Tag: war

All Stories, General Fiction

Was Und Warum Bist Du by Leila Allison

literallystories2014

Was und warum bist du? asked the Invisible Rain of an old man seated at a small table, on which lay a bottle of vodka and a snub-nose revolver. The Invisible Rain tapped out its ceaseless question on the window, roof and eaves, the walls and even on the underside of the floor. The old man refused to answer. He never did. Although the Invisible Rain already knew everything there was to know, it was greedy and insatiable; it increased exponentially with what it devoured, thus always hungry. Why feed a thing that can never get enough? The old man imagined himself as a drum in outer space: “Beat me as long and hard as you can, you’ll never hear a thing.”

Continue reading “Was Und Warum Bist Du by Leila Allison” →

All Stories, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Dark Return by Tom Sheehan

literallystories2014

Wonder had him in its grip and worked him over, tossing him into past years as clean as a pistol shot. More than half a century flipped through his movie mind, stopping whenever he wanted, at whatever spot and breaking loose the sounds, the smells, the fingers touching, the skin knowing again, rocking him with total recall. He saw again the older woman who paraded nude behind a window, who finally beckoned when he was on the way to school one day, calling him on to manhood, and to silence and war, and to the eternal draw.

Continue reading “Dark Return by Tom Sheehan” →

All Stories, General Fiction

Theatrical Spirits by Kilmeny MacMichael.

literallystories2014

In this year of unrest, Daniel Luis was sharing a small house with his mother, sister, his pregnant wife, and daughter. He needed work.

“You will be the new janitor at the Municipal Theater,” his uncle said, “It pays little, but the work is easy. Clean up after every performance. Do your work and be invisible, and maybe in time, I can find you something better. Here is the key to the door. They say the theater is haunted, so wear your crucifix.”

Continue reading “Theatrical Spirits by Kilmeny MacMichael.” →

All Stories, General Fiction

Garuka – Please Come Back by Ernest O. Ogunyemi

literallystories2014

Verse 1 – days of innocence.

 Those days are still fresh, they’re all that remain of that time, like bombshells after an explosion, or the remains of a decomposed dead animal. Those days when we chased grasshoppers in the small bush in our backyard. There were basically three types: one had intricate patterns on its body: yellow and black stripes, dotted with white; another had the skin of lush grasses, and it was why we found it on rare occasions. The last appeared only during the dry seasons. It had the body of scorched grasses, dusty brown. We would watch them jump from blade grass to blade grass, leaning the thin grasses. And we would crouch whenever we came close enough to any – I would put my finger across my lips to tell you to be quiet, like they could hear our voices and flee –  and cup our palms closed on them. We didn’t want them to die. We would tie ropes around their legs and watch them jump, making creepy sounds, as far as the rope could get them.

Continue reading “Garuka – Please Come Back by Ernest O. Ogunyemi” →

All Stories, General Fiction

Prisoners By Chad Plunk

literallystories2014

The German was nineteen or twenty and had bright blue eyes. He’d taken some grenade shrapnel in the stomach and he kept moaning, rolling around like it was the end of the world. It wasn’t a mortal wound, or even a bad one. Just bloody. The German spoke some English and between moans he kept looking at one or the other of the Americans.

Continue reading “Prisoners By Chad Plunk” →

All Stories, General Fiction

Too Much Asia to Erase by Tom Sheehan

literallystories2014

Sleep in any odd alley came piecemeal to Chris Banntry (and never luck, he would add, if anything else.) He called it bonesleep or curbsleep, or a number of other things, just as long as minutes of it were sometimes accompanied by a kind darkness. He liked the minutes where his bones could soften for the merest of moments and his mind go blank and his stomach cease its horrible arguments, and the insects, the ants and other crawling enemies, might take a night off from arduous labors. The darkness, inevitably, could bring enemies of all sorts with it, or the strangest of friends.

Continue reading “Too Much Asia to Erase by Tom Sheehan” →

All Stories, Fantasy

Love Triage by Jeff Blechle

literallystories2014

The ridiculous battle, hopelessly lopsided in the enemy’s favor, sent deserters scattering into the flaming woods, shot hopeful messengers down in their tracks, and, perhaps as an afterthought, stuffed the triage tent to the flaps with wounded soldiers. The overblown histrionics, the saucy horse that trotted into the tent strapped with dynamite, might have struck a jaded audience as faintly humorous.

Continue reading “Love Triage by Jeff Blechle” →

All Stories, General Fiction

End of the Road by Richard Ferri

literallystories2014

I sit up in bed when I see the headlights of a car arc at the end of the driveway, pause for a second over the mailbox, and then stop in front of my house. I reach across the bed to wake Susan before I remember she’s not there.  Mine is the last house on a rural cul-de-sac in upstate New York. Sometimes in the summer, late at night, I get kids making out or drinking beer at the end of the road and if they make too much racket I walk up with a flashlight and ask them to move along. But it’s early morning, the week before Christmas, the kind of dry cold air that pinches your nose shut in the time it takes to check the mailbox. No one is drinking a 40-ouncer this morning. The newspaper guy used to drive by at this time of morning and slide a paper into the box, but I cut that off six months ago, when Dylan deployed. Some things you don’t want to know about. The headlights extinguish, and I can see the glint of the car chrome in the early morning moonlight. I slip my feet over the side of the bed, find my LL Bean moccasins, wrestle into a flannel robe, and turn on the light to go downstairs.

Continue reading “End of the Road by Richard Ferri” →

All Stories, Fantasy

Aref and the Hermit Crab by Phoebe Reeves-Murray

literallystories2014

Hundreds of hermit crabs wearing toothpaste caps as shells shuffled through the dirt at the construction site, dirt so full of broken glass that it sparkled even at night, even with no light. Aref knew probably only he saw that seemingly infinite sparkle, just like he knew the hundreds of hermit crabs were really only one because you’d never find that many crabs wearing toothpaste caps for shells.

Continue reading “Aref and the Hermit Crab by Phoebe Reeves-Murray” →