Stories by John MacIlroy

Chester

July 28, 2017 by John MacIlroy 2017 Summer Writing Contest, Drama, Speculative Fiction 0 Comments

By the end, I wanted to believe him, although it really doesn’t matter.

He was simply one of my best friends, Chester A. Arthur, and we met at a small community college in the spring of 1972, near Richmond.

We were then both largely adrift. My early story was unexceptional, in a kind of stylish Sixties way, dropping out of Middlebury a few years earlier. Odd jobs along a Southern arc, coupled with an interest in history, finally landed me in the Capital of the Old Confederacy.

That’s where I met Chester, both of us finding seats in the back row of HIST. 203, THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT.

Tango-19

March 28, 2017 by John MacIlroy Hot, Science Fiction 0 Comments

The sky went black, as black as the stealthy double hull of her ship, Tango-19, on this, her last mission.

Commander Meredith Conrad eased her ship over the lip of the small planet, one of a cluster now called The Outer Rim. She had seen much in her sixteen years in space, but had never gotten over the sheer terror of Deep Space darkness. The human spirit, she now knew for certain, needs to see something in the night sky.

She was, at least technically, still mostly human, so she let the thought linger. It may have been no more than the ghost of some ancient memory of the brilliant night sky her ancestors had once known—a wondrous display that held for them nothing but promise, until the day the skies forever turned angry, and the rains began.

The Proposal

March 23, 2017 by John MacILROY 2017 Spring Writing Contest 2 Comments

This story is by John MacILROY and was part of our 2017 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the Spring Writing Contest stories here. He would later blame it on the Bloody Marys. But it was always on him. Mencken, wasn’t it, said there’s always a solution to every problem — neat, plausible, and…

Read More »