See. The little stick editor and the little stick writer look happy. You will be too.  Be one of the first to be published with this very different approach. Also, it’s free, all you have to do is sign up: http://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/register/ This feature will launch sometime this week.

]]> http://www.everywritersresource.com/shortstories/submit-your-work-to-many-editors/2013/feed/ 0 http://www.everywritersresource.com/shortstories/resume-by-kristin-leprich/2013/ http://www.everywritersresource.com/shortstories/resume-by-kristin-leprich/2013/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 02:27:08 +0000 admin http://www.everywritersresource.com/shortstories/?p=1992

Batman Steals 3rd by William R. “Dooby” Tomkins Jr.

Resume

by Kristin Leprich

To whom it may concern,

I am applying to be the main hero of this fairy tale.

Let me start with this, though: there are some things in this world that you just… know. You don’t hear about these kinds of things in school. Books and lectures from parents can’t prepare you for it, either. For example, a woman pushes and a baby squalls and suddenly, you know it’s not yours. Depression and anger get married, and you know you’re the bridesmaid, even if you weren’t asked. And have you ever looked in the mirror and wondered if the face you saw was yours or not? Why do you wonder at all? You wonder and then you remember you have a receipt for this heart that was given to you, but you know you’ll be given less money back if you return it.

That being said, I am applying to be the main hero of this fairy tale. I believe–no, I know–that I am qualified for this position because I will do what heroes do. I will climb the tallest mountains to find the edge of my lover’s world. I will grow wings that, when the intensity of the wind is at its highest, can help me carry anyone to safety. I will change my heart so that it can contain the pain of all the other characters; it will be so grand that no other organ will have to feel a thing. Again, I know that I am qualified for this position. I already have hands large enough to cage the lungs of my enemies if words alone do not suffice. My life has already been nothing but one lesson I could teach to others so they can ponder for a moment. And besides, even if you think otherwise, even if the readers think otherwise, there is no limit to the amount of illusions a mind can create in order to keep hearts beating. If you want to test that limit, I will be that illusion. I will be what you need. I know that
I am what you need.

I thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Your Hero

Man at Work

by Marijke Hillmann

The acrid smells of cigarette butts and stale beer hover above the music blaring from the jukebox and the noisy banter on an early afternoon in the Windhoek pub.

An outburst of raucous laughter as the door opens and a pyjama-clad six-plus- footer enters, an IV-device strapped to his arm. The regulars greet him. ‘You managed to escape the nuns from the clinic over the road again, Horst? ‘

He pulls himself up on a barstool, positions the IV drip against the counter and shouts out for a draught beer. ‘Teatime at the hospital is over in 15 minutes, so make it snappy, please’.

With a proprietary air, he asks to see the accounts and has a quick browse through the books. ‘You guys not doing your bloody job, then’ he says ‘the takings are down – you skimming me or what?’

He bangs his hand on the bar counter. ‘It is filthy in here – you guys thought I had died and gone to hell already, have you? Not before you mop those floors and empty the ashtrays – chop chop!!!’

Downing two pints, the pub owner gets up with a sigh and bellows: ‘see you in two days – you can all have one fricking drink on me tonight……….it is my birthday. Sorry can’t join you – need to sober up for yet another op tomorrow’.

He hobbles back to the clinic, crosses the road impatiently and shows his middle finger to a driver who brakes to a screeching halt.

Horst survives his operation, a car accident, two armed robberies and a devastating fire at his pub, but loses the battle against an ailing liver some five years later.

###
Marijke Hillmann writes a monthly story about Africa for our site. You can find out more about her and the time in her life she is writing about here: African in Short. http://www.everywritersresource.com/shortstories/africa-in-short-by-marijke-hillmann/2013/

Yawn by Jim Sholes

The Merger

by Laura Goodchild

The initial paperwork was signed a year to the day after they met. This was seen as proper protocol. Both parties were far from satisfied with the partnership but the merger went ahead anyway, they both had something to gain after all.

True to her side of the terms it was only once their children had grown and moved away did the female begin to consider their deal complete. Being the gentleman he was it was only after the female began to show signs of aging did the male begin to interview others for the job title.

Both wished to terminate their agreement but neither wished to fill out the necessary paperwork.

Bootlegs

by Adam Daniel

We told our parents we were going fishing. My brother stuffed contraband down one of his bootlegs, and we set out for the creek in the woods behind our house.

Nothing good ever came from those boots. He wore them black and with a pointed toe.

I asked him, “Why do you wear them with a point?”

“They are best for climbing chain link fences,” he said. “You never know when you will need to climb a fence.”

When we were children, it was small things: lighters lifted from convenience stores, nips of liquor swiped from our parent’s cabinet, a crumpled package of cigarettes.

At the creek, we smoked. Or took turns pulling from the bottle of dark, warm liquid. We skimmed rocks along the water and watched the sunlight turn hazy. Not once did we fish.
No longer creek beds and whiskey, but vacant lots and switchblades. I saw my brother cut a kid across the cheek. It was the way he carried the blade that got to me. It was as if it belonged in his hand. The action was quick and cold and deliberate. You hardly saw it. The next thing you knew, a boy, just like any other neighborhood boy was flailing on the ground, trying to hold flaps of his face together.

When he got the truck, we did not see him for days at a time. My mother stayed up late watching movies. Dad paced the kitchen drinking beer and muttering. I waited in his bedroom playing solitaire with my lucky deck.

I slept in his bed on these nights. I listened for him to come home, for the heels of those boots to click on the driveway and up the stairs. I fell asleep and dreamt of the adventures he was having with the newfound freedom the truck gave him.

He woke me with beer breath, pushed me to the side, and crawled into bed. Boots and clothes and all.

The last time I saw my brother, it was from across the bar. He was pulling a bag of coke from the leg of his boot. I ordered a beer. He went to the bathroom. While he was gone, I ordered him one too. When he came back and the bartender pointed him in my direction, he did not look. He nodded, drank, and walked out on me forever.

Last week I saw his boots in the window of a pawn shop just on the edge of town.

###

Adam Daniel studied English at The University of Texas. He currently lives and writes in Austin.

First Date

by John Faugno

He was attractive in a rugged, older sort of way. I think I heard someone say he was twenty-six. I wore my cutest red top the next day, the one that shows off my chest without being slutty. We talked after class. He flirted perfectly, and when he asked me to have coffee with him I couldn’t do anything but say yes. I actually said “sure, whenever.” I was smitten.

The back seat of his car smelled strange. Laying there, I tried to place the odor without success. It was dark out, but I couldn’t see from my vantage. On my back, against the velour, staring up at the ceiling, my hands pinned under me. The shortness of breath was because of the duct tape over my mouth.

He said he was a forensics student like me. He would know how to leave no evidence. It smelled of formaldehyde. “Sure, whenever” make poor last words.

What The Murderer Had Left

by Bahri Gordebak

It was nearly evening when a young albino came to the café that I was in and sat down at one of the tables.

He was facing a teenage girl at another table whose eyes widened when she noticed him. It was apparent that she saw an albino for the very first time.

I did not care about them at first.

After a while, I realized that the teen was trying hard not to look at the albino, but she could not manage it and went on staring at his white hair. Who knows what she was thinking?

Surely, the other was bothered and he never turned his head from the sandwich he ate. Obviously, he was trying to ignore her examination.

When I threw them to the winds and looked out from the window, I was thinking about the man I saw in a railway station several years ago.

There was half an hour to the departure of the train, and I was going to wait. When I found a spare seat and sat down, the man sitting against me struck my attention.

One of his eyes was grippingly prominent. This eye gave the man a somewhat scary appearance, although he had an amiable face.

I was thinking a hundred things, “Surely it is inborn. It must be hard for him. Maybe he is used to it. I wonder what would it be being like him. I wonder what kind of a childhood he spent.” and so on. The questions I had absolutely would go unanswered. But as I thought these, I must have been staring at him.

Suddenly he smiled, “Are you going somewhere or welcoming someone?” he asked.

I sobered and answered, “Returning home.”

“Me too.” he said, “I am just evicted from prison.”

“Really? I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. I murdered a man.”

I could not find anything more to say.

He triumphantly went on, “He was staring at me.”

Since then, when I saw someone staring at another, I recalled him. Maybe he lied but all the same. I was looking out through the window to the reddening sky, smiling pitifully. “If only,” I thought, “the albino boy has killed someone too.”

###

Bahri Gordebak is a writer whose two novels and some comic scripts were published in Turkey. He’s a short story enthusiast and wants to write them more.

The White Suit

by Marijke Hillmann

1992 – A small village in Limpopo Province – South AfricThe White Suit by Marijke Hillmanna

In round-eyed wonder Vusi stares at the telegram:  “…….bursary application – BSc Mining Engineering……..invited to attend 3-day selection programme in Johannesburg”.

The high school certificate with 2 distinctions is safely tucked away underneath his brother’s white wedding suit in the borrowed suitcase. He climbs into the mini-bus taxi and jostles the 600 km to the big city along with 23 other jobseekers and returning domestic workers.

That evening in the mining company training centre he hangs the white suit on the door handle of the bedroom wardrobe.

It is worn the next day when the company bus takes all bursary hopefuls for a visit to the gold mine. They descend into the deep, hot and noisy bowels of the earth.

Carefully folded in a locker the white suit awaits Vusi’s return to the change house.

Sweating profusely, the applicants take a shower, get dressed and subdued they leave for the centre at midday.

The next day Vusi undergoes a medical examination at the mine hospital and writes a series of aptitude and cognitive tests, the white suit by now somewhat the worse for wear.

On the final day he attends a panel interview.  Donned in his creased white suit he stands before a five-man delegation and waits patiently until he is asked to sit down. Eyes respectfully downcast he answers their questions and stammers: “eehh……in ten years’ time? I want to earn money for my family. …..”

One week later another telegram arrives: “Unfortunately…..unsuccessful…” The white suit on the wire hanger is returned to its rightful place on the rusty hook in his brother’s shack.

One year later the white suit makes its very last journey when Vusi’s brother succumbs to AIDS.

From London Street Art by Run

On Layers

by Ron Singer

“Penny,” said she.

“Chickens. I was thinking of Jeff and Jen.”

“They’re not …”

“Of their chickens.”

“Their hens.”

“Yes, aren’t hens that lay eggs called ‘layers’?”

“Of course. Hmm, do they become ‘roasters,’ ‘broilers,’ or ‘friers’ only after they stop being layers?”

“Or are ‘layers’ already ‘roasters,’ etc?”

“Hyphenated appellation, perhaps. ‘Millie is a roaster-layer.’ ”

“I think not. Too elaborate for a chicken.”

“Well, duh. There are probably cultures where chickens bear the hyphenated name of mother plus mate, perhaps with a first name, as well.”

“Like ‘Cluckie Penny-Chanticleer.’ ”

“That smacks of henophobia, you pig!”

“Whatever. You allude, I take it, not to my … er, my rooster chauvinism, but to my porcine layer. Not to change the subject, but to change the subject, layers are basic to life. Let’s play The Layers Dozens. You go first.”

“Layers of meaning.”

“Geological strata.”

“Psychological layers: subliminal blah-blah.”

“That gets to the bottom line.”

“Cake, skin, history, brick, deceit, understanding. There’s even a technical term in gardening: a bent shoot covered with soil so that it takes root and becomes a new plant. Not to mention ‘layer’ as a transitive verb.”

“’Speaking of which, would you like to get laid now?”

“Hmm, depends. Can I be on top, the layer? Will you be my lay-ee?”

“Why not? But, first, one (or twenty) more layers: I was recalling that transformational-generative analysis you did back in grad school of the famous line from Milton. How does it go? ‘Him the almighty hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky with …”

“ ‘almighty power hurled’ … and so on. That’s just the surface structure.”

“ ‘Just’!”

“My analysis, you will recall, was inspired by Roman Jakobson’s famous unpacking of  “I like Ike.” I thought, ‘Ha ha, my sigma is so much bigger than his.’ As I recall, the deep structure begins,  THE POWER [THE POWER BE ALMIGHTY]. The rest, as they say, is all in the predicate.”

“Or, as you put it, ‘God is lonely in the diagram.’ How many embedded sigmas did there turn out to be, thirty-eight?  With thirty-six of them in the predicate. Talk about a right-heavy structure!”

“Yep, right heavy, podner.”

“But hold! Enough!”

“Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 8. ‘At least we’ll die with harness on our back.’ ”

“No, no let’s take off all our clothes. Now! … . Mmm. All set, Ms. Penny-Chanticleer?  … Ouch! Hey!”          ### Satire by Ron Singer (www.ronsinger.net) has appeared in numerous magazines, e-zines, and newspapers. He has also published three books: A Voice for My Grandmother, The Second Kingdom, and The Rented Pet. Between 2009 and 2011, Singer traveled to six African countries in order to interview pro-democracy activists for Uhuru Revisited (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press, forthcoming).

Note: Readers who are interested in receiving a copy of the author’s “Transformational-Generative Analysis of a Famous Line from Milton” should use the email address on the Contact page of www.ronsinger.net.

A Fool’s Game

by: Michael Karpienski

“Hurry, we got to go!”
“No, wait, my shoe…”
“Tie them in the car.”

Ben took his left boot by the long laces and trotted to the car with high beams. He was always running late, forgetting items, loosing track of time.

“Now you know Papa will be mad we are late. Tie them up quick and straighten up your tie, it’s a mess.”

Ben, head bent down towards the seat pulls on his laces as the car backs out. Each hair is in opposing directions, like his mind. Always torn between things to do, never able to make a firm decision on anything. Dan continues steering the old pick-up truck down the road, every once and a while checking on Ben.

“Hurry, we are almost there!”

His shoe was tied, but his necktie needed tightening. They approached the parking lot just in front of the cemetery. The service is already in session. Ben takes his tie from his neck and throws it on the ground.

“I don’t need this. He is dead already.”
“Yes, you do. Put it on!”
“No. You and them, you play a fool’s game.”