Category Archive Browsing Category: Sunday Photo Fiction

Every light in the house was on when I arrived. The three men sitting in the bright kitchen at the long  table that had once been in my grandfather’s service station, clear pine darkened by age, pocked and burned by my grandfather’s cigarettes, the cracks in the grain blacked from my grandfathers oil-covered hands. They faced one…

Fifty thousand dollars. After that, I quit listening.   It was a lot of money for us, especially considering what we already spent. Mary Ann had been having troubles for more than a year before she disappeared. Her grades had slipped from As and Bs to Ds and Fs. After a couple months, we got a…

  Gran stops him on his way out the door. “Just a minute. What’s that you have there?” He holds out the magnifying glass. It is a splendid thing, solid bronze, the lens hand ground to perfect clarity. It had been her grandfather’s. “And what are you going to do with this, may I ask?” “I…

Dearest Sventla, The snows have come at last. We have a few weeks’ respite from digging the canal, turning instead to indoor labors. Currently I am employed sewing emblems onto the thick woolen jackets worn by our military comrades in Moscow. It is not like when we were children. Here, the snows will so alter the landscape…

“Does your life unfold like a map? You can’t see it while you’re in it. A gnat trapped in the clockworks cannot tell you the time.”  He stares out the window at the unchanging city, the ever-changing sky. “Too busy dodging the gears and avoiding getting crushed, I suppose. It’s your move.” “Am I to believe you…

Join the Royal Flying Corps and Share Their Honour & Glory, the poster had said in tall blue letters. Lies,  thought Peets as he strode across the slushy grass in his boots and helmet and leather flying coat. The only glory was a cheap, easy kind you only felt at first when you wore your wings and…

If it is true that God speaks in irony, then my story is a case in point. She was the Loyalist and I the agitator, yet it was I who stayed. It was my activities which called attention to our family, alerted the authorities and, ultimately, incurred their wrath. She, who loved her country right or…

The old man wanted cigarettes. I gave him my pack. “Keep it,” I said.  The translator told him. The old man did not thank me. “Ask him about his rifle,” I said to the translator. “It looks old.” They exchanged a few words, the old man’s eyes not leaving my face as he smoked. Dark…

My father told me he spoke to ghosts as easily as people. Coming from him, this did not seem crazy. He mentioned  a conversation he’d had that morning with his grandfather, retold the joke he had heard. The fact that his grandfather dropped dead on the golf course on an April day in 1927 was of…