Frank Manning settled into a chair while his wife, Cynthia, roamed the furniture store’s showroom. Her piano-player fingers wiggled as she talked to the sales clerk and her shiny dark hair bounced at her shoulders. He scanned the spines of… Continue Reading
It was the strangest day of my life. I lost my court case and he won his. An hour later he died, right there, standing next to me, midway through a sentence. It made no sense at all. Fate gave… Continue Reading
Protesters swarmed with signs and claws. Questions shouted at my face. Insults cast at my conscience. The glass door hissed open and I stepped out of the mob and into the lab. The door closed at my back, whispering me… Continue Reading
Lila’s family and mine sat side-by-side watching our town’s Fourth of July parade. As clowns marched by, tossing peppermints to our children, Lila said to me, “I don’t get why my boob is itchy? I stopped breast-feeding months ago.” Lila… Continue Reading
More than forty years, now, and if I knew how to draw I could draw you every detail of the scene. Maybe it was that look he had about him of the young James Coburn, and his perfect timing. Must… Continue Reading
Listen to “The Merry Jester” by Kevin McNeil, read by Folly Blaine: [display_podcast] Kevin McNeil is an editorial assistant for Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazines. He is a physical therapist, sports fanatic, and volunteer coach for the Special Olympics. He graduated… Continue Reading
I upend Marge’s old brown leather purse on the kitchen table as I’ve done hundreds of times for her, as I do every time it gets so heavy that her knee acts up. The clatter of change is almost deafening… Continue Reading
They’d just returned from another cleanup mission, an IED, the explosion tossing a 7-ton Humvee off a convoy bridge. Tossed it, Maria Ramirez thought, as if it were nothing but a toy. The wreckage was bad — twisted metal, chewed-up… Continue Reading
There’s no escaping the cold seeping through the cracks of the Jetway, and it makes me realize nine months in the desert heat has thinned my blood. Everything feels wrong, not just the cold. The sounds are foreign in the… Continue Reading
No one believed me when I said great ships in the sky would destroy the new world. They locked me up and pried open my skull to poke at the gray matter within. They didn’t even have the decency to… Continue Reading