Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Please forgive me all my sins and transgressions. In the name of the Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit I promise if you help me through this I’ll never get pregnant again! Nine months of just pure, concentrated misery. And now this, this intense, unbearable agony… Never, never again.
We invited Literally Stories author and friend, James McEwan to be Editor for a day and choose his three favourite stories from the site. Here is what James had to say about the stories he chose and why he felt they were special…
I am pleased to have been asked to provide a contribution to the Editor Picks, and I have checked the previous selections to avoid any repetition. I have selected three stories, ones I missed reading when they first appeared since I was busy trying to unpick a murder or two. I am still flogging that dead horse.
Week 40.
Four-Oh blind forty.
Those of you like me who regularly visit the local Bingo Hall in search of friendship, weak coffee, numbers no greater than two digits and dayglo marker pens, will undoubtedly not have the foggiest idea what the origins of ‘blind forty’ are. Blind forty, one of many colourful phrases bingo callers cry out, such as three and seven, thirty-seven.
Those of you who do know what ‘blind forty’ means will no doubt glow with pride when name-called a nerd, anorak or some other pejorative that implies they possess a vast general knowledge.
Uncertain whether or not I should round off my momentary lapse into all things numerical by declaring ‘That’s Numberwang’, or were I in Wiesbaden, ‘Das ist Nummerwang’ I opted to consult a search engine and was greatly reassured this utterance was not such a foolish notion after all.
Even the German translation of the spoof game show Numberwang yielded 160 hits in 0.57 seconds.
For a long time, it rained. We moved into the house in late October, before Halloween. I was surprised at the rain, how long it lasted. First it was days. The days became a week. And, finally, it had been raining off and on for three weeks. It was almost Thanksgiving. We were drowning. Sammy didn’t care about the rain. It didn’t bother her. She’d say, “nobody cares, Don. This is the Pacific Northwest. It’s gonna rain, OK?” I got up every morning and went straight to the front door and opened it. Rain.
There is only one way to satisfy those who want you sober, and that is by walking away from the comfort of alcohol, and into a room of uncushioned, dark-hearted truths, an act that defies all layers of logical self-defense.
Virginia Quipp had just entered that room, leaving behind the vodka, and the splendid but unwholesome hush of 4 a.m. It was her second day in that room. Her hands didn’t shake and her nausea was only slight, but at eight in the evening, she sat at her desk facing another night of hateful abstinence. What was it about sobriety that zealots found so alluring?
A reputable librarian knows how to tell a story. My eleven year-old grandniece, reader extraordinaire, inquires about my days as Cabbagetown’s librarian. Our rockers creak on the covered porch, a steady rain patters all about us. “Best story you got, Auntie Claire. And I better not be able to see the end comin’.”
I sip my sweet tea. She leans toward me as I begin. “This story is true, more or less.”
1980
Reading success; the number one predictor of a successful future. The research said children who chose books read more. Yet every summer, I rarely saw a child more than once or twice.
“Well as big Rod once sang, ‘Tonight’s The Night!”
“It’s tomorrow.”
“I know but the joke wouldn’t work! So tonight is the last night of you being alone. I think that was a Heart song. Did you like the one about her picking up a guy for a shag cause her hubby was a jaffa? There is a shit line in it about planting a tree!”
Continue reading “Overthinking by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
There is – I wouldn’t call it a hole, rather a hollow – in the ground outside my house. When it rains it fills up to form a puddle and when the sun shines it evaporates, back to a hollow. The last few summers the puddle hasn’t dried away. Perhaps the sun shone less or perhaps the branches of the tree just above it grew a little thicker, but the puddle remained throughout the season. I can see the puddle from my bedroom window. The puddle, the tree and the green area around it, the little playground outside a kindergarten and a convenience store.
‘A judge tells a condemned man he’s going to hang next week, but he won’t know when until the hangman comes a-knockin’. The judge only says one thing, that it’ll be a surprise.’ The man with dark rimmed spectacles pauses to smoke, his hair is black and slick with Brylcreem.
‘So, when he’s locked up and waiting to be hung, this guy thinks to himself: “This shit ain’t fair, they have to tell me when I’m going to die. I’ve got rights.” So he decides to work it out. He figures if hasn’t been hung by Thursday, he can’t be killed on Friday because it wouldn’t be a surprise, he’d know it was coming.
I walk down the three steps, step out onto the sidewalk outside her house and lean my head back to the sky. Raindrops land on my face, neither warm nor cold. No breezes, but I hear the wind in the leaves on the trees along the avenue. Few people are up, light from maybe one or two windows. The street lamps light my way down the avenue. The asphalt is wet, which gives the city a fresh smell of concrete and cars. I like the smell of both; cars and concrete. It must have rained harder an hour ago. Streams run along the sidewalk picking up dirt in a slow pace and pouring it down the sewer.
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