Tag: Story

Sirena

Isaiah Duey

Dear Kuya,

Papa told me a story about sirenas last night. He said they wreaked havoc after setting foot on human land and should have just stayed on the sea. He said being with them is contagious, that I could get their fins and that’s bad because their very existence is a sin. Are fishes sinful, too? Is that why people eat them? I don’t think I’d fancy sirenas for dinner because I actually like the luster of their tail. I think they shine in the moonlight or when the moon pulls the tide, though I’m not sure. But I don’t tell Papa about this, Kuya. Because sometimes I’d hear him pray I don’t get fins. He said he can already see my skin having flecks of scales on them, and that I might have been infected so he’s started a treatment to get rid of them. He lets me take swigs of his beer, like a man he said. I’m guessing beer is some sort of medicine, but I’m not sure about this either, Kuya. I still like chocolate milk best. On days the sun accents my scales, Papa would scrape them off my face like prepping a tilapia to be fried on a skillet. My face, arms, and legs burn from all the scraping, Kuya. But Papa said we must do this to make sure I don’t leave for the sea, too.

Anyway, enough about me. What’s it like in the sea, Kuya? I hope you’re having fun.

Your brother,
Chito

Isaiah Duey loves mermaids and the stories they hold. Her work has appeared in Five Minutes, 101 Words, and Versification. She hails from a country in Southeast Asia where she lives with her calico cat named Anya.

Making it better

Tim Love

When she cuts her knee in her grandad’s garden and cries, he carries her in and sits her on the settee, rubbing her leg.

“It’s a strange thing, crying,” he says, “Some people cry because they’re happy. Some people watch sad movies to make themselves cry.”

Confused, she stops crying and twists her hair like her mother does.

“When I’m sad,” he says, bringing his laptop over and sitting next to her, “I type ‘lollipop'”. He slides the laptop over. “Go on,” he says, “Try it.”

She wants to show off. She knows it has a double L.

“See how easy it is? Try it again.”

She types it three times, faster and faster.

“I like raspberry ones,” she says, “They’re blue, because red ones are strawberry. Blue’s my favourite colour.”

He remembers the lollies in the freezer and brings her a blue one, taking the laptop away because he doesn’t want it to get sticky.

“That was the last one,” he says. “Your gran used to keep an assortment in the freezer. I’d better buy some more. Maybe they do packs of blue ones.”

She makes the lolly last, watching him as he types faster and faster.

Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet, ‘Moving Parts’ (HappenStance) and a story collection, ‘By all means’ (Nine Arches Press). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Magma, Unthology, etc. He blogs.

Circular Orphans

Gina Twardosz

I think she might’ve whipped it at him in the street once, or more likely, he asked for it back, but somehow, I have come to possess my mother’s engagement ring. It has a modest red stone, possibly garnet, shaped into a heart, placed onto a sleek gold plated band. It didn’t cost a lot and was bought so far after their engagement that I remember its selection and purchase. I don’t think my father proposed with any ring, they just shook hands like a business proposition. It was a marriage of convenience, mostly, which is not to say there wasn’t any love ever, but mostly the certificate was signed because it made sense (love, to me, has never made much sense) and I feel odd owning it now so I’ve stuffed it away in a box. I think about wearing it sometimes but I can’t detach it from its symbolism. Garnet is also my father’s birthstone. I almost pawned it once, but I hated the thought of someone else having it. I don’t think the ring will ever be worn again. I don’t think it’s something to be passed down. I think, maybe I should give it back to my mother, but then what would I even say? Here’s this love back.

Gina Twardosz (she/her) has had work published in Thimble Literary Magazine, Gotham’s The Razor, and Querencia Press. She has work forthcoming in Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose and Cobra Milk Magazine.

She’ll be a Writer

Ellis Jamieson

Two tiny tottering feet imagine they can fly with the gulls. Two blue eyes see mermaids’ worlds inside the rockpools. Her hand-me-down, red coat – a viking sail. Driftwood swords. Sandcastle kingdoms. She and the sea speak a secret language. 

Mum says,
“She’ll be a writer when she grows up.”

Ellis Jamieson is a queer, non-binary writer, based in the north of Scotland. They write prose as well as plays, and enjoy working next to their fire while the winds howl outside. Their work has previously been published in Shoreline of Infinity and on Yorick Radio Productions.

The Space Between Us

Alison Wassell 

Snail slow, we pass neighbours stiff as sentries lining the crescent they call a waiting room for the graveyard. On the main road a bus queue of pensioners pays its respects in what looks like a choreographed routine. When the lights at the bridge are against us you drum the seat as I twist Mum’s ring, the one you said I had no right to, round my too-fat-for-it finger. We stare straight ahead, The Favourite and The Other One, although we never could agree which was which. I ask if you remember the time Grandad’s trilby blew off here, in a blizzard, on his way to wait in for the man coming to mend the telly and we found it, days later, sad and soggy in the thaw. Your lips twitch, but just in time you remember we’re officially not speaking. In silence we pass the school where I fulfilled my potential and you failed to live up to expectations, and the park where you hung out with the rest of the cool kids while I sat in my bedroom watching Top of the Pops on a black and white portable, writing poems that read like suicide notes. We crawl past the pub where we had our first underage drink, me part of your gang for once, stumbling home, arm in arm, to Dad on the doorstep, half-pissed himself and doing his best not to laugh as he read us the riot act. I give you a shy sideways glance and know, somehow, that you’re thinking of the same thing. By the time the car turns into the driveway up to the crematorium our hands have breached the space between us, and our little fingers are entwined.

Alison Wassell is a flash fiction and short story writer, published by Bath Flash Fiction Award, Retreat West, Reflex Fiction, The Cabinet of Heed, NFFD and other random places. She lives in the North West of England with her elderly cat and has no desire whatsoever to write a novel. She wishes people would value short fiction more highly.

Green

Tom Frazer

“Green is the most misunderstood colour. There must be more shades of green in the world than stars outside of it. And yet we call it all green.”

He sighs.

The old man is somewhere in a forest, lying on his back.

His sight is starting to fail. He can barely see the canopy above.

Still, he can remember.

He remembers trees he saw once. Remembers the dancing strangled light and the shifting greenness and the blood-black soothing shade and the crashing, seductive whisper of their melody.

He can still hear the melody, even if the rest is hidden. The song hasn’t changed; nor then, he reasons to himself, have the myriad of greens that sing it.

“Did you hear what I said?” he calls out.

No one answers.

There’s no one with him.

He smiles. The melody is just for him.

Tom Frazer is 28 years old and writes in London. He is studying a part-time masters in English Literature alongside work as a barrister.

Grounded

Christie Borely

I fell off the apple tree. An air-clawing spectacle halted by a rotten thud. Jostled limbs rained soft leaves and premature fruit to the earth around me. In the first landed moment, a crick stinging through my neck, I thought I might be dead. In the next, I wondered why I wasn’t. The third brought a huffy, childish feeling – tugged away by resigned adultness. The branches near my face sway their resentment at me, indicting my meddling, bumbling, inconsiderate humanhood. Guilty conscience brought defiance to my bones, blame to my pouted lip. Where was God? Where was justice? That I, scrambling, clawing my way to the top, should be shoved down by a minute’s distraction. A vain bubble inflates in my chest. It presses on my throat to roar. I scream. I stamp. I see. A swinging orb, red in front of me. In the whirlwind’s eye I recognise it as a gift. And suddenly I am sweet as it, and shy to take. And undeserving pops the bauble in my breast.

Christie Borely is an attorney, emerging writer and poet from the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Her multi-ethnic heritage is made up of East Indian, West African and French Creole ancestry. She aspires to tell vivid, poignant stories that convey a philosophy of inner peace and strength in community. Her writing has been published in Rebel Women Lit and Derailleur’s The Rail.

Wheretime

Ben Lockwood

An old bird flies over an old road, as a man drives west through the countryside. He drives to a town that is unremarkable, neither large nor small, and its signpost lies face down in the grass.

As he drives, the man sees no cars, nor bicycles, nor vehicles of any kind. He drives down a street with no lines, and he sees no unbroken windows nor intact doors.

He turns on the radio, but no stations are nearby, so he hears no voices, nor music. No lights illuminate the buildings, and when he rolls down his window, no scents stream from the restaurants.

His view is a sea of gray asphalt and brown-boarded windows until he comes to an overpass at the edge of town spray-painted with the words:

what makes space a place?

Somewhere else the bird flies over a patch of woods as a woman runs along a trail. She has run it many times, for different reasons: sometimes for time, sometimes for clarity. Today she runs it for memory.

At the end of the trail, where the dense forest transitions to a neighborhood, sits a house. It’s a modest house, where once a man with a cat lived. In the woman’s youth she smiled when she saw the old man working in the yard, and she laughed when she saw the cat darting between the fence posts. Today she will see neither.

She is out of breath when she reaches the trailhead, but she realizes she does not want to linger near the house with no man and no cat, so she pushes herself on as the dirt trail gives way to paved sidewalk, and the house is nearly behind her when she notices the words beneath her feet, written in chalk:

where do places go when they change?

Away from here, the bird flies over a man throwing pieces of glass and concrete into a dumpster. He stands where there once was a school, but soon will be something else.

The man was not here when the school was, so he does not know the building or what was in it. He did not learn here, or laugh, or cry, or fight. He did not say goodbye to one life here, and hello to another. He did those things elsewhere.

Rock and glass crunch under his boots as he walks, and when all he sees is stone and debris he can’t imagine that anything ever happened here until he notices the old wooden desk with the words carved into the grain:

is where i’m from still there now?

The old bird sees none of this, or perhaps all of it. On it flies, gliding over the winds of time and space.

Ben Lockwood is a Ph.D. candidate in the Geography Department at Indiana University. He studies a lot but doesn’t know very much. 

My Son Who Dares to Climb a Crane

Katie Coleman

I click on your channel after your mother’s gone to bed. The video freezes, and the wind blows off your cap. We share the same thick hair. Way back, I used to do a decent Elvis impression. I’d swing my hips like the King and never listen to the things people said. Your balance must’ve been rock solid to climb that crane. I used to surf down the aisles of British Midland trains, checking tickets like I was riding waves. This video misses your heart shaped sign-off. But still, I picture you at the top, just like the King.

Katie Coleman’s short fiction has appeared in The Ilanot Review, Bending Genres and Potato Soup Journal. She has a master’s in creative writing and works as a teacher in Phuket, Thailand. She can be found on Twitter (@anjuna2000).

Extract from Here and There

Samaré Gozal

I thought about how one day, probably soon, he’d be carried out of these rooms.

The space would not register his departure, let alone his infinite absence.

The walls would remain still and mute, awaiting the removal of the lamps and wardrobes

and the cup and spoon he was holding in his hand at that very moment.

One by one the objects would leave the space and soon there’d be no traces of him

other than a picture of him and one of Ola staring into a black and white sun.

A shaky hand reached for the sugar bowl in the centre of the table. Two spoons full and

a seemingly ceaseless stirring commenced. Round and round. I didn’t know where to go

so I sat down in my wet coat. He put a cup in front of me and poured. ‘Why is there

even sugar in this bowl? You’re not supposed to have any sugar at all.’ I felt a piercing

pain in my head. As if a hundred needles were about to be pressed against my eyelids.

I pushed the cup away and leaned back.

Samaré Gozal is an Iranian born Swedish filmmaker who has primarily worked as a director and producer in Ramz since 2005. Samaré  holds an MA in Political Science from the University of Lund in Sweden after which she started her film studies at the European Film College in Denmark. Since then she has been working on a variety of audio and writing projects internationally.