Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..
My alarm clock rings. It wakes me up. I sit up in bed, and run my fingers through my hair. I have such pretty hair. Everyone thinks so. They’re all so jealous of it, they never tell me how much they like my hair, but I can tell. I can see it in their eyes.
The morning, at the outset, had no promise of being ecstatic, though Professor Clifton Agnuus put the rock into his briefcase. Every time out it was about eight pounds of drama for him, at least at the start of term, and now off on a new year. A storyteller he should have been, he argued, a yarn spinner, the kind of a writer that Professor Albie Short, over in A&S, his one good buddy, drooled over, and had been doing so for almost forty years. Albie was apt to open a conversation by saying something like, “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” There was a time Albie would likely answer a telephone call the same way, or with Bartlesby the Scrivener’s opening remark, “I AM a rather elderly man,” but all that had sloughed off when he was burned by some wise-ass responses. For reasons best known by them, he and Albie liked each other. If anything, Agnuus might say Albie was the coin’s other side.
I need to thank Tom Sheehan for my inspiration this week. I don’t know if anyone noticed but we published a relevant story on the holiday of its relevance, if you see what I mean. We don’t normally do this. We published an old friend of ours near Christmas on our first year (Hope you are well Sandy) but that was more by sheer coincidence as we were trying to get established and we were very short of stories. We wanted to keep it until June but the numbers wouldn’t allow.
Continue reading “Week 81 – Holidays, Relevance And Bad Poetry”
Sol Schmeckendorf dabbed at his work shirt with a wet napkin. The grease from the chicken and broccoli was going to leave a stain. The only solution was to ask for seltzer and even though it was his absolute favorite shirt—he just didn’t feel like it.
“I don’t have a lot of friends,” I reminded myself. The cold and warm fronts were colliding in the sky which was colored with moving clouds, yellows, grays, and shades of purple. Darkness was falling as I was driving.
The first thing Miguel became aware of was the blistering sun on his cracked lips. He could feel the great white eye of the earth staring at him, taunting him to fully wake and confirm that his recurrent nightmare had once again followed him into morning. He opened his eyes and blinked slowly, taking in the brilliantly white-washed blue of the sky. It was day five. He felt death in his bones.
Continue reading “Between First and Final Breaths by Kathryn H. Ross”
Begley came here first, and the way I understand it, the fence surrounding the site hadn’t begun to unravel yet, so he had to enter subterranean style. He lowered himself through the sewer grate right out there on Kendall, under the old shuttered newspaper shed, having faith somehow it would lead him here, right under the old train station. It did, by the utility rooms and employee lockers, three floors down from where we’re sitting.
Continue reading “Most of Us Are From Someplace Else by Philip Ivory”
Old Scott’s Mill had given off odd sounds since the day it closed down. Now it gave off a sense of passage.
Having spent the previous day stripping layers of old paint off the shop front the last thing she wanted to do today was begin on the interior. But needs must. Her body complained as she dragged it out of bed, Al still snoring contentedly beside her. He was a lazy bastard but to be fair to the boy he’d worked hard the previous day. He’d climbed ladders and brewed up and carried stuff and taken increasingly fraught instructions as she slowly reached the end of her tether. He moved an arm and an eye shot open then closed again, his head being buried further down into the pillow.
I’m sitting in my Manhattan psychiatrist’s office feeling so anxious and depressed that my limbs aren’t sure whether they should twitch spasmodically or rest heavy and stone-like inert. But the shrink, let’s call him Dr. Becks (in real life his surname is actually just a different brand of beer), has my fickle attention suddenly. Why? Because instead of talking about how to cure me of my various mental illnesses (the impossible dream) he’s talking about an idea he has to make my all but moribund fantasies of big-time Hollywood success come true. He thinks this screenplay idea that he thought up, based on some show he saw on the History Channel, would make a perfect project to attract the attention of one of his celebrity actor patients – let’s call her Kali Kass (in real life her first name is just that of a different Hindu goddess). And who better to write the initial spec screenplay treatment (i.e., unpaid long synopsis) than me, Evan Breach (pseudonym), the man who has written and directed micro-budget films that have been reviled around the world at tiny film festivals (and even the occasional big one, where at the coyote-like reviewers were waiting to rip him apart with mere words, their fangs dripping auteurial blood).
Continue reading “The Hell with Hollywood by Edward S Barkin”
literally stories 