Kevin Rolly
Bio
Artist working in Los Angeles who creates images from photos, oil paint and gunpowder.
He is writing a novel about the suicide of his brother.
http://www.kevissimo.com/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/Kevissimo/
Stories (77)
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The Chosen
“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.” But Dex knew it was a lie just like all the lies she told him, told others. Just another pithy fabrication scrawled in a litany of fabrications upon torn fragments of paper and left taped to cupboards, mirrors and bed posts. Harbingers and shallow insights stolen from others and dumbed down to mimic original thought. She was never the same after their daughter’s death. It was in the days after the tumor arrived. Bedded in her brain and then the messages arrived. She scrawled them down in a fervency of import only felt by her. “Hope will be found in the ruins,” and other such nonsense.
By Kevin Rolly3 years ago in Fiction
What Did You Do, Jake Sullivan?. Top Story - July 2022.
The stone warehouse was vast and extended beyond sight in all directions like the halls of a desolate god without name. Smooth pylons, some twenty feet across, rose featureless and without seam into the darkness above where in the dim shadows he could just discern the whispers of limitless stone arches. They crisscrossed without order in an ancient latticework that he imagined carved with glyphs and dead languages lost to time and war. He walked in the grey shadowless light which emanated without source towards the only sound he could hear – a metronomic click-click, click-click which sounded from not far ahead. He’s had this dream before but it was different this time.
By Kevin Rolly3 years ago in Fiction
The Voice of the Tree House
The whispers from the trees began ten minutes ago to lure us into the forest like a siren's call. Halloween night and me just ten years old as my friends gathered at our house in their costumes and full of candy from the night’s scavagings and roamings from the neighborhood homes lit with pumpkins as the paper ghosts wraithed in the cooling breeze that rattled the leaves that sounded like applause the of bones. The whispers continued tin-like and distant as my friends with their plastic flashlights huddled terrified. “Long is the night, and deep is the forest where mysteries lie! Come find me!”
By Kevin Rolly4 years ago in Families
Ain't No Orphans Here
"The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window," Ms. Whicker whispered under the canopy of oaks that spread crooked overhead like the broken arms of God and flickered red with fire light. The children are sparsed in a loose arc about the fire sitting on worn wooden logs fashioned years ago for these kind of nights as the rock ringed fire spits cinders into the air which rise in hot columns of their own trajectories. They lean in, some tapping their feet on the needle covered ground while others sit on their hands and all sparkle eyed. She squints and reads from the printed page handed to her by the camp directors and trying to find her place. “Where am I in this thing? Dammit, I’s already lost. Oh, okay here…” She continues, “They said bad things happened in that cabin years ago. Terrible things. Tales say there was a man who was friends with bears and goats and he was mean and ornery and liked to…” She stops and turns the page over then looks over her shoulder towards the lodge that perched just up the rise and throws the pages into the fire.
By Kevin Rolly4 years ago in Fiction
Signals
It was three months after the war began and Jason had lost his shoe. Outside the horizon was burning crimson as if the world’s blood had hemorrhaged into the air in a grand exhalation of rage and smoke. The air reeked metallic and the dull thuds like heart pulses sounded as the bombs fell beyond his sight and he knew his friends were likely dead. He had just bought those shoes. They were before the rationing began and shelves ran dry till you couldn’t find a tin of peas to save yourself. The cities now exhausted of goods and looting coursed in the streets. At least that’s what he heard. He hadn’t been to town since the shoes and now he wasn’t ever going to go again.
By Kevin Rolly4 years ago in Fiction
Tales of a Chronic Insomniac
5am and the images cycle randomly through my mind as if some malevolent being holds the TV remote to my brain. The scenes change every two and half seconds. Precisely. I know this because I’ve been counting them all night. They are not the expressions of a chattering mind which is plagued with worries from the day or what needs to be done, but a mundane slideshow lacking all context or meaning - monkeys eating grapes, a tennis racket, microbes dividing…and I can’t shut them off. Metronomic and insipid, they must number in the thousands by now for I have suffered this all night as I lie uselessly in my bed. My body and mind are locked in a war of attrition where we will both ultimately lose.
By Kevin Rolly4 years ago in Humans
Before the Sun Came Dawnin’
Cassie waddled the rottin’ pumpkin to the shore for there weren’t no stars and it was the season of everythin’ dyin’. It lay there caved in on one side like a raw mouth wantin’ to swallow the entire moon which was hauntin’ in the clouds like somethin’ lost. The black stick trees were wet through though there weren’t no rain, but washed over in that grey mist that float out from the lake when things were just so. And things were just so. She waited for somethin’ to happen but nothin’ happens when she’s just lookin’ straight at things. There weren’t no mosquitos because Halloween were over and they all died somewhere invisible behind rocks and tree stumps where all small things go to die.
By Kevin Rolly4 years ago in Fiction
The Late Great Rebellion
Pittsburgh had failed me and now there was nothing ahead but the road. Twenty-three years old – petulant, ambitious and discontented. I was a recent graduate of Penn State’s film program which was an incoherence of beadledom and incompetence. We were hobbled by shoddy equipment, bureaucracy and professors whose only goal was to ruin students’ dreams. To diminish their lofty work into lifeless 16mm corpses by forcing them to comply to dogmatic rules of storytelling - or risk failing. I witnessed my fellow student’s projects blanched of all spark while spending their life’s savings. I too was threatened. “If you do it your way, don’t come back to us crying when it doesn’t work.”
By Kevin Rolly4 years ago in Wander
