Shots (a true story)

By Pat Hamilton

Nick and I walked home from the campus movie, knowing that a few cold beers in the breeze on the front porch would cap the end of a long stifling summer day.
    “Help! Help!” someone cried next door. “They’re killing us all in here!”

Fiction: Her Name(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

My one-block street goes straight to a high school. I look out a window all day every day onto that street, only because my laptop rests on a desk so that sunlight falls on it. Through the window I can see if it rains, or really, if rain has brought down sticks or limbs from three huge oaks onto my front yard that I must clear away before I mow. Woodpeckers love those oaks, and sometimes a hawk visits. When it snows or freezes, I can gauge road conditions by how many cars brave my one-block street, always the last one salt-trucks clear. But mostly, I watch students heading from left to right to school and returning from right to left at 2:30 in the afternoons.

Fiction: Stitched Up

Thanks for the cover
of the April 13, 2023
New Yorker magazine

By Claude May

As far as we have been able to ascertain, the members of the committee known as The Protectors gathered sometime very early in 2019 near Richmond, Virginia, at the home of their Chairman. Most of those present were of the committee’s third generation.
    We have established that the committee considered it their obligation to serve the Union, to keep its flag stitched together. They rarely gathered, but when they did, it was on a matter of the direst importance.

“Acts of Love” Honorably Mentioned

By Moristotle

“Acts of Love,” my entry for the State Library of North Carolina Accessible Books & Library services 2022 Writing Contest, did not place among the winners, but it did receive an honorable mention, for which I am grateful.

    “Acts of Love” had nowhere near the substance of 2021’s resolute march through the rugged terrain of philosophical argument, so I did not expect a repeat of last year’s report that “‘Goines On’ Goes On to Win [the] State Library of North Carolina 2021 Writing Contest.” I suppose that the desperate meta-fictional twist I pulled off in “Acts of Love” captured an honorable mention by virtue of its “creativity” (the statement shown below lists the qualities the judges look for).

Fiction: B-B Ranch (a short story)

Larry Bailie helping a friend put
up some fence in the Everglades

By Larry Bailie

My Aunt Pat and Uncle Dutch Bailie had a cattle business called the B-B Ranch, in a place in the middle of nowhere way out north of Naples called Corkscrew. They had no children, although she had a boy from her first marriage named Jimmy who was away in the Navy. Around Christmastime, my dad told me we were going to Uncle Dutch’s ranch to pick up meat for the family. I, being the oldest at the ripe old age of eleven, would go with him to help.

All Over the Place: The Problem with Marvin (short story)

By Michael H. Brownstein

Marvin called time and temperature many times during the week. He felt he needed to hear another human voice and too often he felt the recording was a real person talking only to him. Then one beautiful Thursday morning, he dialed the number and the voice said, “Marvin, get outside. It’s a beautiful day. Just beautiful. Go to the park, sit on a bench, go to the zoo, wander around. Go.”

All Over the Place: Hunger Pains (short story)

By Michael H. Brownstein

I’m finished with the second box of matzo and we still have a hundred or so miles to go. One piece of matzah every ten to twenty miles. It keeps me awake, and I like the way it crunches, changes texture, leaves a slight film in my mouth. I always take a five- to ten-mile break between each piece.
    “Hey,” I wake my wife, “I need a bathroom and I’m out of food. We’re coming on to Dwight. I’m going to get some food for us there.”

All Over the Place: Train Tracks (short story)

By Michael H. Brownstein

The shortcut to Steven’s house was about two blocks from the train station. Every day he walked on one of two train tracks. He could smell the home-cooked meal his sister had bragged about two hours earlier. When he saw the train coming towards him, he took a step to the left and easily reached the other track. He did not know of the second train until it was too late, and that was that.

All Over the Place: The Gift (short story)

By Michael H. Brownstein

He sat in the third car of the subway, his large bag in the seat beside him heavy with grief, bad choices, and terrible memories. He thought how hard it would be to kill himself on a train, but maybe not—he could walk from one car to the next just as the train swayed and fall out, or he could stand up and confront a group of gangbangers.

Fiction: Our Destination(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“So we agree,” Billy clarified, “to think about finding a second home, for the purpose of spending times of fair weather in one, foul weather in the other. Are we, so far, of one mind?”
    “Yes,” Paula agreed.
    “Then it seems to me our next step is to narrow down possible locations.”

Fiction: Brunch(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

While speaking of splurging and the topic of champagne, Paula opined that brunch was the most exquisite form of splurge.
    Billy could not yet concur. “So many conflicting feelings about brunch!”
    Paula answered, “Not one single thing is ever simple with you,” shaking her head.

Fiction: Billy Lets Go (a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“No, love. I’m done praising the virtues of our freckled leguminous friends. Allow me just to add that adding a spoonful of vinegar to each bowl right before you serve the beans serves miraculously to solve the flatulence problem.”
    Paula knows this. “You’ve told me this same thing every time I ask you why you put vinegar in.”

Fiction: One Lazy Day(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

One lazy night, after they’d lazed in bed all day and taken their properly cooked but previously frozen lasagna and a ring of shrimp with cocktail sauce into the den to dine while watching Happy Christmas, Paula asked whether Billy preferred traveling or staying at home. They’d already spent three years locked down at home, and this plague kept returning just when everyone began to act as if it were gone.

Fiction: I Have Seen the Past(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Flick flick flick sounds.
    Frustrated, Paula screams, “I just need to light this one last ciggy. I just need it right now! “
    Here we are in the present.
    Click click click.

Fiction: She Likes It Cold(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Even long before the wedding, Paula knew they were doomed.
    She liked it cold. Windows-open-in-winter cold. Air conditioners from the 1970s set on 8 in November. Running barefoot in the snow and freezing sleet to retrieve the mail. She’d bring the old-lady neighbors their mail, too. Barefoot in snow.

Fiction: Movie Night(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“Remember you told me I’d have to tell you about all my lovers someday,” Paula reminded, “but I was so cool that I never did? Haha!”
    “I do remember, and yes, you are so cool. I said you didn’t have to.”

Return of the Cheshire Cat? (a short story)

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

[Note: There’s a postscript at the bottom about the real cat.]

Chainsaw in hand, he eyed the fallen tree and wondered if he should tackle it first, or the one next to it that was leaning but had not yet toppled. Another storm, another downed tree. The joy of owning a wooded property.

Fiction: Can’t Shoot ’Em(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“The imbalance of power between women and men since the Middle Ages correlates precisely to the replacement of worship of Astarte with that of Yahweh back in the dusty middle-eastern misogynist deserts of numberless aeons ago.”

Goines On: Acts of love

Click image for more vignettes

The deadline was barely a week away for the State Library of North Carolina’s Accessible Books and Library Services’ writing contest. Goines was becoming desperate. His ideas for selecting some of his recent writings and shaping everything thematically into a cohesive narrative weren’t coming together. He needed to get organized, oil his brain, light a flame.
    Goines suggested to Mrs. Goines that they have a pot of their favorite tea. She didn’t hear him, because she was sitting at the dining table concentrating on the large jigsaw puzzle of a Paris map she had brought back from France two months earlier.

Fiction: Huevos con Chorizo(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

This Mexican egg specialty, originating, actually, with the Mayans roughly 7,200 years ago, offers not just ease of preparation, but magnificence of taste, especially if you’re a newbie young gringo or African-American or a Lufthansa flight attendant on a stopover at Billy’s house on your way to the Taj Mahal or some similarly exotic destination and Billy begs you to take him with you, to free him from the figurative and literal claws of his wife, Paula, who is trying to kill him, but very slowly, he avers.