“Welcome to your new home down on the sixth floor, Mr. Smith…it may just look like a cubicle farm… but it’s really so much more”
“Call me Ted, please…otherwise you’ll make me feel older than I already am.”
“You got it Mr. Smith…I mean Ted…any questions?”
“I’m sure I’ll think of a million…but none right now.”
“Isn’t that always the case.”
I worked for Hart Zehen when I was sixteen, rising at four in the morning to bake bread. It was a great paycheck but my social life, such as it was, suffered. On the positive side, my muscles grew and I learned more from Hart than I might have expected.
Continue reading “Breezy and the Six-Pack Sneaker by Mitchell Toews”
“Whatcha reading?”
“Moby Dick”
“Yeah, I like that one… read his others?”
My expectations and excitement were dampened by the cold coffee and replaced by a creeping realisation of an inevitable disappointment. I kept glancing around as people rushed along the pavement, but it was late – she wasn’t coming. We agreed to meet at the Café at half past six and in my jacket pocket I had an envelope with five hundred Euros in fifties, which I promised for the final payment for her painting. A piece of art that I found hypnotic, it was a scene depicting a battle of female sexuality and a vision of erotic conjecture. I couldn’t help myself, I had to have it. Last night, I paid her a deposit of three hundred Euros.
The pain jerks me up from the dark, spills bright red across my memory, shakes me in time to the artillery shells exploding around us.
##
Voices, mumbling medical jargon, the hum, and clicking of some electronics, antiseptic smell. Bright, bright too bright, I close my eyes tight.
##
My arm. They amputated my left arm below the elbow. Shit. I reach across my body and touch my new left forearm and hand. A prosthetic, but it feels, feels flesh like, like dead meat.
He wakes with a start. The mug is there as always but the message this morning reads like some terrible urban legend.
Your wife is dead it says.
This is weird as I have no inspiration on what to write. I’m hoping that I can write my way into something.
I think all of us here at Literally Stories have done this once or twice when trying to decide on a story. We write down our thoughts, our reasoning and that eventually helps us decide.
So here goes.
Continue reading “Week 88 – Bingo, Sean Connery And Equal Ground”
It was on a summer night that Suki jumped out of that train and into that basement, not a winter one. She remembers the stale cigarette smell, still feels it scratching the back of her throat as she talks about it.
Continue reading “Suki’s Unabridged Journey to The Train of Thought by Sharon Mertins”
Fraternal twin brothers from an exemplary family with a long history of silver spoons, silk stockings, white gloves, and blueblood.
Arthur, the elder by minutes, born to ponder, plan, plot and practice minor deceits for major gains and elaborate scams for minimal returns or momentous losses.
Theo of the laughing lips and smiling eyes, a charming and pliable character and a lubricous seducer of young girls and married women. The younger brother, a slippery wordsmith, giving every word a double or triple meaning. His promises are rarely broken because they are seldom understood.
Continue reading “Atreus (Arthur) and Thyestes (Theo) by Frederick K. Foote”
“Here I am,” says his imperative argument in an undertone, “eighty-seven frigging years old, my knees gone to hell and back, my gut talking about all the beer I’ve sailed my life across, barrels of it talking to me all at once, and this little kid out in front of my house crying his head off. This little kid, this little shaver, one of the ones we did our thing for, our future.
Continue reading “Beau Geste Murtaugh, Veteran of Wars by Tom Sheehan”
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