Great new(ish) stories from around the Web. Forget work for a minute and read a story. It’s good for you.
– This is glacier country and sometimes stupid people stumble onto valuable shit. Skulls and arrowheads, crude tools, leg bones dragged from god knows where. My father shoves a couple bills across the counter and tells them to bring in anything else they find. When they leave, he calls the natural history museum in Boise. In a couple of hours, a man in a blue car drives down and spreads hundred dollar bills on the counter like a Japanese fan. — John Jodzio in decomP
– After all, do you think I could write about purchasing marijuana from my co-worker and smoking it after work by the Muddy River and expect to keep my job, if I didn’t call this fiction? Could I write so freely about my own pot and alcohol consumption, or even broach the subject of how many people in healthcare—nay, throughout American society—use and sell drugs to each other in a multi-billion-dollar underground economy that mirrors the legal one? — Andrew Bissaro in The Straddler
– I’ve always used music to block out the OCD noise inside me, but in the seventies, I couldn’t find anything new to listen to that didn’t make my anxiety worse; it was all so boring. Then in 1976, the first Heart album Dreamboat Annie came out, and I promptly fell in love with the sisters in the band, Ann and Nancy Wilson. Ann was the lead singer, and Nancy was the first guitar chick I knew about who didn’t just wear her instrument like a purse and strum a few chords. They wrote their own songs. — Lorrie Sprecher in Sub-Lit
– I patrol my cramped studio apartment, looking for anything out of place. This doesn’t take long as my possessions are few. A frameless futon mattress sharing tatami mats with a shin-high table. The table is flanked with sitting pillows instead of chairs. On the wall is a matted album cover signed by Ella Fitzgerald, next to a razor-sharp antique samurai sword. Everything looks neat and orderly except for a manila envelope Val sent me and loose items emptied from my pockets sitting on the table: change, some business cards, et cetera. — Tyler Knight in Thieves Jargon
– Mel has stopped waxing her bikini line. Soon we won’t match at all. I smack her ass extra hard. She’s supposed to moan now, but she just keeps staring at the drapes like she’s choosing a flavor. He lies on the big bed, naked, sticky white, and Mel and I lie on the floor, panting more than we need to. It’s a good idea to stay entwined in case he looks at us, but Mel is hugging herself, and he’s talking to us but looking at the ceiling. The usual wife-talk. She’s such an intellectual that she neglects her body, doesn’t see to his physical needs, never lost the baby weight. He has one of those accents. He’s from London, on business. “Over from London,” Mel will say later,perfectly. She’s the one that needs the drama. — Stacia Saint Owens in Willow Springs
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– Ed. Note: DSM is not affiliated with these publications. We merely appreciate the hard work being done by the authors and the editors and wish to bring more light to their efforts. Every Monday we present to our readers essays, poems and stories from other literary magazines. Our goal is to showcase the Web’s strongest writing, and also to serve as a literary hub for time-pinched, interested fiction enthusiasts. Meanwhile, throughout the week, we’ll continue to publish our own stories, interviews, and poems.
