dreamszilla

Alar and Ukrit stop in a bustling village while fleeing Imperial soldiers, and witness the arrest of a child witch; by Ross Hightower.   A mandolin playing the opening notes of a traditional song, soon joined by a woman's high, clear voice, could mean only one thing. Alar remembered right, it was market day in Kartok. As the two boys stepped from the hard pack surface of the Imperial Highway onto the cobbled street at the edge of the village, the festive sounds of the market joined the song. It tugged at Alar's memories of a more innocent time, a time before the Empire stole his life. Ukrit grabbed Alar's arm, pulling him to a stop. "This is a bad idea." "You're probably right," Alar said. "Those Imperials soldiers must be right behind us." "Nah, I figure we have a couple of hours on them." Alar squinted back the way they came. "Or one anyway. Probably." He grinned at his friend. "Come on, Ukrit, aren...

Patrick, now an old man, wants to move back from England to Northern Ireland, to live with his brother near their extended family; by Eamonn Murphy. Passengers were boarding for the three-thirty afternoon flight from Bristol to Belfast, and the queue snaked forward with its usual agonising slowness. Patrick patiently waited for his turn. In a long life of seventy years he had, finally, learned patience. He was a far different man than that fiery youth who had come over on the boat to Liverpool back in the Fifties. He felt a tap on his shoulder. 'Is that you, Mister O'Rourke?' Turning, he saw the top of a man's head. He had to look down to see the face. Patrick stood a couple of inches over six feet, tall for his generation, and the shoulder tapper was only a small man. His bald patch was clear to see, but that wasn't the sort of thing one mentioned to an acquaintance, though you might kid about it with a friend. 'Roger,' he said, recognising Mister ...

Two lovers married to other people pillow-talk about their dreams and delusions; by Jon Fain. "Last night? I dreamt of something called Competitive Nut. You go into a store with an exotic nut, bring a few in a little box," I explained. "They clean them off for you... to your specifications, of course... and you eat it." "What do you mean by exotic?" She gave me a smile. "Maybe because I was there?" "No," I said. "You weren't there." I remembered another dream from since I had last seen her. It was at work, in her office, but she wasn't in that one either. Instead, a kid I'd grown up with and who I hadn't thought about in a long time was in the dream, working where she worked, her office, at her white board. "OK, my turn," she said. "We're at a country club, playing golf. Then we go back inside where people are lining up to dive into a pool. Pete and Kathy are there." "R...

via American Short Fiction https://ift.tt/2LMJswY

A fifty-year-old divorcee sips medicinal wine in a Nepalese mountain tent in Henri Colt's atmospheric tale. "Three nips and a cup." The shapely owner of the Himalayan teahouse smiles after filling my reusable marmalade jar with chang for the second time. I take three sips and, according to tradition, guzzle all that remains of the sweet barley wine. An empty plate of Dal Bhat lays next to my plastic lawn chair, not two feet from a cast-iron stove in the center of the room. The Nepali dish of steamed rice and lentils did little to calm my churning intestines. "Chang better than dal for upset stomach," the owner says. A lock of black hair thicker than a yak's coat covers her face when she leans forward to pour another glass. She brushes it behind her ear with a flick of the wrist and picks at her silver loop earrings. This time, she doesn't wait for me to drink, but returns to the kitchen, pausing to remove a dish from the golden oak table in the main...

Our grandchildren usually decorate our tree during Thanksgiving, but we didn’t get to share the holiday with them this year. There was just a moment when my husband and I talked about not going downstairs and bringing all the Christmas decorations up. However, that moment disappeared when I heard my favorite Christmas song; “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most famous poet of the 19th century, was inspired to write the poem, we know now, as the Christmas carol, on Christmas day in 1863. Two years earlier, he lost his wife of 18 years. She had been sealing envelopes with hot wax when a flame caught her clothes on fire. Henry rushed to her and tried to smother the flames, but it was too late; by the time the fire was out. She was burned beyond recovery and died the next day. He was also severely burned and too sick to attend her funeral. After her death, Longfellow became very depressed. He grew a beard to hide the scars from the fire on his fa...

An Ontario newspaper is on its last legs when a British gossip queen arrives to stir things up; by Brian Clark. She was the Tabloid Queen, schooled in the ways of Britain's racy scandal sheets, and someone had the bright idea of hiring her to run our stodgy old Canadian daily. She certainly caused a stir. Picture a piranha pool at mealtime. She was young, blond, thin and pretty - not to mention relentless. She had a high-voltage personality and liked to get her way. Picture a steamroller with perfect teeth. I had been at the Journal for 28 years when Debbie McIvor first marched into the newsroom. I was known as a survivor, having been spared the boot over countless rounds of layoffs. The Journal was a family-owned newspaper when I arrived in 1990 to work as a copy editor. It was a busy, bustling enterprise then, an aggressive but serious newspaper that regularly exposed corruption, uncovered scandals and unearthed government waste. We dug up dirt at city hall, police hea...