Latest Stories
Most recently published stories in Fiction.
How Rude!
A red Mazda, rudely cuts into the traffic that stretches out ahead of me, like a bungy cord. Clearly, the ‘early bird‘ didn’t ‘catch the worm’ this time! A car horn beeps in protest. Soon afterwards, I give a quiet cheer when the offending vehicle is delayed by a school bus pulling back into its lane… traffic lights flash amber to red.
By Angie the Archivist 📚🪶4 days ago in Fiction
The Rule
This place has never pretended to be merciful. We learned that long ago—before the rivers shrank into memory, before the soil turned to powder, before hunger became the only language we all spoke fluently. Complaints evaporate here, same as everything else. The sun sees to that. It hangs above us like a watchful tyrant, a silent warden that neither sleeps nor softens, pressing its heat against our backs until even our shadows seem to wither.
By Kenneth Boutte4 days ago in Fiction
Annie After
Annie always said she was “handling things beautifully,” though no one had asked her to. In the days after Paul’s death, she moved through the house with the restless energy of someone who needed an audience. Lockdown meant there would be no funeral, no gathering, no public display of devotion. The absence of spectators unsettled her. She needed a stage, and grief—real or imagined—was her current favored script.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior4 days ago in Fiction
Louise After
Louise didn’t attend a funeral because there wasn’t one. It was lockdown, and gatherings were forbidden. Paul’s body went straight from the hospital to the crematorium, and Annie collected the ashes in an urn she had made years earlier in a ceramic class. It was lopsided, glazed in streaky turquoise with hearts etched in the side—more craft project than vessel—and entirely wrong for him. But that was how things were done in Annie’s world: symbolism without substance, noise without meaning. And of course her name was carved in the bottom. She had to put her name on everything.
By Julie O'Hara - Author, Poet and Spiritual Warrior4 days ago in Fiction
