Editor’s Note: To learn more about the recently-launched new media publishing platform Liberty Island check out PJ Lifestyle’s ongoing series of author interviews and story excerpts. The first fifteen can be read in this collection here; the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth are here, here and here. Find out more about Liberty Island’s new writing contest here, running through the end of April. Please check out this interview Sarah Hoyt conducted with CEO Adam Bellow here to learn more: “It also has a unique mission: to serve as the platform and gathering-place for the new right-of-center counterculture.”
Here are links to eight new stories released this week across genres and styles:
1. Karina Fabian: “Beautification Claws: From the Case Files of DragonEye, PI”
She stood on my doorstep wearing hot pink shorts and a blouse that looked like an art fair threw up. I almost breathed fire on her just to put her out of my misery. Nothing cures the aftermath of an ethanol binge like dragon-style pyrotechnics. But I played nice. After all, she might have a job for me, though with that artificially whitened smile, I doubted it. Her type didn’t have much use for dragon detectives.
2. Michael Sheldon: “Better than Fresh Apricots”
Two slender figures were approaching, each with a heavy canvas bundle–half her size and weight–strapped to her back. They were young, beautiful. The kind you expect to find shopping Fifth Avenue, not out here, alone, fishing in Grizzly Canyon.
3. Pierre Comtois: “There Are No Regrets in Skyview Towers”
Stoney Vander sighed as he gazed out over the towers of the aging Municiplex. It was an unusually clear day and he was not only able to see the massive foundations on which Skyview Tower and its neighbors had been built almost three centuries ago, but far in the distance, a hint of the green wild beyond, where civilization ended and unsupervised nature began. What was out there? Stoney wondered.
4. David Churchill Barrow: “A Soul Restored”
Color Sergeant Edmund Findlay Churchill, Company E, 18th Massachusetts, 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, V Corps, Army of the Potomac, was wondering why the hell the withdrawal from the battle lines had to be at 9:00 that night. He was tired — more bone weary than he’d been his whole life; and the last few years had been some life. It’s not like the march would be any big military secret. Everybody, up to and including the Johnnies, knew that they always pulled back behind some river to lick their wounds after taking a beating like that.
5. Ouisie: “GreenGro”
The Obama administration announced yesterday a series of sweeping regulations intended to improve the bottom lines of grocery stores and ensure the health of all Americans. The reforms are also widely expected to reduce the environmental impact of grocery stores and enhance multicultural awareness.
6. Paul Clayton: “2038: San Francisco Sojourn – The Wrath of God”
I never thought I’d meet God in person. Actually, I never thought much about him. Nobody did anymore, or mostly nobody. But one day it happened.
7. Mike Baron: “Free Gershwin”
Sully was on a Boy Scout camping trip in New Hampshire the first time he heard Rhapsody in Blue. It was after lights out, although the boys continued to giggle and pass a rubber rat from bag to bag. As they dropped off one by one into sleep, music floated in the rustic window from a counselor’s cabin, faint, mysterious, and overwhelming. Sully poked himself with his Boy Scout knife to stay awake for fifteen minutes after the performance, so he could learn the name of the piece.
8. Sabrina Chase: “Inscription”
I wish there were another way to do this. You didn’t have any warning and now I’ve changed your life, just by writing the words you are reading. Your situation won’t get much worse if you read the rest, though, so if you can do so without getting caught, I’ll try to explain. It might help you survive.
*****
image illustration via shutterstock / Linda Bucklin
Join the conversation as a VIP Member