Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 52

The Corporeal Chromium Anti-Dowsers Of Elliott Bay, by Dennis Mahagin

After eight straight sunny days, with bare clavicles pink-tinted as candy canes, Pike Street people keep thinking positive in wrap-around Vuarnet sunglasses, especially
the Wallingford gals with teardrop frames and pinafores, down at the Public Fish Market. Rhinestone barnacles cling to their lens rims, they call the hop sing sushi boys by Blues Bro names, curtsy, and drop their granny glasses an inch below the nose bridge, rifling buckskin, pushing sound around:
Hey, you're awful cute Jake, but

Southern Appalachian English from the University of South Carolina

I don't want to take away from Gabriel's great story, but I had to post this, which is a nifty resource for hearing Appalachian speech (if you don't already live there or don't hear it regularly).

Welcome to this website on the speech of one of America's most often misunderstood regions - southern and central Appalachia, which stretches from north Georgia to West Virginia. It's been romanticized as the language of Shakespeare, and it's been caricatured, ridiculed, and dismissed as uneducated, ba

Dig Well, by Gabriel Orgrease

For all the wells which his father's servants had digged in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines had stopped them, and filled them with earth. Genesis 26:15
Damn, I hate August. . . hot, humid, stinking dead days entombed in boredom. Dead summer, an armpit-perspiring stink. Worm fodder doldrums. August here is a burning pisshole.
Discussed with the family when Pop suggests —as he suggests many projects—that we dig out the old stone well in the back yard. Enthusiastic, I am for it this t

If Only it Had Rained Cats and Dogs, fiction by John Sharp

When hurricane Katrina finished burying New Orleans it swept up the central United States, turning into thunderstorms that dumped rain and hail on the Midwest, and ultimately dropping an alligator into the backyard of Joe Pringle of Wingett Run, Ohio, which promptly ate his Yorkie, Puddles, who was out for a potty break. Joe saw the whole thing from the porch, where he was having a cigarette since Lucy banned smoking from the house after her lung biopsy came back negative.

Joe grabbed the basebal

Justice Boys, by Sheryl Monks

Rita takes the baby, still screaming, from the tub of water, lays him on his back on the floor between her legs, kneads his stomach, fit to burst, with her fingers. Beside them, shards of soap, homemade suppositories. His face the color of cranberries, tonsils raging, he stiffens, bucks when she tries lifting his legs. She is forced to pry him open like a frozen chicken, and even then, the soap does no good, brings neither of them relief.

"Stand away from the windows," she tells the girls, but wo

Survivalism: Not Just For the Right-Winged Anymore

Original fiction, essays,and poetry coming tomorrow or the next day; it's been a bit of a wreck around here last week and this. Had to make a quick trip back to my parents to visit my 95-year-old grandma, who is sadly living her last days in this world. Fifteen hours in the car in 48 hours. Not fun, but had to be done. This woman made me sugar cookies special every Christmas for years and years, until her hands couldn't do it. Anyway. Don't get me started. I'll blubber.

It was nice to see my fami

Boner Jones, fiction by Antonios Maltezos

Boner Jones would see about getting a pair of moulded insoles made for his feet like the cripples wear, so the bottoms of his shoes would hit the ground properly. He would have his pants tailor made, stitched special so the creases could run good and straight down the front. He'd stop farting, at least in her presence. He would learn to pee like she told him he should. . . sitting down unless he was in a back alley. He would call her Sweetness and give her pecks on the cheek, his face freshly sh