On the west side of Toronto there’s a little town of about 600,000 called Mississauga. That’s where Julia Madeleine lives and works and writes nasty little tales of mayhem and suspense. She’s also a tattoo artist and runs a shop with her husband. You can check out her artwork at www.malefictattoos.com.
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Continue reading Writers Interview: Julia Madeleine by Paul D. Brazill
Driving a cab teaches you to cultivate your inner asshole. Especially at night. I drove a taxi for the Prometheus Cab Co. for four years in Fayetteville. Despite uneven pay it remains one of the best jobs I ever had. I quit when I got engaged to a tall blonde Texan party girl I’d known and chased for years at that point, who was stuck in a halfway house in Tulsa and said she wanted to move to a place where she could kick back and play her guitar. I suggested Eureka Springs and she said yes, so I quit the job and moved. Continue reading Taxicab Confessions by Emmett Sudsbury
Billy Karlsson is a disgruntled hospital porter; an urban Raskolinikov; an existentialist powder keg waiting to explode. An angry young man who has hatched a plan to blow up a hospital in order to vent his revenge on the world. But there are one or two obsticles in his way, the biggest being that he isn’t real. Karlsson is, in fact, a charcter in a long-shelved, unfinished, black novel by writer Declan Burke.
Continue reading I Didn’t Say That, Did I? Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke
A smashing, crunching of wood woke Bryn from his afternoon nap. He jumped to the window and rattled the net curtain. The door across the street had been demolished. Six officers, heavily booted and uniformed piled into the house.
“Druggies across the street being raided,” he called to his wife.
“That’s nice dear,” she said, her head not moving from her laptop screen.
“Six of them, police, piling in.”
He watched them fly up the stairs, the door half hanging from its hinges. “Get the bastards,” he muttered. They’d been nothing but trouble, that lot. Rented house, that’s what the problem was. This wasn’t that sort of area. Parties at night, comings and goings at all hours. They were nothing but trouble.
Harry Bales heard the slap of the newspaper on his doorstep as the paper boy cycled by. Whistling cheerfully, he went out to get it.
It was a placid early summer day. A light breeze ruffled the tops of the sycamore trees up and down the street. Bales picked up the newspaper, glanced at the top half of the front page. More dead soldiers in Iraq. More lay-offs from major corporations. More salmonella in canned goods.
He nodded, comforted by the predictability of the news. He started back into the house, flipping the paper over to see the bottom half.
He stopped cold in his doorway.
A photograph took up most of the space at the bottom of the paper’s front page. It showed a man with thinning hair, a pleasant but slightly crooked nose, an unassuming mouth. The caption under the photo read: Harold J. Bales, 36 years old, Complete and Total Bastard.
He stared at it for a long moment.
Continue reading The World is Made of Candy by Heath Lowrance
I am immersed in the sepia shot of memory.
Maple Summer and the slow lawns drenched in water. They soak the thick blades of grass and make you drowsy in the heat. The air is full of sap. Fluids breed. Drop by drop the water falls, saturating the drooping petals that want to rise with dawn’s tumescence. The lawns extend to the river that uncoils like a fettered snake beyond human harness and the things we keep at bay in daylight but not the night, never the night, for it knows.
The synthetic packet of eight cooked chicken pieces stared at him illogically. “There are more chicken pieces if I want them, but less if I don’t,” Jack was thinking to himself, facing into the fridge. He wasn’t good at thinking.
“Bitch,” he muttered, “Bitch.”
The Bitch was thinking at least I left some chicken pieces; they should calm him down, like a comforter, a drum stick as a comforter; she half wanted to laugh at the picture of Jack with a drumstick sticking out of his mouth. The other half of her wanted to jam the drumstick into his gullet so he choked to death and collapsed blue and dead on the Continue reading I Love June by 2011
You know what it’s like when you go around thinking you know there was something you had to do, but you can’t remember what it was. Yeah, I’m sure you do. Happens to all of us now and again, don’t it? Well that’s what happened to me this morning, prob’ly because I got up late and went out in a hurry. Apart from that, it was just a normal day.
I have a routine, see. First, I go to Hardwick’s newsagent and get a paper and a pack of Marlboro. Shouldn’t I know, but you know how it is. Then I walk across the rec. to Manny Mohan’s hypermarket. Always makes me laugh that . . . hypermarket. It’s not much bigger than my back garden. Mind you, there ain’t much he don’t have. Amazing Continue reading Just A Normal Day by Keith Gingell
He winked, she winked. Her wink slammed into his libido like a tennis ball ricocheting off of a racket. It sensually stung. It aroused his senses with the eternal vague promise that every man wants from every woman, that tantalizing tease of sex. A twenty dollar tip left on the stage sent a return volley of interest. She Continue reading A Blessing In Disguise by Charlie Coleman
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