I pretended to be asleep.”Time 40:39

    Free online fiction.Short story about a young man and a young woman from Montana who participate in proxy wedding ceremonies for soldiers stationed overseas…

    Short Story

    Illustrator and writer's Carolyn Marie Castagna's first shared short story.A small icicle hanging from a roof peers inside a window at a small reading room, and learns about magical human qualities, and the importance of the one most special human feeling.

    

    Long dead serial killers are appearing before adoring fans, but it doesn't take them long to realise that Nightingale is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong Turn is a fast-paced supernatural story of 14,000 words. Jack Nightingale appears in the full-length novels Nightfall, Midnight, Nightmare, Nightshade, Lastnight, San Francisco Night and New York Night. He also appears in several short stories including Blood Bath, Cursed, Still Bleeding, Tracks, My Name Is Lydia, The Creeper, The Undead, The Asylum and The Mansion. The Jack Nightingale time line is complex, this story is set after Lastnight. Jack Nightingale has his own website at www.jacknightingale.com

    And  a grouping of four stories at the end follows a divorced psychiatrist in an arc that constitutes a short novel.   Included are: “His Women,”  “Great Sex,”  “Old Love Affairs,” and  “The Drinking Club,”  “Patients, “The Wrong Mexico, “ and “Earthquake Damage.”

    It was Halloween and Samantha`s contractions were unbearable so her husband rushed his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver their new bundle of joy. Mike told the doctor and nurse to take great care of his wife. The doctor and nurse reassured Mike they would take very good care of her and not to worry. Mike waited patiently in the waiting room as the doctor and nurse delivered their beautiful baby. After a few hours the baby finally arrived and the doctor entered the waiting room and told Mike to come in the room and see his new baby. Mike entered and his wife was all smiles and said "Honey, it`s a boy!" "I think he looks like a Johnny. What do you think?" asked his wife. "Johnny sounds fine to me," replied Mike. Mike was so excited and held his baby boy in his arms as tears rolled down his cheeks and said "Darling, I think he likes me." Mike stayed the night in his wife's room with their new baby, but as they were both sleeping, an unforeseen force came in their room that was about to change their lives forever, when they both woke in the morning. Morning came, and Samantha was discharged from the hospital, and time for their new baby to be raised in their new home. It wasn't until after little Johnny turned 6 years of age that things around the Delany Estate turned deadly. The first sign that Johnny had the mark of the beast was June 6. It was the 6th month, 6th day, and Johnny was 6. All the numbers represented 666.

    Sometimes it feels like we are all on a different planet earth. Sometimes we are!

     Farzana is one of the prostitutes at Begum's kotha and Ramakant Bannerjee, the writer, loves her deeply. He's promised to marry her once he has enough money. He's currently writing his most ambitious novel, the story of Kaneez. As the story of Kaneez unfolds, so does the intriguing life of Farzana. What fate does she meet? Read on to find out.

    Or, rather, in his oblique way, which was perhaps a strategy of shyness, he’d simply told her that he was going hiking this weekend, and asked if she wanted to join him. The woman had been introduced to the man several weeks earlier, at a dinner party at a mutual friend’s home in the Berkeley Hills. The friend, closer to the man than to the woman, had said to the man, “You’ll like Mariella. You’ll like her face,” and to the woman, “Simon’s an extraordinary person, but it may not be evident immediately. Give him time.”

    Some move toward the future heartened by what they learn from those around them--a tattoo artist, an invented medicine man, zoo animals, strangers, fellow outsiders. Deftly rendered, these stories abound with oddness and grace.In “Tattooizm,” included in The Best American Short Stories 2006, a young woman struggles with a promise that her boyfriend is determined to make her keep. In the Nelson Algren Award–winning “Space,” a reluctantly undertaken errand forces a young man to finally confront the death of his mother. And in “The Medicine Man,” hailed by the Times (U.K.) as “perfectly pitched and perfectly written,” a man recounts his manic attachment to his sister.Moffett’s closely observed stories are candid and complex, funny and moving. The world of Permanent Visitors is an idiosyncratic and generous one, its inhabitants searching for constancy in a place crowded with contradiction.

    “Stone Mattress,” from her collection of the same name is witty, grotesque, and utterly hilarious—an exemplar of Atwood’s tremendous capacity for capturing our darkest impulses on the page.Verna, aging widow, boards a cruise ship bound for the Arctic in search of her next husband. The last four had suffered regrettable tragedies and left Verna wickedly wealthy in their wake. But, instead of finding another wealthy suitor, Verna finds unwitting Bob, the first man to have ever wronged her. Single, reasonably near his grave, ordinary, and attracted to her like all the others—Bob is all-too-easy prey for Verna’s merciless revenge. An ebook short.

    A retired public school teacher, Miss Budge embarks on a series of slice-of-life adventures that take readers into the intriguing and authentic lives of Southern church women. "What our readers love about Miss Budge is that they all know her personally. In fact, they all are her in one way or another. Daphne's stories are instantly recognizable to those in a church community, and that's where the real humour and real pathos comes from. Daphne is a keen observer of the strange and wonderful subculture of 'the church lady.'" Brett Alan Dewing The Christian Courier (Canada) "Mildred Budge is a forthright, almost larger than life, woman who challenges every reader's faith walk by being transparent about her own. She reminds us that Jesus loves us the way we are but He loves us too much to leave us as we are." Julie Innes Evangel

    Francesca, Kelly, and Kelly's teenage sister Amanda are only meant to spend several hours at the pool together, while their professor parents finish up an afternoon of work at their lush, Oregon college. The younger girls are caught up in hair braiding and Marco Polo, but Amanda is poised on the cusp of an adult realm bursting with cruel secrets. When the girls run into a beautiful, anxious woman and her toddler, Amanda starts to act in ways that may well transform an unremarkable day into a dark turning point in all their lives. By turns enchanting and terrifying, and always bursting with vivid emotion, “Frito Lay” brings us deep into our own childhood memories, reminding us that the dark and sinister were never quite as far away as we might have believed.