“Élan Vital” by K. Tempest Bradford June 7, 2009 – Posted in: Fiction, Free Content, Sybil's Garage

THE FEW MINUTES I had to spend in the Institute's waiting room were my least favorite part of coming up to visit my mother. It felt more like a dialysis room, the visitors sunk into the overly-soft couches and not speaking, just drinking orange juice and recovering. There were no magazines and no television, just cold air blowing from the vents and generic music flowing with it. I'd finished my juice and was beginning to brood on my dislike for overly air-conditioned buildings when my mother arrived attended by a nurse. Continue reading

“Heaven’s Fire” by Paul Jessup – Posted in: Fiction, Free Content, Sybil's Garage

ME AND JAZZ waved at the Goodbye Girl as it flew overhead, the gold and blue gossamer wings like butterfly beats, the silver cockpit shimmering in the afternoon light with tiny silver threads looping down and around it. We saw the paint we had splashed on earlier in a drugged out mania, the orange and blue and the bright burning red — making it into star shapes and star patterns. Just so my gal Mary Mary May could find her way home across the many patterns of glowing suns. Continue reading

“Wombat Fishbone” by Jason Erik Lundberg June 7, 2008 – Posted in: Fiction, Free Content, Sybil's Garage

The flyers and placards sprout from a multitude of locations all over town, all displaying the same graphic (the iconic walking man featured on Walk/Don’t Walk traffic lights and signs), although the text is different, unique, in each instance: “J. Juniper Jellyfish walks tomorrow,” “J. Lemon Stegosaurus walks tomorrow,” “J. Wombat Fishbone walks tomorrow,” always that same pattern of nonsense words preceded by the initial J. No one knows who plasters the notices on lamp posts, bulletin boards, tree trunks, brick walls, flag poles, shop windows, mailboxes, front doors, and errant animals too slow to avoid coverage, so fast are the scouts, the ahead-runners, quick and silent and invisible, like ninjas. Continue reading