The room felt cold, the curtains around each bed swaying slightly in a draft that seemed to come from nowhere. Dennis walked down the centre aisle, the soles of his work boots sucking at the floor. He stopped at his mother’s bed, stood at the end of it, waiting.
His mother eventually opened her eyes, the act seeming to take some effort. The skin of her face was slack and grey, seeming to have shrunk since the last time he visited. ‘Dennis…’
He come in like dat. A black man on a black mare, seventeen hands, with three white socks. No saddle, no blanket, no shoes, bald head, no hat. Dat mare dancing and turning, kicking up the dust in the bright sun light.
I saw dat. Dat is what I saw.
Shadrach A. Williams
Recorded March 3, 1868
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In order to ascend vertically and eliminate the need for a runway, the plane was designed to mimic a helicopter on take-off. Then, once airborne, its propeller would shift through 90 degrees, transforming it neatly into a plane.
Neat on paper perhaps.
Due to low funds the whole operation must be effected entirely by hand. The propeller wound into place, the wings extended quickly, creating sufficient drag to lift the fuselage into place. Then the whole structure bolted tight. If they messed up, if they took too long, there was a chance the propellers force would tear the plane clean in half.
The door was unlocked and he was taken into the room.
“We’re right outside if you need us Doc!”
The two guards watched as he sat and then they left.
Living in a mouth is precisely what you’d think living in a mouth would be: wet, aromatic, and exhilarating. It’s cozy and rent-free in here. She’s not a big talker, so it stays as dark as Anchorage, Alaska during a typical winter. I sleep well. I bathe in her saliva. I nibble on specks of food that dangle from the roof like edible stalactites. When she’s wrecked and raging on a Friday night, getting blitzed on gas station wine, blaring Linda Ronstadt, we both stumble into el diablo’s embrace. When she peeks at the mirror while applying lipstick, or washing her face, I pop out and wave hello.
The Lake Huron sunset looked unnatural, as though painted by a child. The tremendous orb hung low in the sky, its colour so deep, so vivid that it no longer qualified as orange. As it slunk below the horizon, wide swaths of the same indescribable colour settled on the water’s rippled surface, then streamed through the trees to the screened-in porch. My mother was cast in an ethereal glow. The copper hair of her youth reappeared, framing her pale skin and the spray of freckles around her nose. For a moment, she was young again. Sensing my gaze, she put down her book. “Did you send the driving instructions to the girls, dear?” she asked—again.
Continue reading “The Lunch by Jennifer MacKenzie-Hutchison”
I’m Saga and I live in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. I have a disease. It’s not fatal, but I am going blind. My doctor told me that I was slowly going blind. My mother said that my eyes were only losing their clarity. It’s true. Before it gets dark it will first become blurry. It already has.
I rewrote that intro several times and finally ended up with that one. I don’t want my disease to define me, but it is the only reason I’m slightly interesting. I was seventeen years old and I went to a public school in a county that had almost no public schools. I wore large glasses – still do – which I had to change batteries on every week. A function inside the lenses automatically adjusted to the daylight. When I started my first year of high school we were supposed to stand up in class and tell the others a little bit about ourselves. I told them I enjoyed reading, knitting and playing the piano. My teacher laughed and asked why I used past tense. She was right though. I could still enjoy most of those things, the piano made a sound and I could feel the fabric when I knitted, but I couldn’t read as well. I can still read to this day, but it takes longer, much longer. I lose patience.
Mary wanders home and dreams of television. She has all her favourite shows recorded, ready and waiting to be watched. She passes a sign for fried chicken. It flickers overhead, metal shutters pulled up, open for business. At home, Mary knows, there are jacket potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge.
She is more than Fahrenheit, she is electric, not the lightning kind that will blast you hither and yon, but wired, the connections to all of me, my eyes bright and seeing the stars mirrored in the river, almost where they belong, bucket-spilled or tossed across the sky above Vinegar Hill, above all of Saugus… above old Scotts Mill directly across the street from my house, above the Iron Works from 1636 leaving figures and ideas larger than fossils on the land (like the 300 year-old remnant of the slag pile), above Rippon’s Mushroom House where I’m bound to work in a few years like most of my older pals, above Stackpole Field, where I’m bound to play with some of the same pals… and me on top of Theda Burton’s back side and she is bumping and bouncing and being electrically delightful as we are on a Flexible Flyer sled rushing down Bridge Street toward the bridge, halfway fallen into the Saugus River, and provides but a dangerous and narrow passage across one side of it.
Continue reading “Fahrenheit, Electricity and a Flexible Flyer by Tom Sheehan”
On the morning of my ninth birthday, there were voices I didn’t recognize in the hallway outside my bedroom door. Most of the voices were from men, and I thought I could also hear Mrs. Crider’s voice. She was a neighbor who sometimes babysat us, my three-year-old sister and me.
literally stories 