Short story writing and creative fiction, essays and non-fiction stories.

The I of the Storm by Randy Kohl

The blizzard commenced in earnest sometime between the appetizer and desert. My wife and I emerged into a snow-globe world where the flakes came down in clots as large as rabbit tails. The fresh snow erased the imperfections in a still-transforming area of the south Loop, painting the cracked sidewalks and vacant lots with a coat of temporary innocence.

We leaned together in a human teepee for support, Jill because she was wearing high-heel boots and was five months pregnant and me because of the bottle of wine. Jill had wet her lips with the Zinfandel to toast our anniversary and I had felt compelled to finish the remaining four and a half glasses before the check. The result was that I was less help to her than she was to me.
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First Contact by Koe Whitton-Williams

Our child, Jilly Nines, will be starting kindergarten in September and last night we participated in our first parent’s night at school. We, and about eighty other parents, met the principal, the school psychologist, all five kindergarten teachers, the administrative director, two first grade teachers, the librarian, the art teacher, the physical education teacher, the night custodian, the director of the PTA, the PTA fund-raising coordinator, the director of bi-lingual education, the director of transportation, the speech pathologist, the director of the PTA communications office, four teacher’s aides and someone else. Almost all of the teachers were endowed with a charming, youthful silhouette. None looked like they could deliver the thunderous reprimands of the Sister Christopher of my youth. The night custodian, a charming woman about my age, fifty-x, looked as if she could have snapped my neck in the wink of an eye.
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Avocation Calling by Peggy Duffy

A few years ago, when I taught English Composition at a community college, one of the first essays I’d assign students was “The Transaction” by William Zinsser. In the essay, Zinsser writes about a doctor who has recently begun to write and has experienced some publishing successes. He compares his way of working with the way the doctor works. Zinsser points out that to him, a professional writer, writing is a vocation, while to the doctor, it is an avocation. The assignment of the term “avocation” implies the doctor will never be taken seriously as a writer. At least that’s the impression I always came away with each time I re-read the essay in preparation for discussing it with a new group of students.

I always wanted to call writing my vocation. Like many people, I had a lifelong dream of being a writer. I returned to school as an adult, when my youngest child was in first grade, to pursue that dream. I’d read and taken to heart the words of another professional writer, John Gardner, that anyone serious about becoming a writer should first get a liberal arts education. After earning my Bachelor’s degree, I went on for my MFA in fiction writing. Creative writing programs are ideal in granting students the time to write amid an atmosphere of creativity. You “fill the well” with ideas and learn the craft by reading and discussing each others’ stories, as well as classic and contemporary works of literary value. And if that doesn’t keep you writing, there’s the additional pressure of having to produce a book-length work for your final thesis in order to graduate. I walked away with my degree along with a few awards and visions of writing grandeur.
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Let Me Be There By Amber Wey

Watching you grow, and going through the changes in your life.
That’s how I know; I always wanna be there.
Whenever you feel you need a friend to lean on, here I am
Whenever you call, you know I’ll be there

Olivia Newton John ‘Let Me Be There’

I was in a deep comfortable sleep when I woke up to loud pounding coming from upstairs. My heart pounded in perfect symmetry with each step coming closer and closer to my room. The last few steps stomping down the stairs where like an eternity, time became still, my thoughts became numb, and everything was in slow motion. As my mother turned the door knob to my room, I slowly glanced at the clock in a dreamy like state. It was 3:34a.m., which could only mean one thing; the day had come that my father lost his 9 month battle with cancer. Although this was the last and worst memory of him, it is definitely not the only one.

The song above is one that my father and I used to sing together. We would go to my aunt’s house once a week. In her basement was a karaoke machine equipped with thousands of songs to sing to our hearts content. However, I always chose the same one. I would grab two microphones, which prompted my father to get up and get ready to sing with his little girl. I handed him his microphone and he picked me up and sat me on the folding table so we could be eye to eye. I did the melody; he did the harmony. We would stay there, in that cold empty basement for hours, just taking turns singing song after song, but no song held a candle to the one that my daddy and me sang together.
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The Britney Bubble by Thomas Sullivan

When your personal income for the year is $542, with $500 of that total coming from a tax write-off for donating a car to charity, you obviously have time to consider the world around you. You read a lot and start to notice patterns emerging in the culture you inhabit. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can wear you down. It may be better just to focus on yourself – as Warren Zevon sang shortly before his death “It’s the land of the brave and the home of the free…the less you know the better off you’ll be.”

The cover of the magazine staring back at me is completely filled with a photo of Britney Spears face. The heading on the cover says Britney Spears: Inside an American Tragedy. Think about that for a moment – the reality that, at the point of your most difficult personal struggle, a time of immense need, you could look at a magazine (circulation thousands) and seen a crappy picture of yourself with a denigrating label. I’m waiting for the day someone’s face fills the cover of Time magazine with the heading $542 this year: An American loser!

Reading through the article, a typical pattern repeats itself, over and over and over: dominating people who care only for their own interests and advancement enter Brit’s world and suck her dry, sending her farther down a path of self-destruction.
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