dreamszilla

An old man bids his beloved car goodbye in Brian Clark's nostalgic tale. Image generated with OpenAI Russell stepped out onto the front porch and closed the door quietly. Beth was napping and he didn't want to wake her. Consideration for his wife accounted for only part of his motive. He eased his way down the three porch steps, his back and knees protesting in equal measure, and hobbled along the front walk to the driveway. He stopped and gazed at the big old car parked in front of the garage, his eyes drawn to the patches of rust, the scratched paint, the dents. He brushed a colourful accumulation of dry leaves off the hood, then began to circle the car slowly, pausing here and there to gently rest his hand on the sedan. When he reached the back, he stopped to examine the shattered right taillight and the severely gouged bumper below it. He sighed. It wasn't my fault, he thought. That driver came out of nowhere. And yet, he hadn't driven since that d...

Phil is enjoying a lads' holiday on a Greek island when he's brutally attacked for no reason; by Will Kemp. Image generated with OpenAI He'd never known such pain. His chest, right ear and foot throbbed; even breathing hurt. And that pounding behind his right eye - as if he were no longer a young man with a damaged eyeball but a damaged eyeball attached to a young man. All he could do was inhale the smell of disinfectant and lie still - bandages binding him from head to foot, arms strapped across his chest like a dead pharaoh. Sunlight slanted through a window to his left, giving the ward the warmth of a greenhouse. It must be late morning. He could remember the night before in waves - the iodine in A&E, being carried into the ward as two old men coughed and groaned, unattended. There was no sign of them now, their beds already stripped and made, flowers and photographs long since cleared away. A clack of heels echoed down the corridor then stopped, leav...

Gary Ives' character tells of a fateful secret that steered the course of his family's life. Image generated with OpenAI Please realize this is a secret I've kept for years. We - our mother, my twin Michael, and I - lived in St. Anthony's parish. When Mike and I were just seven our father, a fire-fighter, died just before Thanksgiving after months of hospitalization due to burns suffered pulling survivors from a burning apartment complex. Mom visited Dad's bedside every morning right after attending nine o'clock mass. I remember us going to J.C. Penny's, Mom buying our suits for Dad's funeral, and I well remember the funeral: the firetrucks and all the firemen in dress uniforms, each one coming to shake our hands, telling Mom and us what a great hero Dad was. At the funeral Mom was walking wobbly, using a walker because she had been released from the hospital only two days earlier where she had donated a kidney, this precious gift given eve...

Squirt tells the story of picking up a mute and mysterious hitchhiker on a road trip from Canada to Mexico at the dusk of the 1960s; by Don McLellan. Image generated with OpenAI It was nineteen sixty-nine or thereabouts, and something was in the air. Richie Havens opened the love-in known as the Woodstock Music Festival, that world-weary voice crooning "Freedom" from a sloppy cow pasture in upper New York State. The Front de Liberation du Québec bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange. Love and hate; it was the tenor of the times. Nowadays he was beginning to slow down, get confused, especially after the liver disease took Laverne, but he remembers that long-ago summer more clearly than most others. There was North Vietnam's Tet offensive. Marches and sit-ins, more bang. It was the summer of The Godfather and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Of Abbey Road. Short skirts and hair-trigger tempers. That year was also eventful for him. On a hot June night a girl wh...

Sami wakes up with a hangover and a big black dog that isn't hers; by Kathy Lanzarotti. Image generated with OpenAI The dog in her dream was a big black lab. Its thick tail thumped on the floor of her bedroom. "S-A-M-I," it said happily. A long pink tongue dangled over its chin for a moment before it spoke again, "S-A-M-I!" He can talk! Sami thought. How cute! The dog sat up on his hind legs, and expelled a hot miasma of rotten eggs. "T-H-A-N-K - Y-O-U - S-A-M-I." "What are you spelling?" The words jumbled together in her dream. Sami tried to make sense of the letters that tumbled from the dog's mouth. "Slow down!" she said. Her head was starting to hurt. "Why are you spelling?" The dog stopped. Its brown eyes widened in realization. "Oh," it said. "Old habits die hard I guess." Its voice was clipped. Sami detected a hint of a British accent. She was delighted when h...