Category: Fiction

Stories told, stories received, stories passed along.

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by Casi Scheidt

Eye Eye
audi_insperation via Creative Commons

“Why did my sissy die?” she asked, her blue eyes dull, tone flat, looking older at four years than she ever would again.

“Because it was her time, baby,” I said.

“I want the grown-up answer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want the truth.”

“God decided to take her back.”

“No.”

“Baby, please.”

“No. Tell me why,” she said, glaring at me.

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I don’t know,” I said, my eyes stinging and throat aching.

“Was it because she was sick?”

“That was part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

For hours she followed me, demanding an answer to the same question I’d been asking myself since it happened.

“Tell me why. I won’t stop until you tell me why.”

“Because she wasn’t like you,” I said, both my voice and my will to shield her breaking.

She watched me, waiting, sensing there was more.

“Because you came screaming into this world, yelling so loudly the whole building could hear you. Nothing could quiet you, nothing could make you still. But not her. She came as if all her demons had already defeated her. She gave up. That’s why anybody dies, baby. Because they have nothing left.”

Casi ScheidtCasi Scheidt is a recent Southern Illinois University college graduate (B.A., English, Creative Writing), and currently lives in North Carolina. While in college, three of her poems, “The Bad Year,” “To Leave Charleston,” and “For the Woman Who Has Failed to Protect Her Virtue” were included in the university’s literary magazine, Grassroots. Scheidt enjoys horror, post-apocalyptic, and literary fiction. She is also a game inventor, and is writing full-time.

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by Rita Jansen

“Better an empty house than a bad tenant,” Mum would say, shovelling the weekly dose of castor oil into me. “When the bowels are out of kilter, the brain turns to mush!” Over the years, many of Mum’s aphorisms made good sense, except for her take on my sixteenth birthday present from my granddad.

“If you ask me, you’re granddad lost more than his right arm in the war,” she said. “Who in their right mind gives a gift like that to a young girl?”

“Granddad’s not crazy,” I said in his defence, although, truthfully, it wasn’t something I would have chosen for myself. “He knows they’ll all be taken by the time I need it, and I got to choose the nicest one.”

2009-11-22 The gift
Henning MĂĽhlinghaus via Creative Commons

Both have passed on now. Mother died suddenly at the age of fifty-two and Granddad didn’t make it to my seventeenth birthday. His gift has remained untouched although I’ve kept an eye on it over the years.

However, it won’t be long now until someone opens it on my behalf and lays me to rest in the best plot in Heaven’s Door Cemetery; Granddad’s gift to me.

Rita JansenRita was born in Drogheda, Ireland but left the Emerald Isle to work as a nursing sister in South Africa. She’s been fortunate to live in many interesting places, including Zimbabwe, finally settling down in a small fishing village on the South Coast of Natal. Now retired, she has the time to pursue a life-long desire to write about the many characters and situations encountered along life’s journey, which lie in wait, like hidden treasure in her memory box.

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by Adiba Jaigirdar

Match
Andreas Levers via Creative Commons

The matchsticks in the broken drawer don’t tempt me now that you’re gone.

We sat on my bed and shared scorch marks like stories of old boyfriends. The one between your thumb and forefinger? Two years ago. Darkened to a deep shade of brown on your already dark skin. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love it. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t dream about it with my eyelids half closed, imagining you beside me, imagining me running my fingers along that scorch mark.

I like the one on your right shoulder the best. It’s nothing but a giant brown blob. There’s a strange beauty in it. Perhaps the most enticing thing about is the way you showed me, slowly rolling up the sleeves of your overly-long, baggy t-shirt.

My scorch marks seem like nothing in comparison. Even now.

Fire has lost its delight too, since you left. Like I never understood the spark, the heat, until you brushed your fingers along my collarbone.

Those two months, sharing stories on my bed, our limbs entangled in each other carelessly; those were the days I was on fire.

The matches, the bedroom, the lick of fire against my skin? Nothing without you in it. No spark.

Adiba JaigirdarAdiba Jaigirdar is a twenty-two year old writer and poet. She is of Bangladeshi descent but Irish by nationality. She has graduated from University College Dublin with a BA double major in English and History, along with an MA in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent. She has previously been published in literary magazines such as About Place Journal, wordlegs and Outburst. You can find her on twitter at @adiba_j.

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by Sandra Grills

“Mama, I need a hug” a small voice calls into the darkness. She believes, even at the age of eight, that her little voice will be heard. She trusts that someone will be there. Not just any someone, her Mama, ready to give her a hug.

With a sigh only perceptible in my sleep weary mind, I roll over and push myself out of bed. My eyes open just a crack as I shuffle down the hall. She’s sleeping when I reach her room—a little cherub running around in the land of nod—but experience warns against leaving. It would only result in a louder, more urgent call. I reach down and do what many would consider an unthinkable sin, I wake a sleeping child.

Delicate eyelids flutter open, and a smile cracks the flawless face with a look that says “I knew you’d come.” Heavy arms reach up and claim their hug. The smile continues, even after the arms drift back onto the bed, and the eyes slide closed.

Sleeping
Mark Probst via Creative Commons

I tiptoe past the creaks in the floor, careful to lay my feet on soft carpet, before I lay a weary head back on my pillow. A little noise floats up the hallway. The contented sigh of a sleeping child who feels safe.

 

 

Sandra GrillsSandra has been a director, a business owner, a project manager, a bookbinder, and a mother. Her current passion is reading and writing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her husband, two amazing children, and a gecko named Captain Doug.

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by Jeaninne Escallier Kato

Lipstick
David Moran via Creative Commons

“Moishe, darling, don’t forget your coat.” She has carefully placed his clothes on the bed, as she does for every opera night.

“And you look breathtaking, Ruth, my love.” He stares at her through her vanity mirror as if memorizing every feature on her face. “The black velvet suits you.” He swallows heavily, sweat beading on his brow.

She grins in that special way that says she wants him desperately. Applying red lipstick, she says, “The children are downstairs with your parents. I bundled them up in layers. It will be a cold night.” She turns away when the tears blur her vision. She knows he is studying her closely.

He runs his fingers down her exposed spine until he touches the top of the zipper. She grabs his hand and presses it to her powdered cheek. Her tears have left visible tracks through an otherwise impeccable layer of make-up.

A door bangs open. He runs downstairs to the children, shielding them from the inevitable intruders. She slowly slips into her mink coat. With trembling hands, she picks up the felted yellow star that has fallen to the floor.

Jeaninne Escallier KatoJeaninne Escallier Kato is the author of the childrens’ book, “Manuel’s Murals.” She has published short stories in various online journals, and her memoir essay “Swimming Lessons” is published in the anthology book, “Gifts From Our Grandmothers,” by Carol Dovi. Jeaninne is a retired, bi-lingual educator who is inspired by the Mexican culture. Much of her written work revolves around the people and traditions of Mexico. She resides in Northern California with her husband, Glenn, two German Shepherd mix dogs, Brindey and Bobby McGhee; and, one very fat Russian Blue cat named Mr. Big.

Visit her on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

 

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by Christina Dalcher

Gran’s tattoo might have been beautiful. On her, it was a desperate grasp at youth, an atrocity, an embarrassment. Ugly.

“You could have that removed,” I said on a Saturday after Gran returned from wherever she went on Saturday mornings. “There’s a place in town—”

Gran silenced me with a wave of her stupidly paisleyed left arm.

Watchtower Concentration Camp - Buchenwald
Alexander Steinhof via Creative Commons

We’d attempted this conversation before. It always ended on the same note, but now Gran elaborated. “I got this after leaving Budapest.” Her eyes crinkled in a rare smile as she nodded toward the strip of curls on her forearm. “From a man.”

“A man,” I repeated. I supposed even in 1940 men operated tattoo parlors. Or maybe she was one of those ‘types,’ as mum might say.

“I don’t want to erase him.”

And I didn’t want to think about Gran having a lover.

She died the following Saturday, and two strange old women came to bathe her withered body. They saved Gran’s left arm for last, stroking it gently, muttering foreign, guttural words.

I got one last look at the ugliness of colored ink on pale, papery skin before mum dressed her, and I saw the unspeakable, forgotten ugliness hidden inside each paisley teardrop: A-13968.

Beautiful, Gran, I thought when we buried her.

Christina DalcherChristina Dalcher is a linguist, novelist, and flash fiction addict from The Land of Styron. She is currently matriculating at the Read Every Word Stephen King Wrote MFA program, which she invented. Find her at ChristinaDalcher.com or @CVDalcher. Or hiding in a cupboard above the stairs. Or read her short work in Zetetic, Pidgeonholes, and Syntax & Salt, among other corners of the literary ether.

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by Ahimaz Rajessh

shadow #4
Marilyn Maciel via Creative Commons

In Nazareth—that intricate yet simplified labyrinth—if you were of the kind that walks in twos, eight of its pathways led to the century-old church that Canon Arthur Margoschis (with the aid of hundreds of nameless, faceless coolies) built.

Nine of them, if you count the ten foot wall that divides the boys’ school campus from the church.

If you had been a lamb, or a child with rapacious craving for climbing, running and jumping, or of the kind that is arboreal, you would know a wall is as well a pathway.

After the scarcely attended English church service, out of pure habit or instinct or both, Yesu took the ninth pathway one Sunday night.

Vaulting it with his pole of a foof (a hoof that’s a foot) in a hole that Jebi carved out two decades ago, leaping upon it and landing as he did, ever so quietly (an inch shy of six foot) Yesu raced toward the southern exit, as the never-once-used, derelict basketball court (that marked the beginning of the slow demise of a once-remarkable, now fading institution) under a starlit sky, cast its shadow aslant.

Ahimaz RajesshAhimaz Rajessh has been lately published in Flapperhouse, The Fractured Nuance, 7×20, Cuento, unFold and Pidgeonholes. His writing is forthcoming in Milkfist, theEEEL, and Strange Horizons.

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by Jake Walters

Face at the window
David Muir via Creative Commons

The frosted glass made my face a ghost’s, floating between worlds, eyes too wide. What I saw: a goddess in her ripening middle-age, full of love for me, her fingers laced together with an unfamiliar man’s. Seeing her smile, through the cold, a smile hesitant and fleeting. Like she was a free woman, her first day out of jail. If she glanced toward the window, I would step back a foot and disappear. Not completely, but the way a story does when the book is closed.

She never looked. Still I drifted backward, until the darkness swallowed me. Funny how it swallowed me, like sleep at an inappropriate time. You always awaken from such dozing embarrassed, not refreshed. I was embarrassed for her, for the man sitting across from her, for me. And for Dad, drinking his third or fourth Michelob already this evening, wondering where She was. Wondering when I would wander back from working on my Chemistry project at a pretend friend’s house.

As I walked home I tried not to imagine the next time I will be called upon to kiss her: at a bedtime, upon leaving for college, or perhaps only at her funeral. Tried not to imagine the labyrinthine nightmare memories that would conjure.

Jake WaltersJake Walters has been published in several journals. He teaches English in Transylvania.

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Double rainbow house
Pete Seapaddler via Creative Commons

As I write this, my little ezine/blog content experiment is rolling halfway into its fourth month. In all honesty, it’s going a lot better than I thought it would, and I was pretty optimistic about it. I’ve received a ton of truly phenomenal microfiction submissions, found audiences and support from some completely unexpected places, and discovered I have something of a passion for editorial work.

But after a quarter of my trial-by-fire year, I started examining things at a higher level than just “read this next submission! layout the next issue! format this accepted story for posting!” What was working, what I wished I’d done differently early on, how things looked financially, whether the schedules and formats I’d established were sound, basically evaluating everything from top to bottom.

The first result of this was a minor re-design of the aesthetic elements. It was something I’d planned to do starting in Volume 2 but I realized I didn’t want to wait. I also made Nikki the Managing Editor, really just formalizing the work she was already doing behind the scenes. Guidelines were set for guest editor spots; plans set into motion for the Volume 1 edition which will collect all stories from Issues 1 through 6; contingencies were established for the budget; realities for the social media presence were addressed.

But the biggest and most glaring source of contention from this examination was the way the stories were being rolled out. Friday posts felt like they were being lost in the shuffle of weekend plans (partially confirmed by the traffic numbers and the relative responses to “in case you missed it” reminders the following week). But moreover the monthly issues with only four short shorts felt like they weren’t being given sufficient treatment in the ezine. In fact with two 600-word editorials per issue (one from me and one from the guest editor), the ratio of story content to meta or editorial text was 2:3. For a fiction publication, that seemed a little funny.

Continue reading →

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by Nikki Boss

“When you come back, I will be here like this.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing to you but everything to me.”

“Sarah.” I love how he says my name, Say-ruh.

“Come here.” I pull him to me, my hands cupping the back of his neck. He pulls away.

Ray Moore via Creative Commons
Ray Moore via Creative Commons

“I have to go.”

“You could stay if you wanted to.”

“I can do anything I want.”

“Except stay with me.” And there it is. It does not matter what I want or what he wants; there will always be this.

He scans the room for his clothes.

“In the bathroom,” I tell him. He goes to fetch them and I use the moment to light a cigarette. Inhale deeply and let the smoke unfurl from my mouth.

“Say-ruh.”

I ignore him.

“Say-ruh.” I will not go to him.

“James.” I state his name rather than reply. Take another drag and let it poison me.

“You can lie in that bed all day and it does nothing.”

I spit back. “I can do whatever I want.”

The door slams. He is leaving me again.

Nikki Boss

Nikki Boss lives in New England with her husband, children, and too many animals. She is currently a MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches middle school English.