One of the goals I have for Emona Literary Services™ that I can hopefully take concrete steps towards before the end of the year is to put out a call for submissions and start publishing stories from other authors (potentially supplemented by some of my own) here and on the Emona Literary Services™ Substack.
What? Publishing is a literary service…
Incidentally, if you’d like to help me get to that point, please kindly consider supporting me via Patreon or Ko-fi.
Also, since I’m trying to get into a routine of posting things on this blog so people will, you know, read it, it took me actually way to long that I could post this story (that’s actually been in my portfolio basically the whole time this website has existed) as a blog post, as sort of a proof-of-concept/prototype/first example of how publishing stories here is going to work.
As I explain in the version of this post in my portfolio, this piece was originally written in Winter 2019 as an assignment for the course “Writing Short Stories” offered online by the network of Ontario colleges and was published later that year in Spine Online, the student magazine of Algonquin College‘s Professional Writing program.
However, as that program has now been discontinued, I have transferred a slightly modified version of the original to the Emona Literary Services™ website for posterity.
Sophie’s Folly
© Joel Balkovec — published by Emona Literary Services™
Seated at the airport bar, Moira glances down at the red suitcase beside her barstool. It had been a gift from her sister from, back when Moira gone off to school. She had been seventeen 17 and eager to leave home in the scenic middle of nowhere, never to look back. Sophie had been 12. She’d cried on the day Moira left. A lot.
That had been, what, 10 years ago now? Long enough that the red suitcase isn’t quite as bright as it was back then. Long enough that Sophie isn’t so little anymore, long enough that she’s getting married in a week.
Moira has been hauling around that red suitcase ever since. After ten years, she can’t look at the suitcase without thinking about her little sister. Though, honestly, her sister is just about the very last thing she wants to think about right now.
The first thing Moira is going to do when she gets home, she decides, is smack her sister.
This whole mess is Sophie’s fault. Sure, Sophie didn’t ask her boyfriend to finally propose to her. She didn’t ask for all this thunder and lighting and rain falling sideways.
But Sophie did ask Moira to fly out. “It’ll be faster!” she insisted. “And fun! You love planes!”
But planes don’t fly when there’s lightning, so Moira has spent the past few hours drowning her sorrows and silently cursing her sister.
“My sister’s getting married,” she sullenly, and not entirely soberly, tells the bartender.
“Yeah?” he answers, at least feigning interest.
She nods. “Yeah. I’m supposed to be flying out for her bachelorette party. But I’m going to miss it, because of this damn storm.”
Screw the weather. Screw the airport.
Screw the Wright Brothers.
Moira reaches for her glass. As she downs the contents, she glances over her shoulder at the flight board. She mutters a curse into her glass when she sees the message staring starkly back at her:
Flight cancelled.
Moira sets down her glass and reaches for the red suitcase.
“Screw this,” she decides with finality, pushing herself away from the bar. “I’ll take the train.”
Now, a quick reminder that I am a professional writer and editor, and if you’re in need of writing and editing support, please consider taking a look at the work and rates currently offered by Emona Literary Services™ and reach out if you think I can help you.
Please consider supporting Emona Literary Services™ to help me expanding my publishing and content creation projects, via Patreon, Ko-fi, or directly through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
You can follow me on my various social media platforms here:
© Joel Balkovec — Published by Emona Literary Services™.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
View the Emona Literary Services™ Privacy Policy here.
Emona Literary Services 
Leave a comment