All Stories, Humour

Case File: Something’s Cooking Under Where? by Frank Morelli

Case File: Something’s Cooking Under Where?

6:58 PM: Dames play games with my head. They drive me to extremes. Run me off to sit in parking lots where the glow of the streetlamps glaze the top of my smoke rings in honey. Some dames disappear in the middle of the night. After twenty years. All because I was born to fight crime. All because I missed a few dinners, an anniversary or two, while out mopping vermin off the streets. Then she gets remarried, moves on with her life like I’m some speck of shit on the toilet rim that never spiraled down. I can only counter with three hundred sixty five canned chili dinners and a new leather duster. And now I’m about to attend my second class in an introduction to cooking course at the community college. I never dreamed there’d be a first, but canned chili only gets you so far before you reach colostomy bag status. So I sit here and wait. Watch the tall brunette, the curvy redhead, and the tattooed blond–my classmates–walk past and wonder which of these fair maidens slipped a favor in the front pocket of my duster last week.  It’s a silly little thing. Pink silk with eyelet trim and a round cutout on one end. Some kind of exotic lingerie apparatus, I imagine. All I know is my pocket was bare at the start of class and later that night I found the kinky surprise. It’s a real mystery. Now the only thought in my mind as I step out of the car is: which of these dames wants to toss my bacon in the skillet?

Continue reading “Case File: Something’s Cooking Under Where? by Frank Morelli”

All Stories, Writing

Week 186 – Writer’s Block, Questions And Ohhhhh Noooooo!!!!

Here we are at Week 187.

I was wondering about writers block. Strangely enough when I thought on this I felt so many memories flooding back. Really strong, vivid memories.

I don’t know why as I’ve never suffered from writers block.

It’ll come to me.

Continue reading “Week 186 – Writer’s Block, Questions And Ohhhhh Noooooo!!!!”

All Stories, General Fiction

Vestigial by Thomas Elson

What can loosen a bond of thirty years?

What can strengthen what can no longer be made strong?

David felt as if he were living inside his recurring fear begun decades earlier inside a chanked and abandoned farm building off a path hidden by overhanging branches surrounded by unproductive land more than fifty yards from a gravel county road when he sat on the wooded floor with the tip of a rifle barrel stuffed in his mouth.

Continue reading “Vestigial by Thomas Elson”

All Stories, Science Fiction

Attending the Mote by Leila Allison

Awesome meets Vicar’s link, travels deep into the Shog’s past, and gleans the stones. Awesome’s activity is represented in Vicar’s mind as a rotating red orb. This is the Third Form symbol for gleaning; when the orb turns blue Awesome will reveal the correct stone in Vicar’s mind. And at that time only will Vicar wield the glorious power death.

Continue reading “Attending the Mote by Leila Allison”

All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Pulling Strings by Tom Sheehan

He had awakened with the itch on his face, from a lone and long hair floating across one eye and one lip, or was it a cob web, a remnant, a silver runner of aerial flight? It definitely was cob-web thin, a filament, a gossamer streamer, light as thought, but not the thought of a spider like the one he had seen eye to eye above his camp bed as a kid. That one hung on such a silken, thin, lone strand that almost wasn’t there. He had always believed he had smashed that black-eyed spider into space with the magazine he had been reading earlier.

Continue reading “Pulling Strings by Tom Sheehan”

All Stories, Latest News

Week 184 – Drinking Alone, Large People And Testicle Mutilation

Well here we are at Week 184, it’s a follow on from 183 but it won’t be half as intelligent!

I’ve written quite a few times about double standards. This irony keeps popping up in life and it gives us a lot of ideas and things to write about.

Continue reading “Week 184 – Drinking Alone, Large People And Testicle Mutilation”

All Stories, General Fiction

A Condition of Absolute Reality by Leila Allison

10:30, Sunday morning, 21 February 1970

-1-

It was one of those little lost lamb spring days that sometimes wander into the dead of a Pacific Northwest winter. The sky was as clear as the devil’s conscience, and the temperature would reach well into the sixties by mid-afternoon. By and by, almost everyone in Charleston would go out to grab a piece of that little lost lamb spring day; for everyone knew it wouldn’t be long until another dreary storm blew in off Philo Bay.

Continue reading “A Condition of Absolute Reality by Leila Allison”

All Stories, General Fiction

Tender Kentucky by Emma Dahlsten

Carrie tilts her head on the back of the vinyl seat on Bus 109 and breathes deeply for the first time in two weeks. The collar of her pressed white uniform is smudged with day old makeup and tears. Her shifts at Memorial Hospital are becoming longer and her patience shorter for the everyday cold and flu vaccinations. She lets her head roll until the tip of her nose touches frosted glass. Her eyes flutter open to see a man in his seventies, draped in loose cotton, stare back at her and wave. The man gives a one-toothed grin and turns his back, shielding whatever sits behind his tall frame. She allows her eyelids to become heavy and falls asleep to the soft lull of the bus’s engine as it trucks through Louisville, Kentucky.

Continue reading “Tender Kentucky by Emma Dahlsten”