In the town by the sea it was the day of the poll, and the poet regarded it sadly when he woke and saw the light of it coming in at his window between two small curtains of gauze. And the day of the poll was beautifully bright; stray bird-songs came to the poet at […]
Charles took a moment to look at the houses on his street while the last bit of sun vanished. Broken windows and kicked-in front doors stared back across overgrown brown lawns. Rusting cars slumped on driveways. Weeds pushed through cracks in the sidewalks. He ran through his checklist: backdoor secured, garage door bolted, storm windows […]
O’er the midnight moorlands crying, Thro’ the cypress forests sighing, In the night-wind madly flying, Hellish forms with streaming hair; In the barren branches creaking, By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking, Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking; Damn’d daemons of despair. Once, I think I half remember, Ere the grey skies of November Quench’d my […]
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories […]
Ed listened to the six o’clock news on the booking officer’s small radio. The reporter described him as remorseless, a cold-hearted murderer. He slumped in the hard plastic chair, cuffs pinching his wrists. According to the reporter, Ed’s twenty acres was a killing field containing “massive piles of dog carcasses and bones clearly visible from […]
Krin looked sheepishly at the dead bear. “Well,” Mika suggested, “I suppose we could always just, you know, say it was a dragon.” She was sitting on a rock a little way off, under the shade of a forest oak, checking the fletchings of her arrows. She’d put three shafts into the poor bear before […]
All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row, twittering uneasily to one another, telling of many things, but thinking only of Summer and the South, for Autumn was afoot and the North wind waiting. And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And everyone spoke of the swallows and the South. “I think […]
If you’d like to read his previous columns, you can find a complete list on his author page. One of the first things I learned about English prose style, far back in the ancient days of grade school, was that I should vary my vocabulary. Repetition of the same word (other than prepositions, conjunctions and […]
This story collection is an exemplar for Short-short Sighted #26, “Again Again Again: Repetition”. Todd and I were having a beer at the Folsom Grill, and I said, “You know, I saw Angela again today.” “Yeah?” he said. “Where?” “At a department store. She was there with some guy named Jim. Scruffy beard. Kind of […]
This is the first column in Bruce Holland Rogers’s new writing series, Technically Speaking. If you’d like to read his Short-Short Sighted columns, which are dedicated to writing very short fiction specifically, visit his author page. Over two years ago, I set out to write a column about various forms, traditions, and techniques of flash […]