Etched Onyx Magazine - The Inaugural Edition: January 2021
Just stories. Available for reading, or listening.
Settle in, and enjoy.
The Audition
“Your name?”
“Cicero.”
“Like the Roman?”
He blinked. “Jones. This is my first time.”
“You’ll be fine.” I turned to Tricia at the piano. “You have his music?” She shrugged.
“I’m singing my own stuff,” Cicero said. “A song I made up.”
“Acapella, then.”
Cicero frowned. “No, you make me bleed.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s You Make Me Bleed. Name of my song.”
Constance Beach
The beach was lousy with flies that morning, maybe the worst that Marjorie and Ron could remember in their nineteen years of making the trip. It wasn’t just that the insects were there, buzzing around, their little sucker thingies making a sharp sting on sun-slickened shins and shoulders, it was their relentlessness, their ability to quickly regroup after a brushing or a swatting to launch a new attack. Marjorie had barely unfolded her chair and sat down before she was hitting herself with her paperback.
She hadn’t wanted to come here, to the beach. She would have rather killed time putting sheets on the beds and hanging towels in bathrooms before
Just Start
I glanced down at her name tag.
Anat.
I remember repeating it over and over again in my head that first time we met.
Uh-Nat. I liked the sound of it.
“Warrior goddess,” she whispered.
It took me a second and a fraction of another to realize she was talking to me, but I had no idea why she’d just said those two words. We were sitting next to each other in a group therapy session at Coldwater Sanitarium, where sappy motivational posters and framed Thomas Kinkade prints fought to disguise what
Sense of Taste
Lauren quickly reverted, pressing her back against the endcap of Ritz Crackers and buy-one-get-one cans of soup. It had been two years since she’d seen him, yet here he was. In her grocery store. Blocking her path to her favorite potato chips, Kettle Brand Jalapeno. They were the only reason she was here. She peeked around the corner to her right, hoping her eyes had deceived her. Nope. She sighed.
An electric shopping cart beeped its cautionary tune of reverse, interrupting Lauren’s thoughts. However, it was the driver who diverted her attention from the situation at hand.
“Lauren!” an elderly, overweight black woman with bright yellow
Old James and the Whittler
It was high on his seventy-eighth year that old James decided he was too ornery to live alone. “No one to gripe at,” he’d say to himself. “No one to give what for to,” when he felt like giving a little what for. And “no one to cuss at, neither,” he added under his breath.
And before long he started to think that it’d be real nice to have someone cook up the pot of beans, but then a cook wouldn’t know to cook ‘em just the way he liked ‘em.
Be real nice to have someone fetch me my pipe come sundown…. But then he soon realized that a woman would probably frown on his smoking, what with all them medical facts that’s come to light recently.