Tag: writing

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Literally Stories – Week 40

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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.

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All Stories, General Fiction

There is a Forest Here by dm gillis

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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?

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All Stories, Horror

The Executor by Tobias Haglund

Tobias Haglund

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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.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

The Culex Experiment by Nik Eveleigh

Nik

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The thin penetrating whine dragged him from the warm recesses of sleep. He pawed at the air as he sank back into slumber but his swipe was ineffectual and the incessant drone continued. He turned on to his side. The insect followed. He sat up in bed, groaned and shook his head.

“Light”

The bedside globe reacted to his command painting the room a dusky yellow.

Where are you, you little…

He rubbed his eyes and scanned the ceiling. No sign of the intruder and no sound to track it by. Resigned to have to start hunting he stretched a lazy arm across his body to pull back the covers.

Ahh…there you are.

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In conversation with...

Hugh in Conversation with Hugh by Hugh Cron – Adult Content – very strong language – do not read if offended

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Right! The story is done.  A long stand in the pissing rain waiting for that bird. Fecking camera in the fecking phone pish. What twat thought of that? I bet it was some weirdo with an ear fetish!

OK now the easy bit…Oh fuck I do make myself laugh.

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Literally Stories – Week 38

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When I visited the back door portal to Literally Stories Friday morning charged with the task of ordering random words into something a little less random my first thought on typing Week 38 was; Is there any significance to the number 38?

In short. No significance.

The best ‘fact’ I came up with was it is the probable year of the marriage of Claudius and Messalina.

Fascinating.

However if you add ‘th’ to 38 and then parallel, too, the plot thickens into something almost but not quite significant, as you now have the 38th parallel. The demarcation between North and South Korea. An imaginary line that also passes just north of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, all of which makes one wonder how newspaper columnists survived before the advent of the internet search engine? None of which leads me to this week’s litany of literary marvels that began with The Aviator.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Romance

Still Working by Tobias Haglund

Tobias Haglund

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December sweeps her dead hand around my throat. My capuche swooshes open and I come to life in the morning hour rush. A beggar scratches the furrows between the cobblestones outside the metro station. When I get close to him, the automatic doors open and the warm breath of the subway hits me. He looks up at me, then back down again to the cobblestones.

I walk out on to the escalator, a boy runs past me, then a girl, then another boy. The latter boy shoves the girl when he rushes by her, down the escalator. She yells, but keeps going. Yesterday the fungus to the right was green, but today it’s covered in white foam.

The subway train comes in and I get on. It’s full, so I stand. I can always tell which state the country is in by looking at the adverts. Education, insurances, job seminars and cheap groceries. I’m reminded of what the prime minister said; the lowest unemployment rate in Europe by 2020.

Promises aren’t worth much to the poor. That’s why the adverts look the way they do, and why the beggar scratches the furrows of the cobblestone.

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All Stories, Writing

A Writing Piece by Tobias Haglund

Tobias Haglund

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Tobias sat down, put his cup of cinnamon coffee beside the keyboard and stretched out his fingers. He moved his neck from side to side making a cracking sound and spoke to himself, but only in his own head.

“Alright, here we go!”

The first couple of sentences were clunky, it took him a while to get into the rhythm. Very much like the first couple of steps of jogging. Not that he ever jogged, whom is he fooling? But the analogy could stay. For now. Maybe he’ll come back to it, like a revisit of- No. No more analogies. On with the story. A setting and a problem. What did he want to say? Ah, he remembered. His girlfriend told him about a tourist guide who literally got into a fist fight with another tourist guide. Oh, but he didn’t like that last sentence. Why didn’t he just write ‘a story about two tourist guides who fought’? Well, it was necessary to part the two since one of them initiated the fight, that’s why.

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Literally Stories Week 34

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Sunday used to be the day LS maintained radio-silence. Well not any longer baby. We sexed up Sunday weeks ago. Anything goes on a Sunday. Well almost. Witness In Conversation with…and Editor Picks and now something outrageously entitled A Writing Piece.

A Writing Piece indeed!

Imagine how long we sat around in blue-sky think-tank style working parties debating the ins and outs of various off-the-wall titles before arriving at that humdinger.

Sunday – A Writing Piece – Tobias Haglund.

But first, Story of the Week. No. A different first before that.

The week that was, began incredibly, yet again, on Monday.

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