Short Attention Spans

Can't manage to finish Ulysses? Here's a selection of the best and briefest of postcard fiction from the Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. It’s fast reading for those who are looking for a literary accomplishment before the end of summer! Visit www.geist.com to get information on how to enter this year’s Postcard Story Contest, or subscribe now for Geist’s Best Friends of Abebooks Deal.

Please Send Help

Richard Long

Hi Chuck, Dear God, it’s horrible! Why hasn’t any help been sent? It’s three days we’ve been trapped down here and it doesn’t seem like anyone out there even cares. Hasn’t it been on the news?

[Read More]

Love Letter to a Starfish

Rhonda Waterfall

She walked out on the low tide until her feet hurt and her skin was sunburnt. From the rock ledge of a sand-locked island she plucked an orange starfish and touched her tongue to its rough back.

[Read More]

Guthrip

Cathleen Kirkwood

Asa, hello sirrah, hello sirrah,” the street boy says, “you want shoeshine, you want talk, I give good black wax special Indian balaangra shoeshine?” He shakes his head from side to side, ear to shoulder.

[Read More]

Calling Home From a Phone Booth Outside a Pub in North Dublin

Bob Thurber

Despite an icy northeast wind huffing across the bay I sneak out after dark, after my mother falls asleep clutching her leather Bible, and I hike up the rutted road to the frosted meadow to stand in mist...

[Read More]

When I Was Born

Florence Grandview

When I was born, my father was forty-four years old. When I was fifteen, I was watching a cheesy thriller on TV and Dad was sleeping on the sofa in another room.

[Read More]

Once

C. E. Coughlan

For your mother’s birthday you made brunch: eggs with black beans and salsa and toasted English muffins, and she arrived in a black dress with lace straps. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. She slurred.

[Read More]

The Bride’s Feet

Anne Sorbie

All your life you fantasize. When you are ten, you wrap yourself in great lengths of curtain and stay out past your eight o’clock bedtime. You imagine yourself exotic and unrecognizable to your mother...

[Read More]

People Who Know Who They Are

Julie Vandervoort

The husband finds his wife down the street at ten at night, persuading the gas station attendant to unlock the glass door. She wants a bag of chips and the ones at the corner store are not the right kind.

[Read More]

3 Valley Gap Honeymoon Suite "Cave"

Roseanne Harvey

This is where I lost my virginity. Last night, the first night of my married life. I waited twenty-seven years for last night. I woke up this morning and looked at my new husband and noticed that he looks kind of like a caveman.

[Read More]

For Evan, the Time of Our Singing

Alex Keegan

I am sorry for Evan. He is a fine tenor. I am sorry too for Bronwen, and little Dai. But we are always sorry. Is it not the way it has always been?

[Read More]

The Stewardess Swims Over the Sea

Mark Jarman

We are jammed together in the sky like caged rodents and I have seen it all, know everything about you, your doe-eyed 4H calf from another lifetime, the Mars bar you stole from Nancy Greene’s ski jacket...

[Read More]