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So I’m yankin’ this thing out the drainpipe, getting’ blood up me cuffs, while those little twats are creasin’ up in the car park. They’ve proper mashed it up, n’all: it’s comin’ out in handfuls; I can feel its guts through me rubber gloves.
Continue reading “Jesu-Vape by Robin Dennis”
“This didn’t happen when we were in school.”
“That’s true, honey, it didn’t.”
“I just don’t get why now all of a sudden – wait, why do you? – you don’t have to sound so patronizing.”
“I’m just listening, honestly.” She changes from her robe into scrubs, loose fitting and dark purple as an eggplant. Her phone rings. She answers it on speaker. “Say hi to your father,” she says.
“Hi dad,” Lily says. “How’s the year so far?”
Continue reading “What Can Anyone Say by Matt Liebowitz”
Warning: Extreme content – see tags.
Running.
Gasping.
Retching, the son of Olayo Mejia charges toward his village amid the stench of burning wood and searing flesh. The odor is heavy and it is moist and it fills the valley beneath him in a haze of squalid yellows and heavy browns. It covers the fog-laced treetops and mingles across the terraced fields and, as gunfire again bursts over the Salvadoran hills, its reek grows sharper with every footfall and every wild swing of his arms. Its taste lingers in his mouth, its fumes choke his lungs and he wants so much to pause and catch his breath. He wants to fall to his knees and weep in terror but he knows he cannot, for the helicopters are prowling above him, the smoke is billowing high into the morning air and his home is very far away.
Continue reading “Chalatenango, 1983 by J. Paul Ross”
(Adult content – refer to the tags at the bottom of the page)
Mick blindsides me as I finish a cigarette and I fight the urge to crack him.
I’ve never liked him. His teeth are black from all the bootlicking and he’s punchable in a way that would make a heavy bag jealous.
Continue reading “The Summoned by Alex Sinclair”
“Verminous dole scrounging deadbeats poetically whingeing that’s all it is, lamenting wistfully about the plight of their work-shy genes. The Celtic curse so it is, forever waxing philosophical about being a shite for brains’ pisshead.”
He stops. He has run away with himself and he can’t remember what he was talking about.
Packy is barely cognizant of where he is. He exists in half dream, half myth.
Continue reading “Paraffin Lamp by Alex Sinclair – Warning – strong language and content that some readers will find upsetting”
Stomach is a damn hard taste to forget. Even before the bile claws its way up your throat, you can taste it—hot metal and candy aspirin. Then you can smell it, too. Sharp and noxious, the promise of chewed food and belly acid to come. I hate to even think about it, but memory’s a certain breed of sadist, and it knows what we dread the most.
I feel the scream rise, but I crush it back down into a solid lump of coal, and then further, harder, until it becomes an imperfect diamond of rage stuck in my throat. I can’t let it out. I can’t swallow it. It sits, laboring my breathing. I shove it down as hard as I can, store it, just like all the others. The rage, the sorrow, the pain. It all goes to the same place.
My life is like a demented fairy tale where the princess barfs jewels and escapes the evil Prince in her shitty Honda. I should be rich from all this.
Freddie knew there were some people you could disrespect and others you had to treat with reverence. He was in a restaurant looking at a man sat at the bar. He knew instinctively that this was a man who was not to be fucked with.
He looked back down at his bowl of spaghetti and ordered his wife to do the same. She did but every once in a while peeked up at the man from the corner of her eye.
She had a bad feeling about him.
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