Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [12]

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12. Bayo led Ras to a shack so far up the mountain

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is  t h e  Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.]

Rocky Road Is More Than a Candy Bar (Excerpt 1 from an autobiography)

Chapter 3 opens: A new teacher’s first day

[Editor’s Note: Jim Rix has introduced us to the 4th volume of Shirley Skufca Hickman’s autobiography in his own autobiographical column, “My Life,” and William Silveira reviewed the book on March 18. So, today, we present an excerpt from the book, the opening of Chapter 3, in which the author describes the first day of her first week as a new high school teacher. The rest of the chapter will appear on Wednesday. And remember, if you know how to access Amazon.com, you can “look inside” the book there.]

Bootleggers on the River after a Fresh Night Rain

By Blake Adamson

Black sludge for water
Full of muck and that pond stink
The moon’s drenched in haze
Just after the rain
The woods are like pitch
And the going slow

The Loneliest Liberal’s new soubriquet

Acting Citizen:
What a privilege
to be just that

By James Knudsen

My January 2017 column announced that a “New sobriquet [was] acomin’.” The 3-year delay serves as further proof that when it comes to procrastination, I perform at an Olympic level.

Ghost Fish (Part 5 of a Story for My Son)

Uncle Carl, age 93, after a recent trip
to Quebec, on what turned out to be our
last trip to the family “camp” (cabin,
we would call it here) at Tug Hill, NY.
He was still walking – carefully
– and casting a flyrod on this trip,
but he would die within two months

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

It took me 40 years to realize that it wasn’t just a fish I was chasing, it was the life I had created in my mind that I would have lived if only: if only my family hadn’t moved south, if only I had lived closer to my aunt and uncle, if only I could have traded the really not too bad life I had grown up with in Virginia for the unproven but dreamed of much better life I might have had Upstate. By then, my father had been dead 20 years, my mother and my uncle Carl had died four years previous, and I had put my life and businesses on hold to assure that my ailing aunt died in her home, as I had promised Carl I would.

West Coast Observer: What’s in a name?

By William Silveira

Undergraduates in Yale College who were residing in residential Calhoun College in academic year 2016-2017 started residing in Hopper College the following year. They didn’t accomplish that by moving their stuff from one residential college to another, but by Yale University’s renaming Calhoun College (after John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who served as the seventh vice president of the United States) to Hopper College (after Grace Murray Hopper, an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral).

My Life [6]

Getting Cousin Ray out of prison

By Jim Rix

Early in the 1990s, while SoftRix was taking off, we learned that a distant cousin of mine, Ray Krone, was on death row. My mother assured me he was innocent, and since she was an objective thinker, not subject to the whims of bias, I decided to look into it. I visited Ray and examined court records, soon becoming convinced that my mother was right. Ray was innocent and we provided significant assistance to secure his release. But, hey, I offered in Chapter 1 to practically give you a copy of my book about that. Go read it.

Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [11]

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11. As he sipped his grapefruit and rum

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is  t h e  Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.]

Songs of an Irishman: My Father’s Watch

By Michael McLoughlin

[Editor’s Note: With the publication of his story today, we welcome Michael McLoughlin as the latest columnist to join our staff. The story also launches his column, “Songs of an Irishman.” His entry in the sidebar tells us a bit about him. Thanks to Columnist Roger Owens for introducing Michael to us.]

About four or five years after my father passed away, my mother found a poem in the newspaper about how one’s name is passed on from father to son and we should keep our name clean and not let it fall into disgrace. She asked me to make an enlarged copy for her at work, which I did. I kept a copy myself and put it above my desk at work. I read it, and then just forgot about it, and it hung there among the many other items pinned to my board.

[Rave] Book Review: The Time of the Canton

His father’s story

By Roger Owens

In his historically reconstructed story, The Time of the Canton: A Sea Story, Michael McLoughlin takes us on a journey through light and darkness, in the now nearly mythical age of the German U-Boat Wolf Packs of World War Two, which terrorized the sea lanes practically unopposed. Hundreds of ships, huge tonnages of supplies, along with thousands of crew and passengers, met a watery death at the Wolf Packs’ cruel hands.

Uncle Juan

By Cory Adamson










Couldn’t keep his hands
off that one type of woman.
Gave his nephew a whole
colony of aunts. Revolution
was inevitable, and copper
headed Juan was overthrown.

Boldt Words & Images: Vampires’ love

Greta Thunberg

A poem

By Bob Boldt

“If the Nuremberg laws were impartially enforced and applied, all thirteen US presidents since FDR should have been hung.” –Noam Chomsky

Ghost Fish (Part 4 of a Story for My Son)

Sunset where Grindstone Creek flows into
Lake Ontario at Selkirk Shores State Park,
about 5 miles south of my family's old
NY farm. If you are going to waste
countless hours hopelessly casting a fly
to a wraith of a fish, the epic
sunsets are at least a wonderful reward.

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Back home in Virginia, after that first trip to Upstate New York, despondent over all I was missing by not being raised there, life was a slow burn. If we had a foot of snow, local people cowered; Upstate, my uncle called that “a skiff of snow, a dusting.” That was the life, I thought, especially in summer, when our front porch thermometer soared toward 95 degrees, and my uncle would confirm by letter that it was only 75 there.

Sketches from the Twin Cities: Apocalyptic Haikus

Series I

By Geoffrey Dean

The guillotine fell,
its severing slice precise –
fine execution

Book Review: Rocky Road Is More Than a Candy Bar

The fourth volume of Shirley Skufca Hickman’s autobiography

By William Silveira

Rocky Road Is More Than a Candy Bar is the fourth volume of Shirley Skufca Hickman’s memoirs. The first volume started out in the small coal mining settlement of Crested Butte, Colorado, where she was born. She now takes us to her first job as a teacher after graduating from Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado.