed Attempt at Method Writing
I recently streamed a documentary about the Stanislavski “school of acting”–aka, “The Method.” Like all other artistic endeavors that get over, there’s a bunch of pretentious pontificating associated with The Method (which first got big in America about seventy-five years ago). Once you get past all the verbiage and “pillars,” the Method is mainly investing your own emotions in a character, to “become” the role you are playing. If the character is supposed to be sad, think of the day your hamster died and act accordingly.
To illustrate this the documentary showed clips of “mannered” performances from the 1930’s–those in which stage-like performances were filmed because talking film acting had yet to be invented. These were compared to James Dean and Marlon Brando emoting. To be honest with you I smelled plenty of ham baking in the early Method film performances. Marlon must have really loved that hamster named “STEEELLLLA!!!” But who am I to criticize?
Anyway, it got me thinking about bringing the Method to writing. I experimented with bringing forward a memory of someone I hated and attempted to use the emotion in fiction.
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Fake Teeth Yarn by Kiersen Clerkin
Listen officer, kids die all the time, you know. Trust me. And seventeen isn’t that young. But his blood tasted like mine, that was a surprise. So was his walk; wobble really. Monnie told me he needed a few more, “Get it girl,” that’s what she said, and she said it just like that, like her lips were dripping with sticky spit and she was slurping it back up. I couldn’t, not just then, couldn’t give him what he need.
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Half Broke and Fully In by Josiah Crocker
It didn’t take long before I regretted everything. By then it was too late. I cast a look back at the events that had landed me here in this moment and saw nothing but weeds. Overgrown brush and dry mud cracking under the low winter sun. A life left without watering.
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The Lady has a Following by Tom Sheehan
Gawkers galore, that’s what followed her around, at any corner, on any walk, never mind the beach in a thong outfit nearly disappearing itself. Men of all ages, for their own reasons, guesses, imaginations, rallied to the cause, we all can readily believe. many women, too, who wondered what they themselves could do with her carriage, like seeing is believing from the word “Go,” or “If I had that bod, I’d be a god of the ward.”
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Literally Reruns – Two Characters In a Shantytown by Tom Sheehan
Tom Sheehan’s Two Characters in Shantytown is a high combination of realism, art, despair, the past and that which carries the same into the future. The “cartographer” knows that the story will not come full circle until someone is fed to the river.
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Week 377 – Slothful Penmanship, ‘Infamy, Infamy… They’ve All Got It Infamy’ And A Hotel That Would Do Shit On Trip Advisors Ratings (Or Maybe Not!)
There are some forms of writing that I can’t understand. It is close to being double standards but is not. Maybe if it was in the same story then I could say that.
Well that is as vague as a vague thing on Vague Day.
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