Author: Sam McManus

It’s Sunday Morning.

It’s Sunday morning. I should be watching Friends for the umpteenth time and drinking coffee (dark roast). I should be curled up in a blanket, on a couch somewhere, taking sips and laughing. I should be daydreaming of weekends in the Caribbean, of trips to destinations unknown because I’ve seen them in a postcard somewhere. I should recall what postcards used to cost. I have no idea how much they are now.

I should be doing many things. After all, it is Sunday morning. But instead I am looking outside my study window, at the intermittent rain. If I am patient enough I can see it touch down in a puddle, which is how I know it’s still there. I’m sure if I open my window I would be able to breathe it in, the salty with the sweet, just like a confectioner’s shop.

I leave the window closed. It’s enough to imagine it, to remember it again, because I’ve been fooled before. I’ve been surprised by the smell of the rain, and I’m not in the mood for surprises this morning. Continue reading “It’s Sunday Morning.” →

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Driving Sideways

Ever since the accident, I’ve been extra careful, especially when it snows. I can still feel the gravitational pull as my car slid across the ice, past a braking Honda Accord, and planted itself sideways in the ditch.

I’m sure my expression was one of shock. I kept thinking, “This isn’t really happening.” My brain had it on replay, the only phrase that made sense out of the chaotic wasteland that was my mind in those brief moments between driving down the road and being sideways in the ditch.

My mind still goes there every time it snows. I try not to drive by that spot, if I can help it, with the tree, and the house back a ways, and the ditch that I imagine still has the imprint of my Santa Fe in its depths. The car I slid past pulled over to the side of the road after I went into the ditch sideways, its driver scrambling out to assist me.

I am grateful for the kindness of strangers, always, but definitely then. I was in a state of shock. In my mind the whole accident was replaying in slow motion, over and over again. Continue reading “Driving Sideways” →

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Me and Ricardo: A Novel

It’s funny how things come about sometime. Case in point: I was minding my own business this time last year when a friend of mine announced that he had been attending a flash fiction group. I had no idea what flash fiction was at the time, but when he shared a piece he had written for the most recent group meeting, I was hooked. I found out the group challenged themselves every week to write a 500-word story, give or take a few words. Continue reading “Me and Ricardo: A Novel” →

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Losing It Again

“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Memory is a fickle thing. It used to be my constant companion. People often asked me for clarification when anything involved a shared memory because they knew I would know what had really happened. It was a gift I guess I took for granted, that I lorded over others like Excalibur newly freed from the stone.

But unbeknownst to me while I was in the middle of that blessed time, memory was also fickle. I imagine it had begun curving away from me, its ends a bit frayed by time, without my even recognizing the shift. As time went on I started to lose fragments of my massive memory. I used to joke about it, back then.

“I guess that memory had to leave to make room for this one, right now,” I would tell people, but inside my brain this niggling doubt began inching its way in. Continue reading “Losing It Again” →

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The Awesome Power of Writing

“The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses.” ~E.L. Doctorow

Truer words have ne’er been spoken. Seriously, though, writers don’t just write for the pleasure of it. So often we are compelled to speak, by time, and circumstance, and this endless need to fill a black hole inside of ourselves. What compels us are our everyday lives, though many of us don’t write specifically about those everyday lives.

We write science fiction, fantasy, horror, ways to escape that world for the amount of time it takes us to get our thoughts out. But we aren’t escaping as much as we are creatively chronicling those times, those experiences.

For every character who goes to Mars there is a little boy living with domestic abuse who needs to get away. For every post-apocalyptic love story, there is a woman who needs to escape the mundanity of her relationship. For every “Team Edward” there is someone hoping for change they can believe in. Continue reading “The Awesome Power of Writing” →

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One of the Crowd

I have always hated being one of the crowd. For as long as I can remember, it was always imperative to me to maintain some semblance of difference from the “unwashed masses” who listened to the same music, who read the same books, who did the same things in their spare time.

I fought hard against being the same as anyone else. If you told me everyone liked the color blue, I would have told you I hated it (even though I have no feelings whatsoever for the color blue). If you told me everyone was drinking white wine, I would have preferred red, for no other reason than that everyone was drinking white.

Of course, after a time, this default setting of mine to be different made me forget that sometimes I really did agree with the majority. Sometimes I found myself swaying to Britney Spears, reading and enjoying John Grisham novels whilst drinking white wine. Sometimes I found myself hating that I loved something, simply because everyone else loved it and that made me normal. Continue reading “One of the Crowd” →

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