Julia Corliss

“The Portal Cartographer” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #196

Lydiana found herself walking along a seashore familiar and restful though she had never been here before that she could remember. The last thing she remembered was exploring in a dusty curio shop tucked away in a back alley in a part of town she had previously avoided. She had been looking at old photographic images of a scene. These predated the usual contemporary holographic images of places. The scene she was most captured by was of a seaside, clearly far from her inland desert community where she lived and worked.She was sure she had ne...

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“FINDING JOY” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #191

Shondra dragged herself out of her disheveled bed after another sleepless night. She stumbled to the bathroom not looking in the mirror because she knew what she would see—a hollow-eyed, bedraggled woman with tangled curls and without a spark of life. She didn’t want to see this version of herself. It was bad enough feeling like this, so she wouldn’t look. After relieving herself, she washed her hands, the one act of caring for her body she still enacted due to engrained habit. She shuffled to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and gr...

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“MY LAST CAT” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #187

I’ve had many cats in my life because my mother loved cats and my father loved my mother. In the end, he came to love cats too. I had my first cat when I was two, and there were many in between then and my last cat, Gidget. She began her life as one of the various cats in my parents’ life together. When I first met Gidget, my husband Burt and I were living about 20 minutes from my Momma and Pops and were delighted to spend lots of time with them. It was fun. Momma and Pops knew how to have fun. There were always cats and dogs around as wel...

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“LOVE MATTERS” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #186

I have kept journals for over fifty years. In these journals I have returned again and again to thinking and writing about love because what matters to me in life is love in all its many manifestations. I read through my journals seeking to find writings that illustrate why love matters to me as part of the never-ending story of life on Earth. I begin here with my understanding of what it means to live life as a human being. Life is a wonder and a challenge As each day proceeds With all its tumult, thunder, Corners of quiet, and fleeting g...

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“SILVER DOLLAR LUCK” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #180

JB and his childhood buddy Lloyd were at loose ends in January of 1941. The winds of war were stirring but not yet raging as they would be after December 7, 1941. JB and Lloyd had been working as crop dusters but there was no such work while winter lasted. They had some money saved, but were now both between jobs and so they considered their options, which were not great in winter in SW Arkansas. They decided to hitchhike to the big city of Little Rock to seek work. Fate had something totally unexpected awaiting them, especially JB.They got ...

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“BOOKSHOP MAGIC” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #176

Winslet had tended the books for many years. Time was hard to keep track of in the bookshop. According to family lore, he had first entered the bookshop in a stroller when his mother pushed him in for a book of stories to read aloud to him. He didn’t know it then, but already the books were speaking to him. When he was six and walking past the bookshop on the way to and from school, he often felt an urge to stop and linger awhile in the bookshop. Mr. Digby, the owner and proprietor, never seemed to mind. Later in his teen years, he became an...

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“PROJECT READ ALOUD” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #175

The sign on the librarian’s desk read: “Readers Wanted for Project Read Aloud.” Sherene stared at it as the librarian stamped the book that she had selected for her weekly reading fare with a return by date. “There you go,” said the librarian startling Sherene who had been lost in thought. “What is Project Read Aloud?” Sherene asked. “Thank you for your interest. Here’s the brochure about it. There’s a form inside to fill out if you want to become a reader,” the librarian said with a smile and a nod of dismissal already signaling the ...

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“REUNION MEDICINE” by Julia Corliss

They hadn’t seen each other in thirty-five years. They had met when they were young and in love with two men who were good friends. Now, both those lovers were dead and they still lived. Corinna’s mind was filled with images of those days long ago. The immediacy of her friendship with Hensley went back to those youthful days of yesteryear. Their friendship had lasted all these years and been sustained through telephone and US Post exchanges. They enjoyed calling themselves pen-pals. Now, here she was on her way by train along the Hudson Ri...

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“THE BOX” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #170

The Great Awakening that brought about tremendous changes to the world came in stages and phases to most humans. Sadly, for many, it came through loss of loved ones and things. Many people died and many material things disintegrated or simply became outmoded and valueless. Steadily transformation occurred through life’s tenacity and humans’ ability to adapt. Sabrina’s awakening came in both a mundane and mysterious way. One day on her doorstep there appeared without warning a package addressed to her with no return address and no postal st...

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“FROM THE DIARY OF WORKER #6289” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #167

I have decided to write down here in my diary everything I can remember about what happened to me and how I came to live elsewhere. Today I found myself waking along a trail through a redwood forest that had somehow survived human mishandling of Mother Earth’s gifts. I stopped and stood before it in awe. I looked down to where the base of the tree united with the ground. I spied a door complete with a doorknob that had materialized and become visible. I stood before that massive redwood tree, and I knew it was a Patriarch tree. I reme...

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“A LEGACY OF LOVE” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #163

The sky was heavy with snow clouds, and it had already snowed a lot. Eight-year-old Careena stepped off the school bus, and glanced at the sky. Her galoshes sank into the snow as she swept the bus stop scene with her eyes. Her heart lurched. Lucky wasn’t there to greet her tail wagging. Her faithful Lucky was always there, but not today. Where was he? She felt like someone had kicked her in the stomach. Panic struck. She clutched her lunchbox and clambered through the snow steadily making her way home as quickly as the snow would allow, whic...

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“THE HITCHING POST” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #154

 Lydiana’s love of horses seemed to have always been a part of her being. While in high school, most of the others in her birth group couldn’t care less about these long-ago legendary creatures that were often in stories from the Before Time. Her birth-groupers were passionate only about the latest tech inventions created for “Get-Aways,” where they could virtually exist as if in a real world without real world consequences. Admittedly, “Get-Aways” were tempting, but then, her birther group members hadn’t experienced anything else, so w...

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“DEAR ONE” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #146

May, 2022 Dear One,         Time rolls along like waves lapping the shore…past, present, and future…somewhere, some when, lapping, moving in and out with the pull of the moon, and the rotation of the Earth. Thus, time moves on.         Here you are having reached three quarters of a century in this life time so far. I suppose you cannot help but wonder if you will live on Earth for a whole century. The years ahead stretch out. You are a creature of hope. After ...

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“ADAM AND SPARKLE: FRIENDS FOREVER” by Julia Corliss

Submitted to Contest #143

The three kittens were almost ten weeks old when their mother went out hunting one night and never returned. They were all weaned and their humans had been feeding them milk and chicken hash for about a month when they were orphaned. The first morning without their mother who had continued to sleep with them in the warm box their humans had provided, the kitten named Adam awoke early. He missed his mother’s warm body. He was the biggest and strongest and quite curious. He easily climbed out of the box where his two siblings still slept an...

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“THE POWER OF LOVE: A TRUE STORY” by Julia Corliss

I have always loved horses and still do. When I was four years old, I began to fervently wish for a horse of my own. My parents lived in a new housing development in California without a horse in sight, but my grandparents lived in a small town in the southwest corner of Arkansas and had eighty acres outside of town of fenced beautiful woods and pasture land. I spent the summer I was four years old with them and it seemed like I saw horses everywhere. There was a ramshackle old barn on their eighty acres, but no horses. I had my birthday in ...

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