Tag Archives: coming of age

Shooter Flash: “On the Rocky Shore” by Clayton Lister

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We were happy. Fatherless, but who needs one? Money was tight, but if it wasn’t, would we have appreciated what did come our way?

My brothers tormented me, of course. Every youngest’s tribulation. Which is why I had escaped the house on this particular afternoon. Some trivial thing, I am sure, only blown big by excessive sensitivity. Mum’s favourite – youngest’s privilege – even she had warned me against this weakness. Why is anybody tormented if not for a reaction?

In any case, umbrage was nothing a buffeting wind couldn’t salve. And some hundred yards off the esplanade, close to the shore’s rocky drop into the North Channel, I recognised my sister as that there lass conferring with some fella. It didn’t take long to comprehend my redemption in this scenario. 

But had I time to run home? 

So, I gambled. I burst my lungs. Regardless, from the foot of our stair, drew air enough to holler, “Ali! Mac! It’s June! With a fella!”

Mum was off the sofa and in the hall doorway even before they had hurtled down full pelt like the heroes to me they truly were. She need pull me to safety out of their way. 

Ali had the advantage of ready-donned trainers and was gone. But Mac, eldest, most naturally athletic of us all, lost barely a moment slipping his on. The prospect of coming second to anyone in any pursuit galled Mac.

Mum’s squeeze of my shoulder told me, “Follow.”

Back on the esplanade, I clocked June strolling alone now and her fella soon enough. Picking his way across the sea-slick rocks, he paused to raise his binoculars; amid the wind, crash, suck and cackle of the surf, he heard nothing of Ali’s approach. I hadn’t a hope of hearing their exchange. This rankled. So, my raw lungs regardless, the scorch of lactic acid regardless, hauled my arse to the steps.

Mac, for his part, had slowed seeing Ali detain the fella. But by the time I gained the beach, he’d drawn level, and Mac wasn’t one for blather. He punched hard and without questions. How impressive do you think the thud of that wee fella’s head on the rocks must have been? Ali kicked him for good measure.

Upon clocking the action, June had doubled back. She checked the fella’s anorak and wallet. Mac and Ali rolled him off the rock’s edge. 

What would have been the point in my catching up now only to double back myself? But before they could thank me or give me my share, behind and above me, June spied someone at the esplanade rail. Our elderly neighbour Morag wrapped tight in her knee-length mac and plastic hairnet, no doubt awaiting the bus to her daughter’s. 

It would have been rude not to acknowledge her. At the top of the steps, in turn, we did.

“Perverts,” Mac lamented. 

Morag agreed. “Aye. They’re everywhere.”

So they are. And who needs thanks or money, anyhow?

*

Clayton Lister has had stories published online and in magazines, with a few shortlisted for prizes. In 2023, Stairwell Books published his first novel, The Broke Hotel. He’s now trying to interest publishers in his second, The KamaDevas: Opening.

Coming of Age issue explores sex, loss, and startling changes

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Readers of the Coming of Age edition will note a discrepancy between the issue date of Autumn/Winter 2024, and the publication date of May 2025. Sadly this was caused by the rapid decline and death of my mother, Anita White, during the early months of 2025. 

Being in midlife myself, I was somewhat prepared for this inevitable though devastating loss. My mother was not terribly old at 77 but, pushing 50 myself, it still felt in the natural course of things.

For those who suffer such a bereavement during childhood, the loss of a parent can trigger the worst, most abrupt transition to adulthood: a severe trauma that jolts them out of carefree innocence, straight into adult responsibilities and painful life lessons. Some of the pieces here grapple with this harshest of coming-of-age experiences, in particular Saturday Mars’ “An Ode to Dewey Dell Bundren”, a literary reflection on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that opens the issue.

Approaching loss from the polar opposite direction, Probert Dean’s short story “A Thing That Presents Itself to the Mind” explores with black humour the demise of a very different sort of mother. Douglas Cole in “A Game of Chicken” and C S Mee in “Amy Sullivan” also tangle with death and the transitional impact it makes in their tales.

Another equally significant coming-of-age theme, sex and sexuality, crops up in much of the issue. “The Sex-Education Fairy” by Monterey Buchanan offers a fantastical method of getting embarrassing questions answered at school, while Paul Hammond’s “An Odd, Odourless Scent” takes a more oblique approach to such matters in rural Ireland. In her memoir “Love in a War Zone”, Alison Watson dissects her youthful recklessness from Budapest to New York City with honesty and verve, showing how using sex to gain love and validation rarely pans out.

The poets largely grapple with sex and death as well. Elizabeth Wilson Davies, Kait Quinn, Brian James Lewis, and Craig Dobson explore some of the thrills and implications of dawning sexuality in their poems, while Alison Tanik and Eugene O’Hare suggest the darker side. Kent Leathem and Emily Cotterill conjure burgeoning homosexuality, from the challenges of feeling like an outsider to the rewards of awakening sexual identity. Kevin Grauke, the only poet to engage with death, does so with poignant simplicity.

A few writers took a more left-field approach to the coming-of-age theme. In his poem “September Cohen”, Bradley Taylor muses on an alternate reality for musician Leonard Cohen. Cat Isidore closes out the issue with her surreal story “Milkteeth”, about a girl forced into a violent confrontation with her mother’s garden flora.

As the winner of the 2024 Shooter Short Story Competition, “The Bunker” by Dilys Lovell also appears in this edition. Competition winners are not bound by the magazine’s themes, but Lovell’s piece could easily fit the category, featuring a girl on a remote island who yearns to be free of parental constraints. Her sheltered existence is shattered by the imposition of the wider world, as well as an interloper who reflects the tension she feels between safety and the call to adventure.

It is apt that, following an edition about major change, the next issue (our twentieth) will mark the end of Shooter’s life as a biannual print magazine. Shooter will evolve, but the final print edition will be themed Sweet Hereafter, both in honour of my mother and to mark the end of Shooter’s print identity. As the Spring/Summer 2025 issue, it will follow hot on the heels of the Coming of Age edition – but as with all things that die, Shooter will not be gone, but simply carry on in a different form.

To order the Coming of Age issue, please visit the Subscriptions page. 

Shooter Flash: “Drift” by Sammi LaBue

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Alex wore her half of our heart necklace long after high school, but when they found her across the bay, she wasn’t wearing jewelry. Just her long hair around her neck like a noose of wet string. 

She finally moved to New York from Tampa two years after I had. She lived in Queens and I lived in Brooklyn, but we made Beach Day an official weekly holiday, no matter the weather, to remind us of home, and I got her a job at the bar where I worked.

She found me in the walk-in refrigerator during the shifts we shared. I’d mix cheap vodka with cranberry juice and slices of lemon, our seventeen-dollar happy-hour cocktail, and she’d talk about her new friends, her roommates, her artsy kind of sadness. The refrigerator’s vacuum seal suctioned us in behind her, as if to preserve us. 

*

We’d walk down the beach warp-powered by the Adderall she brought. I thought of our purse of shells and treasures, our iPhones and keys left behind, thinly veiled by faded bath towels. But she’d say, Let’s never go back, smiling. 

Days would slip by without a whisper from Alex. “Sometimes friends drift apart,” Mom said when I called her instead. Then Alex would be back again, our teeth hard-set against the cold of the walk-in. Her voice sounding more and more like the silent void of her voicemail.

Want an adderall, a xanax, anything else? The sand-stained coin purse started to fill with chalky blue-and-white pills – nothing like sea glass. 

*

Still on for Beach Day?

Is it going to rain?

Meet at DD, right?

Im Here

?

I waited outside of Dunkin Donuts flipping between my doppler app and messages and back again. A green mass crept across the screen pixel by pixel.

When the smell of rain had washed over the roasted nuts cart and the car exhaust, Alex appeared with her hands shoved into the pockets of her leather jacket. I was getting worried. She wasn’t wearing her necklace. Where’s your bag?

After the intersection, she threw a laugh over her shoulder then ran across the boardwalk and down to the beach. I chased after her, rain needling my skin.

She dropped her clothes in the sand. The metallic reflection of the waves striped her skin, her hair melted out across the water’s surface as she waded deeper. 

Alone on the beach, time expanded as she pushed out and out. 

I remembered bike races to the beach back home and how you could eat the heavy evening heat right out of the air. 

I remembered her theory about being adopted, even with her mother’s round, clamshell eyes, those straight eyelashes, the scattered sand freckles across her nose. 

I remembered the first day she showed up to work drunk, when she breezed past the walk-in window.

The storm faded as fast as it arrived, and then so did she. I could see her. I could see her, until I couldn’t. Like a star stared at too long in the night sky, she flickered out as the lifeguard’s whistle blared. 

* * *

Sammi LaBue is a Brooklyn-based writer and educator. She founded Fledgling Writing Workshops (Best Workshop in NYC, Timeout 2019) and is the author of Words in Progress (DK 2020), a creative writer’s guided journal. Her writing can be found in Literary Hub, Glamour, The Offing, Mutha Magazine, Hobart, and Sonora Review, among others. She received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, is The Penn Review’s 2024 Poetry Prize winner, and has recently finished a dual memoir written in collaboration with her mom.