SUNDAY 7:00 p.m. … Cynthia closes the door. She earned the privilege. Privacy. The quiet of the dayroom after hours. She turns on the lamp and positions the green upholstered chair, its back to the wall of windows and next to the table with the telephone, completing the ritual she’s performed every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday evening for two months.
Continue reading “Evenings by Joanne Parsons”
It was early Thursday afternoon on Halloween. The sound of an email alert on the other side of his studio apartment made Wally Ray Tucker sit up beside the pale redhead drifting off in his bed. Their extended nooner had given them enough time for a double play, but there would be no hat trick. A lifelong friend who recently added with benefits to their relationship, CC had to get back to her office in Rockville. He nudged her, slid out of bed, and went to his desktop computer. As she washed and dressed in the bathroom, he checked his email and printed out an attachment. Then he read it. And felt his throat constrict.
Continue reading “One Known Drop by Gary Earl Ross”
She comes every June to set us free. Zooms into our neat little neighborhood, somehow boiling a cloud of dust from Grandma’s swept asphalt, brakes squealing like a stunt driver. Grandma’s jaw works but she forces the corners of her mouth up, tries to smile a welcome. The car fishtails in, parks crooked as a middle finger. A brown foot, naked, toenails the color of a freshly skinned knee, heels open the driver’s door and a cardboard cup in a long-fingered hand appears. Immediately upends. A brown waterfall of liquid and half-melted ice splatters the driveway, and as it rivers down to the street I hear it: that wonderful voice. Yuck, flat, Aunt Glory announces, and summer begins.
Continue reading “Dirty Summer by Jennifer Maloney”
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Meanwhile, “inside” a song playing in the fantasy multiverse….
A middle aged man dressed in late 18th century finery stood pensively at a window. It was late in the evening and he was gazing across the wily, windy moors at an ethereal, yet extremely familiar young woman in a fleecy white dress. She was singing (incredibly, accompanied by an invisible orchestra) and steadily progressing toward the window in an artistic dance. He heard his name in her song, “Heathcliff.” (The lyrics also contained some character observations that Heathcliff could have done without.)
Continue reading “Wuthering GOAT by Leila Allison”
The sirens didn’t bother me because I was busy thinking about ending things. On the morning of my 573rd cycle, we rolled out of our threadbare bed with a rumbling belly. Breakfast went down stale and seedy. Military rations were all we’d managed to trade for lately; a half-eaten block of Nutrient-Toast mocked us on the counter.
Continue reading “The Ending of Us, Toxic Love During the Apocalypse by Karley Cisler”
“They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.”
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
There was a good film of the same name based on Betty Smith’s autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which came out shortly after the book was published in 1943. But as it went during the days of the Hays Code of “decency,” much of the book could not be filmed due to content that the movie people figured viewers would be offended by. This involved a wildly over-sexed female character, pedophiles, alcoholism, antisemitism, children pulled from school to work after sixth grade, suicide, racism and persevering only for the sake of survival, for no greater aim than to prolong the misery. Some of those topics (especially the gentle father’s self destruction via the bottle) were addressed passingly while others were let alone.
Continue reading “Auld Author – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith – By Leila”
She moves her arms, her hands, her fingers as if she’s floating in water. From an index finger, a swirl begins. It’s the air. Concentrated. Rotating clockwise. An inch in diameter. It bends all the light and all the colors in the room, yet remains clear.
Continue reading “Swirls by Laura Shell”
The service station was different. While it was busy, it was quiet: a gentle hum of conversation and the odd rattle of cutlery and crockery. Everything was calm. There was no panic, no urgency, no pain.
Continue reading “Hartshead Moor Services – Westbound by Matthew Roy Davey”
Willie Ferguson lay staring at the wee cracks in his bedroom ceiling. Like a lot of people, he hadn’t realised, til he stopped working, that he was missing something. It sure as hell wasn’t the job that he missed: he’d collected his pension with a sigh of relief. It wasn’t family either: his sister, Margaret, living behind a privet hedge down in England, was emphatically a distant relative, and should ever remain so. But Willie knew he really was missing something.
Continue reading “Searching for Unicorns by Michael Bloor”
Ian was a stereotype.
I didn’t really know him but I knew his wife.
The reason I say ‘stereotype’ is that he was a raging alcoholic but unbelievably functional. The usual story here, he worked in the entertainment industry as a lighting man for a theatre and that was a life that had alcohol not just at the end of the day, also throughout. As long as he could shine a spotlight and in these more technical days, programme a system, no one gave a shit.
Continue reading “Ian by Hugh Cron”
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