Stories

Firebrand

9/21/2019

by ANDREW McAULEY

Beer and Fire by Alan Levine | Flickr

Marty O’Brien pushed through the door of his local, nodded at the barman, then tripped on an errant shoe left discarded near the door.

‘Ah, for feck’s sake...’ Marty groaned as he struggled to his feet. He dusted off his tweed trousers and cast a scowl at the barman.

‘Watch yourself there,’ the barman said in a sing-song voice as he dried a glass with a towel.

Marty cast his gaze around the bar. The pub was vacant except for the barman, unusual as at least a couple of locals tended to wait outside for the eleven o’clock opening time, and it was already quarter to twelve. The floor of the bar was littered with shoes of all kinds; trainers, smart leather shoes, hiking boots, wellingtons. All lay together in pairs as if the owners had removed them and left the premises without thinking to put them back on.

‘Whose are these shoes all over the place?’ said Marty.

The Poet in Bed

9/8/2019

by CAROLYN BANKS

Untitled by Rowena Waack | Flickr

He reads my poem. “But you’re not married,” he says. Right. Not only is there a husband in the penultimate line, but a son, even earlier. “I guess it’s good,” he says, trying to mend things, erase his memory of the look that swept across my face.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You don’t have to like it.” I rub my bare foot against his to tell him it really is okay, “I’m used to it, really.”

“I’ve never met a poet before,” he says. “And I sure as hell never slept with one.” We both laugh, his laugh real, I think.

“We’re a dying breed.”

“Not just yet,” he says, flopping atop me.

After ACHES

8/30/2019

by JANN EVERARD

sjm_sleeping_red1 by Michael Mandiberg | Flickr

“Head lice are easier to get rid of,” Sarah whines, and the group nods in unison. Sarah is the newest member of ACHES—Adult Children at HomE Still—a support group that meets every Friday night at the Wine On Bar, rain or shine, statutory holidays excepted. Counting Sarah, we now fill a table for twelve.

Meghan, our facilitator, gives us a few seconds to scratch our scalps. “We’re near the end of the venting segment of our meeting,” she says. “Does anyone else need to vent this evening?” No one speaks up. We’ve pretty much covered the insect analogies in past sessions—our kids as difficult to dislodge as wool moths, potato bugs, cockroaches. Meghan raps the table with shiny black nails. “Good. Let’s move on to coping strategies and self-care. Vivian, how are you doing?”

Next to me, Vivian shudders as if woken by gunshot. She has the look of a hard-core addict, all bony angles and sunken eye sockets. Her shoulders curve in towards her chest as if she’s protecting her breasts. In a thin voice, she says, “My doctor agreed to prescribe Pristiq.” She nods at me. “Thanks for that suggestion, Ann. I’m told anti-depressants take six weeks to fully kick in, and it’s only been two, but already I’m feeling something. I mean I feel like my brain is empty so that’s good, right? Better than obsessing?” She looks around the group for acknowledgement and we nod again vigorously.

Then the Monster, Lucky Me

8/10/2019

by BRYAN MILLER

Fressen & Gefressen Werden by Eden, Janine and Jim | Flickr

The auditor was wrapping up his presentation, a tale of cooked books and mislaid funds—one for which I had no explanation—when the monster emerged from Lake Michigan.

Thank the lord for big-ass, hydra-headed favors.

Specifically the auditor was saying something about turning me over to the Securities Exchange Commission when a woman in a pinstriped power suit interrupted with a hearty “Holy shit!” She must have been the second person in the room to see the thing hoist itself dripping onto Lakeshore Drive. I saw it first. We had a tremendous view from the gleaming window-walled fourteenth floor conference room. Even from here it was hard to distinguish between the monster’s prehensile legs and its multiple tentacular heads.

Inertia

7/26/2019

by BOB SHAR

Speed by James Loesch | Flickr

“Nothing wrong with do-overs,” I tell Ralph as we file into Bowman Gray Stadium for maybe the hundredth time this summer. “More times a man goes around the track, slicker he gets,” meaning, no days off for us. “Practice enough, you do without thinking,” I say. “Practice makes perverts,” I say, and on, and on like that.

I am the brains of our operation. Ralph’s the hands, the feet, maybe the balls, but not the mouth. He’s what you call legally dumb. Can’t make words. It’s on me to coach him up, so he don’t get sloppy or give in to the heat. “Do-overs can’t hurt a man,” I holler every night. “Do-overs can help a fool, which, not saying you’re one,” which, actually, who knows? “Look,” I say, pointing at the track below, “reps teach when to speed up and when to slow.” But – this I don’t tell him because this don’t occur to me yet – reps can’t teach a man what to do when shit hits the windshield.

The Earth Revolves Around the Sun

6/28/2019

by ALYA DEMINA

Eine hand hält einen Globus by Marco Vetch / Flickr

The door was a leather-wrapped cripple with a colony of miscellaneous bells sprawling from its edge to the wall. I double-checked the address and pressed a random button. Shortly after it warbled inside, the door flung open and a rumpled woman in greasy flower prints gaped at me.

“Doctor Nehms,” I introduced myself, trying to shield my nose from an acrid smell coming out of the apartment.

“Oh yes.” She nodded and forced a crooked smile. “Come in.”

She beckoned me to follow her down an endless gloomy hall, heavily laden with ancient wardrobes, broken chairs, rusty bicycles, bundles of rags and all sorts of clutter placed in a random pattern. I hit my elbow on the edge of an antique chest of drawers; it rattled, and something scurried from beneath my feet. I suppressed a scream.

Role Reversal

6/14/2019

by LEAH MUELLER

marijuana joint by Torben Hansen | Flickr

You don’t know how you ever landed in the western suburbs of Chicago. Aurora, Illinois. Forget Wayne’s World, the place sucks. It’s miles from the city. As far west as the train can go before it has to turn around at a big roundhouse. Some entrepreneur transformed the building into a brewpub imaginatively named, “The Roundhouse.” Not a bad place--in fact, the only good aspect of Aurora. That and the Paramount Theater, which shows movies like “West Side Story” on Wednesday nights for a quarter.

Your dance classes and the Vergil Gilman bike trail have kept you from going insane. You work out a lot when you’re depressed. You’re in good shape, which means you’re truly miserable.

No one else seems happy, either. Even your Christian chiropractor’s elderly receptionist whispered to you that her husband smokes pot. She congratulated you for filling out the intake form honestly. You were almost honest. You said you used marijuana once a day, but it’s more like twice. You’d smoke pot all day long, but your brain would turn into static.

Time To Go Home

6/1/2019

by CHRIS DIGIORGIO

Green Room by !Koss / Flickr

I slept until early afternoon. In the evening I went for some drinks in a hole-in-the-wall down a small alleyway. Old dusty bottles stood in front of a tarnished mirror behind the bar. I looked at my face and saw a stranger. As I was leaving, I heard live music coming out of the bar next door, so I wandered over to see what the noise was all about.

The place was small and dark and smoky. I spied Stephen hunched over at the end of the bar and ambled up to him. He had long before discovered the pleasures of wormwood-derived alcohol, which he called the “little green fairy” or just simply “my goddess,” like the poets of old.

“Greetings Gregory, how are you this fine evening,” he said, swishing around his glass. "Will you be partaking in my goddess also?”

She Sang a Song She Did Not Sing

5/11/2019

by DAN TREMAGLIO

"I have a mandolin, I play it all night long, it makes me want to kill myself" -—The Magnetic Fields
by Seth Tisue | Flickr

She wanted to write a song.

She did not want to write a song.

She loved music and how it made her
feel and was born to write and play it.

She might have been tone deaf.

She never felt more alive than when
performing in front of people.

She was often terrified and never far
from bed.

She did not own an alarm clock because
she could open her eyes at any exact
minute and more often passed the entire
night pacing the villa of her imagination
in the nude and moonlight.

Babyface Rafferty

5/11/2019

by JOE BONGIORNO

Burning by Alvaro Tapia | Flickr

The whirring hum of the cryptocurrency rig resonated through the Hochelaga apartment. Accustomed to the noise, Benjy Rafferty rewound the VHS amateur pro wrestling tape. Nailed it, he thought with pride as he watched his younger, teenage self in star-studded tights, the babyface scripted to be cheered on by the fans, execute a perfect piledriver on the heel, Vince Vendetta. At sixteen, one year after the tape was filmed, he dropped out of school and gave up wrestling to sell pot and counterfeit bills full time, making more money than his mother did as a receptionist at the dental clinic.

What time was it? Wednesday’s first light shone through the living room curtains. He finished the bottle of Crème de Menthe, the only liquor left in the cabinet and snorted a ten-milligram line of oxy off his roommate’s thesaurus. The rush was immediate. The fidgeting and tapping of his hands and feet let up; the buzzing of his ADHD came to a full stop. The painkiller’s weight and warmth amplified by the three-day binge. Now that the edge was taken off, he leaned his head back and smirked at the ceiling.

Foremost in His Mind

4/2/2019

by GLENN A. BRUCE

Protest.20 by Elvert Barnes / Flickr

I walk into his office, after hours. No one in the building, guards downstairs didn’t see me.

Fuckwads.

His office is as plain as he is, as dully average as the man himself, aside from the golf trophies, all won at company events, so they’re meaningless to anyone other than him or the people who come in his office on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis. His life is broken up into meaningless chapters of time.

His name is Rory and he’s every bit the asshole you would imagine with a name like that. Rory Mavers. Mavers. (I laugh.) It takes the edge off his first name and gives him a feminine quality which I’m sure he abhors but convinces himself otherwise. He’s that way. About everything. Everything.

Unsubscribed

3/2/2019

by L. MACK

iBrokeIt by Derek Gates / Flickr

Digital influencer craycray died last week in an incident that had earned her 20 million views as of press time and a special commendation from the Darwin Awards.

craycray, born Emma Smith, clawed her way to fame through decades of exhibitionism, and clung to the spotlight with an uncanny gift for exploiting public spectacle and emerging technologies. This talent earned her widespread condemnation – the Poet Laureate of the United States famously described her as “a soul-sucking crater of vapidity and selfishness” – and millions of devoted fans.

Born in 1982, craycray was an early adopter of all technology, rising to fame in the mid90s with a “UniSoCam,” a 24/7 live videofeed of her sorority bedroom. After her expulsion, she gained international notoriety with her blog, mememememe.com, which TIME called “a biohazardous train wreck, which seems to draw its influences equally from the confessional and the act of projectile vomiting.”

Passenger

9/9/2017

by SARAH BARKER

Waiting for the Bus by Michael Labrecque-Jessen / Flickr

A spot of firm, grey snow next to a bus stop stands as an exhibit of a modern Midwestern woman’s daily pilgrimage to her cubicle.

Oh, that rise from the dark, warm of bed now happens with the regularity of the sunrise. Bitter coffee, no sugar because this belly isn’t getting any firmer. A slap of cold water on the face. Toothpaste stinging the back of her throat. Flannel pajamas eschewed for a crisp suit.

These banalities and the woman is out of the house, on the curb. No one else uses her stop. It’s like the bus sign was erected with her in mind, like it was crucial to the state of the world for her to reach the office by nine.

Her husband used to drive her, but he died about three years ago. She was twenty-three at the time and had never bothered to get her license because she so enjoyed him driving her to work: his rough palm pressing against her thigh, husky voice crooning along with the radio.

Portrait of a Kingdom

9/9/2017

by WARREN J. COX

Pink Castle Piñata in the Gutter by Drew Leavy / Flickr

The phone alarm sings its melody at six thirty, and I begin my slow rolling on the carpeted floor. My typical exile. There are ill-defined darkly aches in my legs beneath my woolly checkered jammy-pants, and there are acidic grumblings in my astro-gastro-gut. I know it’s a long way to standing up, but I have to get there.

By six fifty I’m outside holding the trumpet case awaiting the child-king who is still being processed, confined strictly to the bathroom until the final moment, by the matriarch. I am staring up at the slightly more than half moon, which I more and more believe is like a big blown-up bug eye, perhaps that of a Robber fly or blue damselfly. It could be a frog eye, too, I reflect, but I decide it belongs to a blue damselfly because then it’s easier to imagine (I’m aware I’m forcing the pareidolia) that there is a gigantic one of those up there staring at or past me; its body, obviously, is camouflaged perfectly in that shade of way-too-early sky blue.

The other eye, meanwhile, is looking off toward Eurasia, North Africa.

The Existentialists

9/9/2017

by PAUL SMITH

Sunoco by Chris / Flickr

The two men drove the rented car on the Expressway up from the airport. They were looking for Anderson Road. Once they found Anderson Road, they would look for the Sunoco station on the corner of it and Linebaugh, and then for the Puerto Rican that ran it.

It was not a long drive. Under different circumstances, it could have been pleasant even, so the men talked. They talked softly, without raising their voices, but steadily, as if something was about to happen and they would be part of it.

“So this guy’s a manic-depressive?” Stanley asked.

“A manic-depressive, which according to Jung, or Adler, I forget which, is most susceptible.”

“One of the four basic personality types. Wait a minute. Shouldn’t he be choleric or something? You know – hot-tempered."

Chess / Utah Agave

9/9/2017

by KYLE HEMMINGS

Chess by Nick Stenning / Flickr

Chess

In the park, where voices are low and gathering in numbers, and the gaps of silence mean someone is straining to hear, Munch plays chess with a war veteran who helped take a desert city and wipe out any late afternoon mirages.

"Death was so hard on the eyes," he says, "and the accidental casualties we had to deny."

I'm sitting on a bench across from the two, taking small bites out of a Bavarian ham and cheese sandwich from the family-owned deli around the corner. Munch, his forehead creased with deep lines of concentration, his pockmarked skin around his cheeks oozing sweat, moves his bishop to take the old veteran's knight. In turn, Munch loses his bishop to the old veteran's queen. The old man looks up at Munch, shakes his head.

"The world will end in approximately fifteen days, no more than thirty. I read it in the stars."

Pterrorshark vs. Sharkadactl / That Day in the School Yard

4/16/2017

by SAUL LEMEROND

Tiburon Volador by Jc Olivera / Flickr

Pterrorshark vs. Sharkadactl

I had stopped, long ago, waiting for a movie to come out that could redefine the genre. It’s not done anymore. Studios are too interested in their precious international dollar to spend any money or take any chances because everybody already knows the formula to set off a blockbuster in Beijing or Bali. Film is a dead, the Yuan and the Rupee have killed it, and though we visit its grave every now and again when we re-watch films like Jaws or The African Queen, there’s always a melancholy attached because something inside tells you this is it. It was fun while it lasted but it’s over. Most times I sit in my theater seat expecting just another movie as I’ve abandoned hope of an actual cinematic experience. But I was wrong, and I’m glad to say I was because Pterrorshark vs Sharkadactl is a tour de force. Man vs nature vs shark vs nuclear power vs the digital age, the film combines this country’s post 911 anxiety with what’s left of our communal Cold War nuclear paranoia.

The Pterrorshark (the ‘P’ is silent) has two heads, and each head two mouths, all of which breath atomic fire. The right head is of a shark, which surprises no one, and the second head is a lion’s head, which surprises some because they don’t expect to see a lion head on something called a Pterrorshark, which also has three pairs of wings. A set of bat wings, dove wings, and what look to be the wings of a flying squirrel. It has the body of a shark and is the size of the empire state building. The giant beast exists as the result of radioactive genetic experimentation, is considered by the people who created it a danger to human existence, and is encased in lead under the Yucatan Peninsula by order of the president.

Your Daddy's Daddy

4/15/2017

by CATHERINE MOORE

Roll Tide by Paull Young / Flickr

Eldred Hagan had been in possession of his great-grandmother’s engagement diamond for near two decades when he decided to take action. Well, maybe possession was too strong a word since it was stolen five years prior, but on the afternoon that ring was syphoned out of the muddy waters at Burnt Springs he was standing in front of the consignment section of Larry’s Gun & Pawn where Larry’s wife leaned over the counter in a provocative way. It was about his favorite place to be especially when Larry was off fishing in the Burnt.

“They have lots of these online dating sites now,” she said in a way that made online sound dirty.

“Don’t think my daddy would approve of me seeking the hand of a stranger, ma’am.”

“I reckon since WJ’s been six-feet under for a couple of decades, you should stop minding what he’d think. And who says anything about marriage?” she added a wink.

Call It What It Is

4/15/2017

by CHAD W. LUTZ

Chair by Thomas Hawk / Flickr

“That chair is putrid!” I shouted at my partner. “Get it out of here!”

We’d spent the better part of two hours transporting the cathedra across town and now that we were standing on the sidewalk outside our building I decided I’d had it.
“It’s too heavy. I’m tired. Let’s just leave it here. This was pointless, anyway.”

“Well,” he said coolly, lighting a Parliament Light, “then that is your life.”

“What do you mean, ‘That is your life’? Why do you always say things like that?”

“Because you always say things like that,” he said back, exhaling a rather lengthy drag.

I threw my hands up in the air, disgusted. “The day is ruined. Let’s do this some other time.”

But my partner never moved. He just stood there, smoking his cigarette, enjoying the act more than I’d ever admit I wanted him to in the still pale early morning sunlight.

1-800-CALL-GOD

4/15/2017

by DL SHIREY

Churchsign-6 by Brooke Witlon / Flickr

Duìyú zhōngguó qǐng àn yī. Pulse dos para español. For English, press three.

Thank you for calling 1-800-CALL-GOD. Our menu has changed, so please listen to the entire message before making a selection. At any time you may repeat this message by pressing four on your telephone keypad.

To leave a confession for a minor sin, press one. For a list of mortal sins and current penance for each, press two. To find an authorized place of worship, press the pound key followed by your five-digit zip code. To report any personal religious experience, including prophetic dreams, saintly or angelic visions, and suspected demonic possession, press three. To talk to God, please stay on line. Your call will be answered in the order in which you called.

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