All tagged Short Stories
If I were a suicide I wouldn’t have become a punchline. Budd Dwyer kept his dignity. “Don’t, don’t, don’t” were his last words. “This will hurt someone.” The way he says “Don’t, don’t, don’t” is careful and controlled. A man who knows exactly what he is doing. He’s incanting, summoning up the language to finish the act he knows he has to carry out.
When the doorbell rang, J.B. peeked out his bedroom window to see who was at the door, and as soon as his eyes hit the fuzzy red ball atop Mr. Lawson's tam o'shanter, he ducked, and crawled under his bed to hide.
J.B. knew why Mr. Lawson was looking for him, so he closed his eyes and prayed he would go away. But it was the Fourth of July and his father was home for the holiday. So after a few more rings from the doorbell, Tom Baxter answered the door, and Phil Lawson marched inside.
"After Death" by Nashae Jones is a short story about what connects us to each other, our mothers.
“Who are you?” she had asked. “Where do you come from?”
“ I a woman,” Qui, the woman from Vietnam had told her.
“Good, good. You are a woman,” Quinn had said.
Encouraged, Qui continued.
“I mother. I have son.”
Quinn had faltered, her eyelashes blinking rapidly against her powdered cheeks.
"Marketplace Children" is the story about of farmhand Jovita who deals with the reality of her place in the world. Jessica Santillan's haunting short story debut.
The thing about laboring all day in the sun, she thinks, is you can either focus on the misery of the task, or on the misery of your life. Sweat drips and collates in the creases on her face. She is machine, without the luxury of being machine. Ay, she thinks, even machines get to break down sometimes.
Jennifer Todhunter's short story "Soup & Nail Polish" is a story of friendship built on music and nail polish, and what happens when past traumas come back to haunt.
I’d bring home random scraps of the city for Harry—rare finds from used book stores, shades of nail polish we both could wear, ballpoint pens liberated from businesses—and make him pizza and soup because he wasn’t interested in eating anything else. He didn’t want to talk about what was going on, and the more I pressed, the more withdrawn he became.
"Beer Mile" combines exercise, competition and beer. What could possibly go wrong? Find out in this short story by our Writer of the Month, Sarah Szabo.
So they began the regimen, cramming what they could into two long, grueling months of prep. The goal was learning how to run plowed, keeping the booze down. He’d had years of practice running, good form, and the genetics of a true rake in him. All there was to do was get used to the feeling of running a full sprint while a liter and a half of cold beer wreaked havoc in his gut—to make it as close to second nature as they could.
Two co-workers bond in Lisa Bubert's short story, "Hand For Your Hip."
Zoe is twenty-eight, unmarried, without children, and not beautiful but not unbeautiful. She comes in to work every day dressed as if she is a different person, her make-up and hair changed so strikingly, it is not unusual for regulars to ask if each day is her first day. Today, she is stunning and elegant. The day before, she lined her eyes thick, left her hair unbrushed, and replaced the stud in her nose with a ring. George has seen her hair dyed blonde, black, pink, and now this deep, dark red. He likes the red but the blonde is his favorite. When Zoe wore blonde, she wore it white and curled like Marilyn Monroe and she walked with the poise required of it. The world rotated around her presence -- the books, papers, and people around her but waves on the sea and she the magnetic core.
"Fit of Inspiration" by Sarah Szabo, our writer of the month, is a short story about a man who is having a day where nothing is going his way. It all starts when someone tears out half of the last page.
Karl bit his lip, set down the book. Last page torn out of the sturdy binding. How shitty. Some awful rube must've needed to scribble a phone number and panicked, or just hated the ending enough to damn it to the void. Or maybe they were just sadistic. One crucial page gone and the whole story's ruined.
A little girl spends the afternoon in the library waiting for her father in Jason Buckholz's short story, "Care For Prickly Pear."
The plants she loved most were desert plants which was fortunate because they were often driving through deserts. Her father said Jesus had the right idea when he went out for forty days into the desert, he said that’s probably where he got all his big ideas because man can think in a desert like he can in no other place.
Two spies meet at a wedding in Arthur Davis' short story, "The English Muffin Critic."
“No silencer there. Someone’s bound to hear the shot, especially in this stone wall chamber with two very large vaulted openings facing the street.”
“It’s really a beautiful church and quite a shame to mess up your elegant tux from Hiding Roosevelt & Clyde, I believe?”
“Blyton Huxley, their most senior fitter.”
“Yes. Couldn’t quite put my finger on which of their tailors it must have been to have stitched you such a fine suit,” she said gesturing with the muzzle of the Beretta at a small wooden bench in the corner.
