West Coast Review

Gimme your damn wallet

Said the middle-aged pyknic, in a slow and deep cadence. A clearly edacious black man, with an air of dumbfounded innocence. His pinguid complexion bled rancid stains beneath rolls and rotund. While a mayfly’s attention echoed in his cleanly shaven dome.

Gimme your damn wallet

A macilent, black youth wearing a white, tank-top and a minacious gaze. The gold-toothed bruxist, seethed the words with venomous bravado. He was a sheep in wolf’s clothing, surrendering to a survival instinct that perhaps worked better in darkness, than a well lit room.

Gimme your damn wallet

The hoary, flocculent patches of his otherwise dark hair, betrayed his age; as much as the tired wisdom reflected in his watery, bloodshot eyes. His measured, nonchalant delivery, showed he’d been here before; he knew the routine. A gelid, gliding stream hidden within a sinewy, ebony derma.

Gimme your damn wallet

An obviously…

Back in very late 2014, still trying to wrap my head around the sudden appearance of, and surgery to remove, a tumour behind my right eye, I found myself dealing with the mini-depression that comes with the end of a relationship. Now, believe me, break ups happen all the time, and I would usually deal with it and get on with life, because it’s just a part of life, not the end of the world. But, because this one came at the tail end of quite honestly the most stressful year of my life, I’d be lying if I said things didn’t feel particularly tough.

In an attempt to keep my mind distracted, I found myself doing some wallpaper removal at my Sisters house. This was actually a bad idea, given how utterly mundane a task wallpaper removal is, and so all I inevitably did was do the one thing…

There are many ways to drink and enjoy a night or two at a tavern. With stories to tell and stories to hear and games which, if won, provide your ale. And if you wake before the dawn, close your eyes and try again. And if fortune smiles upon you and you wake when day has broke, enjoy the bedding you have been supplied.

Okay, okay… so, it’s actually a reminder about a call for submissions…

But, that’s just semantics, or something like that.

Anyway…

Silver Star Labs is still accepting submissions for the Father’s Words to their Children charitable project.  Please take a moment to click on this link, write something up, and submit it.  Not only is it an opportunity to get your words published but it is also for a good cause!

Plus!!  (But wait, there’s more…)

Silver Star has two more charitable projects you can contribute to as well:

Letters of Loss

Letter from Pets

Please consider submitting for any and all of these anthologies.  Your voices are what will make them great!

“Presentiments are strange things: and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity had not yet found the key” ― Charlotte Brontë

Mrs. Wilkie is listening.

What is a dream?  The mental garbage of the day organized into a surreal narrative?  Or is it the moment in which we tear down the walls that protect the borders of our consciousness from the realization that time itself is a nebulous entity that may or may not exist, allowing us to peer backwards and forwards through the veil of practicality and linearity?  Do murder, suicide, and traumatic events ripple across the elusive time barrier and give us a glimpse of a universe where everything happens at once, but is experienced by our consciousness as flow?  I have so many questions.  Including, why do they put orange peel in marmalade.  It’s a perfectly tasty…

Again?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Alright. I will tell you again, from the beginning. I will warn you, though, you are not going to like or believe anything I say. You are not going to believe a single fucking word.

Why? Well, because, I don’t believe a single word that is about to come out of my mouth and I was there. I saw the whole thing. I know exactly how it sounds, but I swear to you. Everything I am about to tell you is the god awful truth. I am not crazy. I wish I were, but unfortunately for both of us, I am not.

I can’t tell you the exact day when I first saw him. Or, even where. I was hitching along the northern stretch of highway one going through northern Ontario. There is little that I can say about exactly why I was there…