When I was little, I was afraid aliens were going to eat me. Of course, it was just that Twilight Zone episode I’d seen, To Serve Man, the one where a message of peace turned out to be an alien cookbook and the world was its meal, people being fattened up on a spaceship for the slaughter. They had to convince me it was just a show, a parable about humanity and all that.
Continue reading “To Serve by Yash Seyedbagheri “
Nick needs his wine. Merlot, Malbec, good dark-colored wines, wines that have just that tinge of bitterness to them but aren’t completely devoid of sweetness. Every night, he pours a glass. Promises himself it’ll be just one glass. But he swigs it in ten minutes straight, feeling the rush of dreaminess, the sense of elegance. He inevitably goes for the second glass, turns on Tchaikovsky or Debussy. Clair De Lune is his go to piece on the most depressing of nights, piano chords that offer tinkling company, the nights after faculty offer unwarranted advice or another student doesn’t understand his comments on a story or another and needs explanation. How do you explain in plain English that a story simply isn’t good?
Continue reading “Evaluation by Yash Seyedbagheri “
There were men and women throughout the library reading books. A librarian wearing a sweater over her shoulders sat at a desk organizing a stacks of three by five index cards. A young man sat at a table, his face visible behind two columns of heavy, academic tomes. He held his finger up to his lips in the universal sign of “Ssshhh!”
Continue reading “Book Stuff by Ryan Priest”
In the whole of Riverside Cemetery this was the one stone that had slipped its mooring, leaned not forward into the new millennium, but backward, into the one passed by mere years ago, as if saying it was tired of all the holding on. In one instant the scribed name was home with me: Dumont Pulsifier, an old pal from my neighborhood, but everybody, including his mother and his dead father while he was here, had called him “Scratch.”
Continue reading “Scratch by Tom Sheehan”
“Quietness, at what cost?” Reid said as he swung in his hammock on Burnaby Mountain. He pushed his legs over the edge of the canvas. Then he put his legs back into the hammock. He wanted to live in the wild, to make a new start away from the city noise. “I’ll call for that teaching position at Pinantan Narrows reservation,” he decided.
Teaching isn’t easy. Certainly not in Jersey City. I might as well say it at the start, I hate it. It’s hard to be among the young.
literally stories 