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July 08, 2025
General Stories Michael Barlett

Dance Of Death

CHAPTER ONE 1940 Chief Inspector Kenneth Langford offered the Commissioner a crisp salute, and then walked back through the labyrinth of passageways to his own small office. Langford was a member of the London Metropolitan Police, commonly referred to as…
July 08, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Winter Blues

the winter blues has a grip on me, all so tight Its icy tentacles wrap around me and squeezes freezing my fingers and toes with its nasty frostbite staving off the cold is a battle, an endless fight it brings forth an assortment of nasty diseases The winter…
July 08, 2025
Horror Stories Sushma R Doshi

Deliverer Of Messages

A loner in my childhood, my scrawny and weak figure prone to being bullied by sturdy and robust boys, I tended to wander around places frequented by few. Those curvy roads which fell into darkness after evening without street lights, the area near the pond…
July 08, 2025
General Stories L Christopher Hennessy

With A Side-Eye I Cherish

for Brittany ma amour Up to my neck in sadness for something just out of reach and she came along and fired up my life with kisses and the physical. The moment I looked into her eyes I didn't want to share her with anyone else and keep her all to myself. In…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Days Of Future Dreams

the days of future dreams the flames once rose high thinking our lives would end up supreme thinking our future seemed a far of dream but in the end nothing is what it seems many times the winds of changed has blown this way one minute we`re lapping the cream…
July 03, 2025
General Stories L Christopher Hennessy

Bad Girl

Part 1I lost the entire manuscript when I assassinated my laptop with sauvignon blanc as I rubbed the lower back of a woman who dozed drunk on my bed, sweating. She was crazed, somewhere between screaming and lying about the orgasm. Bree was a miracle to me,…
July 03, 2025
Horror Stories Nelly Shulman

Black Is Our Colour

“I swear she could have been you. Look! This girl is your long-lost twin.” Fi nudged me, and I smiled. “Never had or wanted one.” I stood up. “Let’s go, or the bargain hunters will clear the shelves before us.” We dived into the vintage emporium across the…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Transformation

"I need a brake" words that twisted my heart- shattering the dream that we would never part. I asked myself 'what ever did I do wrong? sad, gloominess could`ve easily been my song. I wouldn't let the anger and misery grow or cultivate- uprising feelings I…
July 03, 2025
Flash Fiction Benoit

Jae

It was Jae’s birthday today. She turned eight. What a beautiful sunny girl! Hyo planned a surprise or two; Li, his wife, did too. Birthday cake, a puppy and … Don’t forget, they grinned just before he drove off. Traffic was intense. A long call came from…
July 03, 2025
General Stories Matias Travieso-Diaz

Fear

Leandro stood outside the Kroger, leaning forward as he shivered in the early March dawn. He hated this moment: the cold, the fatigue, the feeling of helplessness, the anticipation of another day ahead at his degrading job picking collard leaves under the…
July 03, 2025
Horror Stories Mihko Askiweno

Found You

Panic gripped her as she staggered up the steep, rocky incline, breath coming in jagged, shallow gasps. Sweat streamed down her face in torrents, her hair clinging to her forehead and cheeks in disheveled clumps. Her legs trembled with exhaustion, molten fire…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

Lost On The Path

But alas; sometimes I think we've lost our way- too many strayed opinions...one too many a survey. Walking on the road ahead, just following the herd of sheep- with a hypnotised mind, wide awake yet very fast asleep. While yelling...join the team of the…

I'll take taller - Editor

The Taller and Tumult

by Augustus Peake

We were there in your Garden of Eden. I believe it is documented; though I have never read the book. Documented, but misattributed. You called us, and continue to call us, ‘the snake’. Understandable, I suppose - we do look rather similar - but somehow faintly disappointing. Don’t get me wrong – all that ignominy and hatred wasn’t something we craved. On the contrary, we were amused by your taxonomic incompetence. Still, some of us were and are a little peeved. I mean, to be over-looked for millennia can’t be good for one’s self-confidence, can it?

And just for the record, it was a pear.

You are shocked, I can tell. Which part shocks you? That the garden really existed? That it was a Taller?

That there were many beginnings?

In our family, there were some greats. Giants, really. That tree in Eden was not a highpoint, literally I mean. After all, pear trees tend not to be greater than 10 meters. But I had a grandfather, you know, who made it to Giza. Now, for you moderns, a trip from The Garden to Giza would be a short plane trip away. Not for us. For generations, we had talked of it and made it the object of our collective ambitions. And although it was Khafre’s and not Khufu’s, he was the first to get there, the first to tall one, the first to reach Tumult on one of your constructions. In our stories of him, he moves from stone and stone-cutter, to mule and mule driver, to slave to slave to slave up the face of the great stone edifice to its final stone. And when that final stone is laid, he is there for his Tumult. Blue with a hint of pineapple.

Tumult.  What deep, contented joy it brings us. When one of us reaches it, we all feel it – though not as intensely as the Tumulter. Is there jealousy? Some, I won’t deny it. So many try, so few succeed. Most of us meet the flat and flat-line. Simply put, the rise is our friend, the decline our fall.

Just do not talk to me about mountains. I do not want to discuss them. They are a sore point. Let us just say that height is good but snow is bad. How horribly ironic.

Later, a limb of my family moved from the old world to the new.  An astonishing achievement when you think about it. Several cousins even made it to California. Need I say it was the wonderful sequoias? Perched on the upper-most branch of the park’s tallest tree with a hapless tree surgeon from Oregon one cousin met Tumult. It was spectacularly peachy.

I can see you are struggling to comprehend what we are and what defines us. Perhaps an analogy will help. Your sharks are an approximate aquatic parallel. For water and thus oxygen read verticality. Let me explain: sharks swim, and by this act, they oxygenate their blood. We climb, and by this act, we reach tumult.

We call ourselves ‘Tallers’. Does that help?

How did I get to be here with you? Now that is quite a story, and I am not sure you want to hear all of it. You seem, to say the least, a little preoccupied. Let us just say that my own talling began with a blade of grass and I was talled from there to a tree – fig I believe – to a sparrow that perched on the sill of an office window with an outstretched hand that fed an avian coterie, to a hand that rested casually on your shoulder - as your remarkable bonus was announced - to where we are now.

Canary Wharf Tower.

One foot from the edge.

I have a feeling my Tumult will be bright yellow with a hint of cinnamon.

©2010

 

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