People’s Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.

    The sun was out and the few remaining clouds were scudding away, but the barnyard was still too wet for playing. The grandkids joined Bob and Berta on the porch.      Bob had seen them looking curiously at the dust covered little car in the barn yesterday.  He’d begun wondering about the car’s mysterious equipment failure that had brought him here so many years ago, and his suspicions were on his mind when the kids clustered around him, begging for a story about the old days.

    “Did I ever tell you kids about the time I was kidnapped?”

    Berta’s oscillating chair jolted to a stop.

“No!” she and the grandkids said.

“Oh, Grandpa Bob,” the kids continued.  “Were you really?  Did you get hurt?  Were you scared?” The kids, ages five, six and seven, pressed closer, touching him gently.…

Read more: Arti by Neil McCabe

People’s Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.

I AM: unemployed once more, 4th time in past year, which is 100% tell-me-somethin’-I-don’t know info as

I AM: an L.A.-cliché, AKA failed TV writer, with lone 6-years-in-past credit, but 2-day is 2-day and

I AM: on Zuma sands, sweating ass in yellow plastic chair.

I AM: sans sunblock yet again,

I’M: still on Prozac, AND

I’M: reading something calculated to make me more attractive to some Baywatch beauty-type, though she’d need a degree in contemporary Lit or else won’t recognize name of author of same Grove Press tome which I hold, but don’t read really- a ploy, as I say, to gain the interest of some boobs and brain dream-combo and NOT the fully-dressed man with the John Brown-wild, granite-colored hair and beard who, as he stands like darkened dew-fat cloud between yours truly and the warm-as-raisin toast sun, is fucking with my George Hamilton, and who claims

I am your biological father

and who has tracked me here to this spot, he further elaborates, after having received tip from faux-Jamaican accented mama answering the telephone at 1-900 psychic thinggy – but he could just as easily have found my # & my address after B.S.-ing some nosey neighbor, Crazy Kelly no doubt, she with aged tattoo of weeping Jesus on Pillsbury-Doughboy white left ass cheek, latter and its twin in serious need of Thigh-Master action to point that Jesus, when Kelly sashays in satiny G-string bikini bottom after leaving my apartment door disappointed yet again, shimmer-moves and appears to be face from LSD flashback (Vermont, 1979, Neil Young plucking acoustic guitar in converted cow pasture, and me speaking aloud to any funhouse-mirror faced fellow concert-goer nearby fluent German, I think, having never studied same) all wavy’n shit and Kelly always slapping at same ass cheek with turquoise ring-weighted hand, reminding me that “he’s” (weeping tattoo Saviour) “got my ass covered!” then haw-hawing at own quasi double-entendre & extending invitation # 332 to me to drink Mickey’s tallboys by our apartment building’s kidney-shaped pool, said pool overflowing with water the color of that which passes thru same organ, but I digress; daddy, or so he claims, could’ve gotten info on my whereabouts any number of places/sources, though when he mentions

You were born in Washington D.C.…

Read more: Historical Insignificance by Garrett Clancy

People’s Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.

        Seven squid jiggers line the weathered dock like seagulls. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder, hair amiss from a significant east wind, waiting for their prey. Their hands are covered with ocean slime, dirty water sloshes over onto their shoes and the sound of a distant foghorn goes unnoticed in an otherwise silent night.

      I live on a rock where jiggers welcome the black of night like hungry bats. They use the dock nearest my house. On the east side of the island, the dock juts some 300 feet into the deep waters of Puget Sound. The dock, they say, has been here almost as long as there have been people living on the island.

    Sometimes I walk by the fishermen at night filling my lungs with fog and mist and occasionally rain, on my way to the Toolies to dance and drink with others who gather to avoid lonely nights in dark houses, alone with last year’s thoughts. …

Read more: Squid Jiggers by Judi Blaze

First Place Award Winning Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.

After my father left us, my mother began speaking to people I couldn’t see and never answered the door. When she was institutionalized, I became a ward of the State, but only for a week.  The court awarded custody to my uncle, who took me to live with him and Aunt Rose on their farm in McMinn County.

“She’s your ma, Melissa,” Uncle Luther said of his sister.  “She’s afflicted with real bad nervous spells; always has been.”

I was seven-years-old and had never been outside Knoxville.  I remembered little of my father, and my mother’s intractable moods rendered her incapable of bestowing affection, so, emotionally, I had left nothing behind.

The sun had not shown its face since morning, the sky rippled and twisted into gray whorls, but then, just before dusk, as we turned off the main dirt road to an even narrower one leading to their house, the same house where my mother had grown up, it streaked low, lingering clouds in scarlet and purple. …

Read more: Fields Where Glory Does Not Stay by Lones Seiber

People’s Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.

      After the passing of Camilla, it was as if everything living had ceased to fly over the village of Grande Fleuve.

      Once an important trading town buoyed by the reign of King Sugar, many moons of silt and remembrance had rendered its once thriving channels unnavigable, causing nature and its people to turn their back on the rest of the country; they became the  people of a dreamtime, with sandbanks and wiry mangrove closing the door to the world outside them.

      The town had been founded and designed by Mr. Oxley Keats, the unclaimed bastard child of the once flourishing Keats sugar plantation. In the hope that God would absolve him of his illegitimacy, he had originally designed the village to look like a giant crucifix from above, with King’s Lane forming the main business base and Queen’s Trace completing the apex.…

Read more: Madame du Jour (Lady of the Day) by Solange Anduze James

The doves stare through the bars of their cage, the opened slats of the blinds, the tight mesh of the window screens, into the dismal, sunless morning. They are mystified, it seems; the world is as much a mystery to them as they are to Mary. She watches them while she waits for the water to boil; she can smell the newly ground coffee.

She wakes Tennyson with a kiss and a glass of orange juice. He is the only little child she has ever known — heard of — who likes to sleep in but, this morning, he wakes with a huge smile and throws his arms around her neck, surprising her and spilling a few drops of her coffee onto his favorite pajamas.

"Oops!" he says. "I got it dirty." She smiles.

"It’ll wash out," Mary tells him.

He sits up, takes the oj and swallows it in one large gulp.…

Read more: “The Thing with Feathers” by Evan Guilford-Blake

Just east of New Orleans, outside of the town of Slidell, something in the rear axle of the car gave way with a bang. The wrecker, when it showed up, was an old Ford with rust stains streaking down the fenders like stripes. A black-painted legend on the door read Dan Hebert Towing. Dan Herbert himself was thirty-ish, sun-dark, wearing Rayban sunglasses and a Peterbilt cap. "You called for a tow?" he asked them.

The garage that Dan Hebert towed the car to was just a large tin shed, open on one side, a concrete slab for a floor. It was set back from the road in a field by itself, surrounded by the rusty frames of twenty or thirty stripped cars. Dan eased the Monaco backwards into the shed, onto a waiting hydraulic lift.

Dan pointed out a wooden picnic table under an oak tree, among the carcasses of the parted-out cars.…

Read more: “Low Tide Turning” by John Blair

I never wanted to have kids. I had mom and dad. And that was enough for me.

Ever since I can remember, they’ve behaved like children, bratty, infantile and unrestrained. Amid all the melodrama, someone had to be the adult in the family. And on my sixth birthday, it was decided it would be me.

That year, dad showed up late for my party, smelling of cigarettes and cheap perfume. The kind his secretary wore to the company Christmas dinner a few days earlier, when she sat next to her boss looking more like his wife than my mom did. Her left hand never made an appearance at the table that night. "The whore" barely touched her food, so busy was she touching my father’s T-bone. I wasn’t there. But I got served all the sordid details with my slice of triple chocolate birthday cake. So did my classmates who looked terrified under their party hats.…

Read more: “Scrambled Lives” by Doris Chauvancy

"So what do you think?" she asks, sitting across from me wide-eyed and terrified.

"What do I think?" I repeat. I’m totally unprepared for this.

—

I haven’t seen her in at least a year, and other than the occasional online exchange, we haven’t had any real contact since that random beach outing last summer when she called to see if I had any interest in an F-train journey to Brighton Beach.

"Brighton Beach?" I asked at the time, flippant in my tone, "why would I want to go there?" Now that I think about it, perhaps our entire relationship has been a series of her asking me questions and me asking them back.…

Read more: “Old Friends” by Ruvym Gilman

I am my mother’s daughter. Our faces align themselves in the mirror of her bathroom. Our eyes large and blue-green. Hers are mostly green and mine are mostly blue. Our hands are making the same movements, applying dark mascara to the length of our eyelashes, our birthmarks brightening with concentration. Her lips are moving, and I am mesmerized. I’m not really listening. I’m following the sound of her voice and wondering if this is what I sound like to her. Our hair is brown; our skin is fair. She is much taller than I am, but if I wear heels it’s hard to tell us apart. The lines around her mouth and eyes are the only things that give us away.…

Read more: “The Week My Sister Died” by Kari Wicker