Tangled
Tangled
By Annie.
I’m seventeen years old today but I don’t know how sixteen is different from seventeen. And then seventeen turns into eighteen and nineteen and twenty, but I don’t like thinking that far ahead. “What is an age but a number?” My mother says to me. She is combing my waist length hair. Sometimes I feel like my hair is weighing me down when I walk. But today it comforts me; I like the smoothness of it and I can smell the lingering scent of green apple shampoo in my hair. I am old enough to be combing my own hair, but I let my mother do this ritual. It comforts her when she’s holding the comb and smoothing out the tangles.
When she tugs gently at my hair, I look at my reflection in the mirror. I see the scratch on my cheek, a zit blooming on my forehead, the roundness of my face and the shadows under my eyes. I see a mess of imperfections. Today is my birthday and I am seventeen. My mother doesn’t believe in birthdays, only that I am still her baby, her only child that was inside her. She has a hard time letting me go out. I hate it when she grumbles about weekend nights with my best friends. I want to go to the movies and not have that nagging worry in the back of my mind. I always worry about her, because she holds her loneliness too close inside. Ever since my father left two years ago, she’s told me that all we have is each other. That you shouldn’t trust buys, that the outside world is dangerous. She likes me here with her, but I feel like I am crumbling. My father didn’t take much with him, just a suitcase, a few books and his watch. I haven’t talked to him since.
Trading Places
Trading Places
By Fabio P.
We would meet at home after work drink Campari and go to the sauna. Religiously we would sit in the sauna, until the sweat dripped down our chest. He would tell me about Sweden, how they loved the sauna. Then we would jump in the pool, then the hot tub. After that the pool again, then the sauna and the pool once more. “It helps the immune system”, he told me, “In Sweden they go to sauna then they jump in the lake”. “I read about that when researching Finland back in high school” I told him once, “Sometimes they even have sauna out in the middle of the lake”. “Every building has a sauna. Usually on the top floor”, he would say, “and they love vodka and strawberry juice”. He was so much cooler than I ever was he traveled the world, alone.
He would talk about his journey. How he ended up with a son and a full time job surprised me sometimes. He told me how it all happened, but it never seemed like those were his intensions. He wanted to go to Australia. No wife, no kid. But shit happened. We started living together when I was twenty. I got the living room he got the bedroom. He still seemed like the seventeen year old kid he was in his stories.
We would drink together, a beer at dinner or a few beers at a club. Once we got drunk at home, it was the night before he went to Italy. We were taking shots in our kitchen that was the size of a large cubicle, except we had the gold-flaked black granite counter tops. On the sixth shot I mentioned that I might need to slow down, I will never forget what he said.”Slow down, what are you? A pussy?” Poking me in the chest, “You will get this shot! Don’t be fucking pussy!” I took the shot and many more after, without throwing up. I felt comfortable being with my dad, sturdy not wobbly. I would have thrown up with any one else. Before he went to sleep that night he told me. “Tomorrow my son, I will be in Italy, drinking with my dad, and tomorrow I will the son and he will be the father”.
Torture Row
Torture Row
By Karim Q.
By morning the florescent fortress is on lockdown. In the uneasy quiet of empty block-halls, fear floats like some miasmic gas. Through bars of steel the prisoners peer, their ears heal sharp for any unusual sounds, unable to see at any useful angel. A few distant crackles of walkie-talkies down the hall make several inmates perk up but the noise suggest nothing irregular. Hours pass in eerie lockdown silence.
Suddenly a low siren sounds, reverberating around D-block and into the cells making the men start. The inmates turn to those they can. Scattered shouts of disbelief, applause and claging of bars erupt among the cells, and for the first time in days, the men have grins on their collective faces. Some inmates shout “jailbreak, jailbreak!!” (for what else could the siren signify?), and listen over the clamor for the subsequent township-wide alarm.
It never comes. The siren fades off like a foghorn, blast again, then fades, continually blaring on-and-off. The prisoners’ excitement quickly dies into confusion, and their thickest silence yet settles beneath the siren. Abruptly, within the block crackles a chorus of walkie-talkies, and key-rings jangle all around the cells. The entire three shift of guards dash en masse from cell to cell, armed with batons and armored like myrmidons, and suddenly the tense prisoner quiet is cut by shouts of fearful rage, and the unmistakable sound of beatings. Cries of “get the fuck off” and “pigs” harmonize with boots and batons thudding against muscle and bone. Out of open cells the most resistant prisoners are dragged, handcuffed, into empty cells or shower holds to be locked in and bludgeoned. Though naked, though unarmed, some fight back only to be seized on by the armored mob. Outside of D-Block, the other blocks hear the shouts and grunts as distorted, ghostly echoes.
By dusk the cell-block has settled. The few unharmed inmates can do nothing but sit and whisper to their huddled neighbors who, broken and bloody, shudder underbeat the flickering florescent light. The prisoners are silent again: this time with the flat silence of defeat, as hoses was away the blood stains from the walls, the floor, the faces of the just rebellious men. Lockdown continues. Not quite death row.
Perfume
Perfume
By Stewart M.
I smelled your perfume where I sat in an aisle seat of a 747 but it was worn by a short and dumpy stewardess and every time she passed me with her carts of drinks I could not stop myself from remembering the time I first smelled it on you after I had skinned my knee climbing a wall to get to a vine laden with purple flowers just three minutes before you arrived at the café so radiant and with that perfume which seemed to emanate from the nape of your neck tucked in under your remarkable dark curls that were so thick they remained damp hours after you showered and then you asked about my torn pants and I glanced sheepishly up at the high growing vine and then down at the small bouquet in your hand and with a deep inhalation I kissed the side of your neck and smelled your perfume so sweet and so clean and that was the same scent I smelled in the plane returning home and damn it shook my smug conviction that I had forgotten you through means of booze and beach and happy Caribbean women because there was your perfume hanging in the air and it was ripping off the band aid of my fake cure and creating a wound anew while I was running down my list of half baked excuses for the sabotage I created and trying to feel some genuine confidence in that wreckage but when I got off that plane I went directly to your apartment I do not know why and with my bags in my hands I stood outside your window in the harsh wind and saw you silhouetted by a light against the closed blinds and you were brushing your hair with a tenderness that struck me hard and again the smell of your perfume came to me but this time I was only imagined while I watched you there and did nothing but stand in the cold wind and despair.
Yet Another Vampire Adventure
Note: This short story, Yet Another Vampire Adventure, is in a very draft form. I think I have only checked it once. It was supposed to be part of a short series of Vampire stories, but we will see how it goes. Let me know your feedback and comments are most welcome. Thanks, and I appreciate every one that reads it.
Warning this is story contains violence and disturbing content that might not be suitable for all ages.
Yet Another Vampire Adventure
Fear and passion intertwined at the moment his lips were about to meet her soft and carnal lips; he stopped for a moment with his eyes wide open and his heart beating so fast that his blood run wild throughout his body and his arms quickly embraced the girl and he got missed into the point of no return. After that his world became an interstellar war with the heat that her body transpired and the fast beating heart of hers was music to his ears.
He well knew that it was the first and last time he would experience that moment with her. Even thought he had just met her not even two hours ago, but yet he adventured to share this intimate moment with her, even if it could mean his death. He savored her aroma and slowly began to consume her energy making her zombie like, until she was under his control. He smiles and puts his teeth around her neck and the blood begins to flow freely and so do her memories. Images of her and her father playing on beach come alive and some more images of her graduating from college and then the images slowly fade away. He lets go of her and she falls into the bed.