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NostalgiaBy Brendan Rijke
QuailBellMagazine.com "We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten." - Cesare Pavese The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Giant Story By David Somerville QuailBellMagazine.com “Have you got anything about giants?” “Giants, huh?” the librarian closed the copy of Gulliver’s Travels he’d been perusing and examined the boy over smudged glasses. “What kind of giants?” “Oh, I’ll read anything with giants in it,” the boy assured him, right toe kicking the heel of his left foot. “Mean giants, nice giants, smart, stupid, I don’t care. I just like a good giant story.” “Follow me, then,” said the librarian, rising to his full height of five-foot three and edging out from behind the desk. “We should have something in fantasy.” The boy followed eagerly, but with some hesitation. “I’ve pretty well cleaned through there,” he said. “I come here a lot.” “I’ve noticed. Often you’re the only one in here.” “I like reading,” said the boy. “Especially about the giants.” The librarian cast a glance over his shoulder at the boy. He wasn’t tall or short – about normal for his age, thought the old man. He was heavy, though, and a thick mop of hair flopped around his face in a haircut that made him look like a round-bellied mushroom. “Why giants, in particular?” “Oh, I dunno,” said the boy, bobbing behind in a clumsy, somewhat off-balance way. “They’re big, and they can be funny or scary or just normal.” He paused, and then concluded, “It’s the normal giants I like the best.” “Normal giants?” “Like stories where kids get turned into giants, but they’re just kids, and they’re just trying to figure out what to do now that they’re so big. And their friends try and hide ‘em sometimes, or sometimes they’ll go after the bullies, or even just wander around and do nothing, just get looked at and look in the top windows of buildings right at their nose-level.” He raised a flat hand to his nose. “I like those stories.” “You like the stories where the giants wander around and don’t do anything?” “Sometimes,” said the boy. “I mean, if you got turned into a giant, what would you do?” The librarian chuckled, “I couldn’t say.” “No,” said the boy, stopping. The librarian turned and looked at him. “Really,” said the boy, mouth set in a line, his tone urgent, insistent. “What would you do if you got turned into a giant, right here in your real life, today?” The librarian thought about it. He was an ordinary man with an ordinary life, a creature of habit and simple pleasures. Going from bed to breakfast to working among books to relaxing among books and back to bed was all he had aspired to since he was a young man. He couldn’t remember what he had aspired to as a child. He lived alone in an apartment building next to a 7–11. He looked down. The boy was still waiting for his answer. “I’d hide until it was night,” he finally said, “because I wouldn’t want to make a scene. And then I’d go to the house where the woman who almost married me lives. I’d find a way to call her first, so I wouldn’t scare her out of her mind. But then I’d sit outside her house, and hold her in my hand, and we’d talk until I understood why she left me alone.” He was surprised to hear these words, these thoughts he’d never allowed himself to think, coming off his tongue — especially to a mushroom-haired ten year-old in the fantasy section of the library where he worked. He coughed, embarrassed, but the boy nodded knowingly. “Giant stories are lonely stories,” he said. “What would you do, if you were to turn into a giant?” asked the old man. A flock of emotions flew across the boy’s face, a pack of secrets in his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing much.” David Somerville is a living, breathing person who writes, thinks, draws, and listens to music. He is currently the Design Director at Government Executive Media Group in Washington, DC, and can be found and followed at smrvl.com and @smrvl. More of his fiction can be read at scribd.com/smrvl. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Atom Bomb of Misery By Aden Harry QuailBellMagazine.com Apart from the fact that he couldn't write with both hands, Jerry Porter had another problem that had bugged him all his life; everyone he touched, everyone who touched him, became miserable. Not only would they become miserable, but they'd be hijacked and driven by it. Alas, he spent the most part of his life all alone. At first, he didn't know it. Of course, it's difficult to pick up on something like that; the stuff of mythology and pseudospiritual metaphor. But when he reached age eleven, he found himself unable to consider anything else. How could a single touch burden another human being with a lifetime of intense, unbearable misery? He sometimes called the spurts of misery, “plagues,” because, in his childlike innocence, it just seemed like people were getting sick. They 'weren't feeling very well.' First it was his own parents, who gave him up for adoption after just five months; found dead in each other's arms in their bed, overdosed. Then his grandmother; over a long period of time, she descended in a rough downward spiral with nothing to hold on to nor break her fall. She became silly, bed-stricken, she lost her wits, then her memory, her will to live... then her voice. Trapped inside whatever it was going on behind her eyes, she spoke with no-one. In one last act of baseless courage – perhaps just the fear of taking her own life - she committed herself to psychiatric care. Jerry's English teacher pretty much followed his grandmother's footsteps; she isolated herself in a desolate paranoia, became a recluse and was then involuntarily committed to care a month after, upon setting her apartment on fire with her still inside it. The day after, Jerry's school friend, Alex, nine years old at the time, was found face-down in cold bathwater. Nobody could have seen it coming, and Alex's mother forever after despised her depressed eldest son, Ryan, for introducing his younger brother to the concept of suicide – which, by the way, he did not do. All Jerry saw was the people around him disappearing. And as the numbers added up throughout the years; from school, the park, a number of neighbourhoods, doctor's offices and even church, the townspeople became afraid and even tourists were attracted as this “new mystery” befell them. People were being dragged under by something, going crazy, turning to drugs and alcohol, killing themselves, and there were seemingly no connections between any of them, for there were a few – and this tormented Jerry's thinking later on in life – who he probably didn't touch because he had no memory of ever meeting them to begin with. Thirteen years of age; two of his friends had been committed to care and a shopkeeper was found hanged in his shop. Jerry knew he'd met and had touched all of them. It was then he began to consider that he was directly related to the cause of this mystery. In fact, as far back as he could remember, almost everyone who'd been overcome by it had made some sort of contact with him; anything from a hand on his shoulder to an accidental brush while passing him would be enough. He was the only connection between them all, and he was the only one who knew about it. See, then the problem became school. Jerry wanted to take himself out of the picture; out of the danger of being touched for everyone else's safety, but the state's rule was mandatory schooling until the age of sixteen, and for reasons unknown to himself at the time, he didn't want to tell anyone about his suspicions. There were four more suicides and seven more cases of what he came to call “The Misery” for the lasting three years, two of which suicides happened at another school. And it was those suicides that confused Jerry, but still didn't cast any doubt on his suspicions. Seeing as he could say for sure that he hadn't ever met at least one of those most recent suicide victims, he considered the possibility that, under some circumstances, perhaps where someone of a certain blood type or something like that was concerned, the 'infection' could be passed on. When he became sixteen years old, he left school and straight away got himself a job behind a supermarket cashier's desk. He figured it was safe enough. A heavy guilt set in – he'd confirmed his suspicion that he was the cause of The Misery and the suicides time and time again, and yet he felt no surprise, not even a bit of remorse for any of it. He could even be considered somewhat happy, and he didn't miss his parents. Yes, the guilt was the only real, just, easily explicable aspect of it. At seventeen he left his third foster parents' house – with their blessing and supervision – to live in a shared house with two college guys. He was careful never to touch them; not to shake hands and not to pass on the stairs. It was a step forward to being able to go on to living alone which was what, he’d concluded, he needed the most. Over another year, three more people descended into The Misery and were involuntarily committed to psychiatric care after being pushed to the edge; luckily, no-one died that year, but Jerry could no longer distinguish between those he'd touched and those he hadn't; with his job, he was meeting too many people. He put in a request to be transferred for work in the warehouse right away. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Witch KissesBy Christine Stoddard QuailBellMagazine.com Fancy the country girl used to run through the thrushes,
calling to the warblers and the 'coons-- she was the witch of Luray, a small but frightful, freckled thing. She was not born; instead, she leaked from the limestone and oozed into her mother's arms, wailing like Satan in Antarctica. Both bears and mountain lions answered Fancy's songs in the night, full moon or no. Then she had them kill any cow she craved. Fancy had no father, but, even as a little girl, she could speak to men the same she spoke to other animals. All the men-folk in Luray knew her witch kisses. They knew her spiraling red hair and flickering eyes. They knew her in the Biblical sense. Fancy enchanted husbands the same she enchanted bobcats and her first demon spawn came at age fourteen. Her womb burned and she bled and the mangled beast shrieked through the hollow. Fancy fed him to the owls or the snakes-- no one knows for sure, only that she left him in a crag like a Roman babe. All of Luray heard the cry that changed Fancy's child from infant to prey. After that, Fancy stopped bewitching the bears and mountain lions, though she never stopped bewitching men, the musky, coal-covered men of Luray. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
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untitled By Claire LeDoyen QuailBellMagazine.com ragged hemline of twilight past brushing high on long legs that storm through lonely night sand, trapped in fishnets and stewing in seaweed and saltwater the past tense tide rode my tattered tights. romance once had and knowledge now lost make up the oil spill i splash in; drowning in flames i set myself to smoke the demons out. my lungs are burning: i blow smoke rings to the mind i left on shore i don't know which side of the mirror i'm on anymore. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
DustBy Diana Rae Valenzuela
QuailBellMagazine.com Juanita is furious that the Montreal Mall isn’t in the center of the city. Goodness, she and Lorilia are forced to hoof it out to the wharf whenever they need to shop, feet slapped raw by thin sandals before they even reach the parking lot. They can’t hitch a ride or take the bus because they inevitably encounter some man with big eyes mooning over girls like this or that. “People who didn’t get any in high school,” Juanita opines, “are the worst.” Rather than walking along the highway, Juanita likes to cut across Old Town where gangly white guys sit on the curb seeping sunlight, drunk and square-faced. They fire off air kisses like gunshots when girls stroll past. “People who got too much in high school,” Juanita opines, “are almost just as bad.” You know? |