“Where shall we go tonight?” Euan caresses my cheek with the back of his hand then brushes a stray braid away from my face. He is propped on his elbow next to me in the classic post-coital pose. I suppose he thinks he looks suave, but he doesn’t. He just reminds me of a kid trying to pull off a look that’s too big for him.
Kathy’s Dad passed away in his own house, his last rattling breaths aided by the morphine his daughter poured down his ancient mouth. He lived alone in the old place for decades. Germs terrified him. He secured the windows with plastic. The air inside turned stale and rancid. He roamed the neighborhood at night, searching for cans and bottles. He filled the house with old lawnmowers, pieces of scrap metal, newspapers piled to the ceiling. Kathy inherited this rotting, junk filled dwelling. Over the next year, she and her husband Neil renovated. All the plumbing and electric wiring renewed, a new shingle roof, restored walls and floors. The father’s piles of tools and newspapers, old tiles and bottles all recycled, usurped by Kathy’s stuffed toys and hangers full of vintage and antique clothing, her hundreds of art books and coffee table volumes about Hollywood stars, her garbage bags and boxes packed with blankets.
Duncan Coffey felt a mild agitation. At first, he marked the subtle change as curiosity and then, making small measurements, corrected the assessment. A retired rewrite man for The Saxon Sentinel, he was frightfully aware that his capacity for surprise had long fled him. Odd moments told him he might have another person sharing his skin. This was one of those odd contemplations now working on him. His old fishing pal Ed LeBlanc used to say he had bitten off more than he could chew in this life, dwelling too often on little things, getting hung up in details, losing the big picture. “Duncan,” he offered a few times, “You could choke on a blade of grass and lose the whole thing.” He’d never explained what the whole thing was, but Coffey got the meaning.
Gods in heaven determined the fate of humans.
So, the gods decided that I be ugly. And when they inflicted punishment they went for the harshest, and made my bride odious too.
Continue reading “A Few Ugly Humans by Hareendran Kallinkeel”
Do I love?
Of course, Ship can love.
I mean, who the fuck are you to ask?
Readers who have been with us from the early days will remember this author. One of our first – and we still miss her. Leila has found a piece by June, this is what she said:
Continue reading “Literally Reruns – Talk to Me by June Griffin”
Here we are at Week 263.
I’ve been wanting to do a feature on this subject for a very long time but every time I tried to write the post it sounded like a Chronic Tourette’s Sufferers Convention.
8 am, Wednesday, and Chris waited for his mother. If only there was some way to stop her. Just because she had borne him nine long months, gotten up to him in the middle of the night in the years directly after, suffered his tantrums in the years after that, sent him off to school with a fresh packed lunch each and every day, saw to him as a teenager with his sullen silences and raging hormones, and helped him get a job and out into the world, she thought she could still intrude.
Continue reading “When People do Bad Things by James Hannan”
After a year of high adventure, its time for one young woman to return home.
And so, it had come to this… nothing would ever take him from his steely promise to extract, once and for all, total redemption from his old pal and teammate, Greg Lumbada, payment of the highest order, Amontillado on the instant air. So be it.
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