Memories & Mementos
Featuring stories by writers Gina Hanson, Kurt Mullen, Derek Ivan Webster, and Charlotte Sulick, read by actors Olivia Killingsworth, Don Carter, Max Woertendyke, and Josephine Cashman. Hosted by Andrew Lloyd-Jones at KGB Bar on March 27th 2019.
The Berenstein Conspiracy
by Derek Ivan Webster
The lines looked the same, as did the colors. You could follow the certainty of the pen’s ink as it stained over the mess of pencil strokes beneath. The figures were friendly and inviting, their brown fur represented by warm, rounded tufts at the head and shaggy tips extending from their clawed hands. Yes, they had hands, not paws, and they wore overalls, button-up shirts, and sunny dresses that looked like they’d been dried outside in the wind. The words, confident in their folksy rhythm, never too long, and printed in sizable font beneath the pictures, were exactly as he remembered them.
No Sugar
by Charlotte Sulick
I don’t know that parents are supposed to hug. I don’t know Dad is too tired to change. I don’t know Mom is dreaming of leaving and taking us with her, that the hope she might save up enough money to move out keeps her alive. I don’t know that it will take her ten more years to get there. I don’t know a lot of things.
I do know that I’m allowed to make Dad’s coffee.
When Churches Are Converted to Condos
by Kurt Mullen
She was small and old and she sat there in the evenings with a baseball game on the radio, in a folding chair that was her nest.
The last thing he wanted was to make her nervous.
No, no, it’s okay, he said, moving closer. I live just over there.
Just to put out his hand and say his name and say I live here, too. That was the idea behind that first trip across the street. Maybe if her grown sons were watching from the windows above, they would see he wasn’t such a jerk.
Some Very Good Reasons
by Gina Hanson
Gordon Hewitt was the hardest working man in Milford Falls. He managed Milford Grocery Mart for as long as any of us could remember. Most folks around here expected Gordon to retire back in 2012 after Dick Clark died. It had long been rumored that Gordon was the illegitimate son of America’s Oldest Teenager, and there were three very good reasons why everyone thought this: