He was sitting in his yard draining his last can of beer and stubbing out a cigarette when the change came. He felt no pain, only the sensation of being tugged, like a fluffy pillow being urged from its fitted case. Finally, he came loose – this conscious part of him – and hovered over the dilapidated mass from which he had just wrested himself. “Well, damn,” he thought, “guess that’s it then.” But the truth was, he’d been thinking for some time that this might happen. While he was not what you’d call old, he’d pretty well made all the use of his body – for better or worse – that a man could make. He knew he’d worn it out. He…
Posts tagged “fiction”
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”- Robert Frost Bonjour, Helen! It’s Grandmother Grace here. This is my first time to use this recording software. Your grandfather set it up for me, and he tells me that it is superb, so I will trust his judgement on that. Your mum tells me you are having the time of your life in Paris. Well, that does not surprise me at all. I loved Paris, too, as a young woman. I visit it still in my dreams sometimes. I like to imagine you listening to my voice from a cafe near the Seine, sipping warm milky coffee while the sun shines on your hair.…
Tom walked out of the 7-11 with two coffees in his hand, one for himself and one for his wife, Gayla, who had waited in the car while he pumped the petrol. He stopped for a moment to watch children clambering on the Wonder Wall which made up the west side of the shop, and which Tom supposed caused more parents to stop here for petrol and soft drinks than might otherwise. The wall interested him because walls were his business. Tom was a manager in a company that rendered residential and commercial exteriors. Usually, as jobs go, it was pretty good; but this year had been tough. He regretted the decision they’d made two years ago, as an executive team,…
Della’s sneakers hit the asphalt as she stepped off the bus from school, and immediately she regretted not having worn her better shoes. The rubber soles of this pair were rubbed so thin that the heat coming off the street seared the bottoms of her feet. “Like two catfish in a frying pan,” Janice would say later over dinner, laughing when Della told her the story. “I told you to stop wearing those ugly things a while back, didn’t I?” Janice was good natured, and would not give Della too hard a time about it; nevertheless, she relished handing out an “I told you so” to her daughter on occasion. Della lived with her mother and her six-year-old brother, Cayce, in a…
Dear Janesy, I have enclosed a photo of our old homestead, now yours. I know you will think I have left you nothing but a money pit – a pile of debris, on land that may seem cursed, spurned for decades by God and Nature alike, and then … well, the terrible fire that ended everything, or most things. As for me, I go on. I know you will think either that I must hate you, or that I must be laughing at you from the Great Beyond, to have left you such a thing. But I know, too, that you will not resell it or walk away, abandoning it to time and weather, as others might have done. …
Cake had never met his father. He had lived with his mother, Celestina, in the same two-bedroom apartment all his life. Cake called it their layer. It was the fifth level of a five-story building on 9th Avenue and Carson Street. His grandparents, who owned the building, lived just beneath Cake and Cele on layer four, and his auntie and cousins were beneath them on layer three. The rest of the building, which included a second layer, a first layer, and a basement, was taken up by the family bakery. Cake was nearly sixteen and only his family still called him by his real name, Javier. His friends had called him Cake for so long that he thought of himself as Cake, too.…
The cricket bat cracks first at the base of your neck, then across your chest. Another smashes into your back, and that’s the one that sends you hurling to the ground. You cannot believe that they continue to mock you, this gang of boys, as if bashing you to pieces were not enough to prove their cruelty. Now, you are spat upon and, though you cannot see what’s happening behind you, you feel a hot wet stream splattering you, drenching your hair. This is your final degradation. “Dead girl head! Dead girl head!” They scream, push each other, and laugh, kicking at what’s left of you. You take it all in, but give nothing back. “Hey there! Stop that!”…
It was 8.00 p.m. in Houston, and Martin should have been landing back home in Chicago by now. What the hell, no one would be waiting. Anna had taken everyone with her in the divorce – their two younger kids and Bounder, their Golden Retriever. He stared out Room 1207’s glass wall, as the girl came out of the bathroom. “What do you call that color?” he asked her, pointing to the sky. He recognized it was the same color as the walls in the family room, in the house where he used to live. Mostly, though, he was trying to distract himself, to keep from staring at her too intensely, too hard. She was breathtaking in her youth. He’d forgotten what that…
She never liked it when the sand was messy, preferring to find an unfrequented patch of shore, where the only footprints were those of seagulls. Yet he would insist on plunging into the beach with both hands, digging and gouging like a wayward child seeking China. What was worse were the artless structures he would erect, piled high and higher still, leaning this way and that – ugly but fragile – begging to be slammed to the ground, and then pummeled into the beach, where they towered like sentinels. He was helped in this by the waves, as he would build always at the water’s edge, taunting the sea to reclaim his monoliths – or perhaps he meant them as an offering.…
13 Ways is an on ongoing creative project that was launched in 2011, by td Whittle and Sandra Peterson Ramirez. The central theme of the series is a simple one: the stories have been inspired by the photos which accompany them, and they provide an imagined context for – or a particular interpretation of – those photos. Some of the tales are brief vignettes, while others are more fully-developed narratives. The literary styles and subjects vary enormously from story to story, invoking realism, suspense, fantasy, and modern Gothic. Here’s how to access the 13 Ways stories: To read the stories that are available here on our site, click on the first link under Categories on our sidebar. To read our first published collection, featuring sixteen tales from our 13 Ways series,…