Issue #58

Spring 2016 | May 1, 2016

In this Issue:

In the Blackness
by Robert Garner McBrearty

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When he woke in the blackness, heart pounding, he knew instantly that he had been buried alive. What a bunch of imbeciles!

He’d been shot twice, but he knew that he had a good chance of survival when he staggered bleeding into the emergency room. Just his luck to get a crew of incompetents who couldn’t handle a couple of simple shots to the guts. He’d had a feeling going under that they were going to screw up. Read more...

Three Fairy Tales
by Mark Budman

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Oh, My Balls

Desperate for relief, I scrubbed off all my pains and aches, made a ball out of them and hurled it down the Empire State Building. A Chinese boy from Brooklyn in a T-shirt that read “Yr wyf yn bachgen o Brooklyn Tseiniaidd” under the Welsh flag (only Google Translate knows what it means), took it home, dribbled with it daily and got a scholarship to Notre Dame five years later. By then, I had accumulated new aches to make another ball half the size of the former planet Pluto. Read more...

Alice by Valerie Alexander

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After school Alice walks to her grandmother’s house and finds a long black limo waiting out front. “Your grandmother’s in the hospital, Alice,” says a tall blonde in pearls. She’s leaning against the car, wrapped in a fur coat even though it’s a mild gray day. “She asked me to take you to her other house. Her real house.” Read more...

Primacy, a play
by D. Harlan Wilson

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CHARACTERS
Man
Woman

The clamor of machinery surges . . . and dies. A man crawls halfway across the stage and collapses onto his stomach. A woman enters and slowly ambles towards him, feeling her way, as if she’s in a dark closet and can’t see anything. Eventually she steps on the man and shrieks, waking him.

WOMAN

          Is that you! Is that you!

MAN

          Stands.

          No. Read more...

From Analects: Carceri Sequence
by Ruaidhrí Mac an tSíthigh

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I — Title Plate

History is the library of the prison of consciousness.

II — The Man on the Rack

Detritus of the world as would be apportioned to the world by a brain in fever... Too heavy, too heavy, the weight of history, that apportions ruins and all ruination to the shoulders of men, and makes men ancient under its great stone weight... Read more...

A Jaunty Walk by Holly Saiki

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It started out like an ordinary day. I woke up for my early morning walk, put on my favorite exercising outfit and did a few warm up stretches before opening my bedroom door. What happened next wasn’t what I expected.

I looked out onto the inside of a huge circular tower covered with green vines on the inner wall. A stone floor, large enough to hold a few people, stood right in front of me. Read more...

About Our Coffee and Other Fare

Please Note: All of the coffee served at The Irreal Cafe is fair trade, organic, shade-grown and not real. All of the food served at The Irreal Cafe is organic, vegan, locally sourced and not real. See "At Our Cafe" for more about what we would serve at The Irreal Cafe and how we would serve it if there were an Irreal Cafe.