I write about Jeanie just to keep her alive, her memory is a ghost in these pages. Though it hurts to remember, the pain is easier to bear than the emptiness. So I return again and again to the image of her face which at first was burned into my mind but now begins to fade – the lines once sharp and vivid are loose and blurred.
Continue reading “Her Ghost in These Pages by Daniel Joseph Day”
As regular visitors will know, we sometimes receive submissions that don’t fit into the usual scheme of things but we want to publish because of the quality of the writing, or the message, or sometimes something special about the author. This is one of those. We thought this deserved a moment in the sun:
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – Him Her Them Us by Victor Kreuiter”
The Introduction
This is my first wrap of 2026. A few weeks away have made me flabby because I am unnaturally lazy. Therefore, like an athlete gone to seed, I will pull on the sweats and attempt to get in shape by writing about small pointless items and work my way into good enough form to intelligently write about this week’s group of stories. All within a few paragraphs. I aim to put a point on pointless, to sharpen its, well, pointy, or at least pointier end, then use it to etch profound wisdom on the corbomite* walls of public inanity. (*Extremely hard and potentially explosive fictional mass invented by Captain James T. Kirk, known associate of Hardcourt Fenton Mudd, a suspected interstellar Jeffrey Epstein of the 23rd Century.)
Continue reading “Week 567- Superfluous Quotation Marks”
It’s nighttime, and- look, I won’t get into what’s gone on. I won’t get into Jenny or into what’s happening with the kids or any of it. I think it’s simpler than all that. And- it’s terrible. I don’t mean to say it isn’t. I’m just focusing on what I can change. There are people in terrible trouble and something’s gotta be done. Nothing can be done about Jenny. And the kids, I don’t know. I just don’t know. Anyway. It’s nighttime, which isn’t unusual. I am having dinner at the diner again. I sit in the booth across from the windows into the St. Pat’s rec hall. I watch him. This is the third night in a row after a few weeks waiting. I know something is coming because I’ve spent good time with thinking about it. I can feel it as if it were mine.
Continue reading “Pennsylvania Man by Tony Godino”
The sun rose in the west and coloured the hills. Velvet dark, not quite black… Then burnt umber. Orange-red, limpid platinum. Light gathering.
The hills became distinct; hard, dry mounds the sun reached from, taking hold of the day, making it hard and brittle too.
A party of men came back into the landscape, carrying something wrapped in canvas. They stopped at a freshly dug hole. They laid the canvas bundle down, not too gently, and unwrapped it.
It was a corpse, bones really, hard white chalky bones, dead a fair while. These the men put into the hole, one or two at a time. Then, using shovels and a mattock, they refilled the hole. It looked hard work. The last blows were struck with the mattock by the smallest, oldest man – an Aborigine – and the other men stood about, talking. They were white men.
Continue reading “The Sun Rose in the West by Stephen J Kimber”
Nothing, she thought, could make her feel better than having a nice, long cry in the shower. Nothing felt better than water flowing over and out of her, releasing every negative emotion that drifted into her mind. Hot, cold, she didn’t care; it was the best medicine. The blaze of an inferno and the frost of an avalanche purging every impurity. The only equal? A full day lying in bed, listlessly flipping through childhood memories.
Continue reading “And She Was by Jordan Eve Morral”
According to the man at the agency, half a meter’s rainfall over two days was all it took to so loosen the soil the local cemetery gave up its coffins. Dozens of them, he said, dozens of coffins bobbing along half submerged amid the general flow of debris – tables, wardrobes, phone boxes, and so on . . .
Continue reading “Installation, by Geraint Jonathan”
As Molly pushed her dolls’ faces together and danced them around her bedroom window sill, she could see Mr. and Mrs. Green in their house next door. Molly named her favorite boy doll Bill and her prettiest girl doll Jill – last name Green, but no one else knew that.
Continue reading “Missing by Kayla Cain”
“Keep your eyes on the road, your hand upon the wheel…”
– The Doors
“This land is your land…” – Woody Guthrie
“Superman never made any money / savin’ the world from Solomon
Grundy / and sometimes I despair / the world will never see another
man like him.” – “Superman’s Song,” Crash Test Dummies, from
The Ghosts that Haunt Me
I used to leave in the middle of the night, solo, mostly.
It was the 1990s. I was in my 20s. My procedure for road trips in those days was simple.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – Roadhouse Blues an Essay by Dale Williams Barrigar”
Here we are at the first of the New Year with Week 566
Well, that’s the festivities over for another year. I hope you all have had a restful or mad time or a bit of both. I had some beautifully wrapped presents this year. I received a life size Dalek, a lucky horse shoe, an inflated beach ball and an anchor. I was grateful but not one of them was a surprise.
Continue reading “Week 566 -Obvious Prezzies, Paul Newman Was Brilliant And A Nod To Johnny Kidd And The Pirates.”
literally stories 