The story of the week for August 12 to 16 is…
The Case of Upside-Down Carassius Auratus by Rachel Hapanowicz
All posts by Tim
SHARON GERGER: The Cottonwood Tree
I left your room and wandered down the path beside the pond. I reached the tree you’d called your favourite when I’d pushed you along the path in a wheelchair borrowed from the hospice. It screamed at me on a breezeless day. I knew then you had left me behind.
Sharon Gerger is currently sitting in a hospice with her 92 year old father. She could not convince him to go for a walk with her in a borrowed wheelchair but she knows he would have loved the noisy cottonwood tree on that breezy day.
LYNN KOZLOWSKI: The Departed
His once dear ex-wife has died at 59, 30 years after their sad divorce. No words, sightings, or news between them for half his life. Cause of death unreported. It’s as if he’s lost a slumbering phantom limb—with all real feeling gone and now none even to be imagined.
Lynn Kozlowski’s writing has appeared in such places as 50-Word Stories, The Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Poetry Breakfast, and failbetter.com. He has a volume of short pieces, Historical Markers.
DEBORAH TAPPER: Summer Preserved
We braved ferocious thorns to pick luscious tayberries. Petal-drenched in butterfly sunshine, liquescing, mouths laughing crimson juice and our pricked fingers dripping sweetness.
You again, years later: defeated, damaged, devastated by life. You buy homemade tayberry jam. Don’t recognise me. Don’t remember.
But you will, when you taste summer’s promise.
Deborah writes at an old desk surrounded by five hundred pet bugs.
RACHEL HAPANOWICZ: The Case of Upside-Down Carassius Auratus
My mother keeps secretly replacing my little sister’s dead goldfish.
My newly adopted sister keeps randomly telling strangers at the store, “My mommy died!” and “I’m going to the beach!” My mother–our mother–nods, tired.
Two things can be true: There is a dead goldfish. There is a replacement.
Rachel Hapanowicz is currently a teacher in Cincinnati public schools where she is an expert at making cool lingo very uncool to her students, being from Ohio, and finding the best karaoke spots in town.
SAM HALL: Blushing Bride
That winter, he found endless ways to make her blush—mostly by telling dirty jokes or secret desires, late in the evening when the wind beat the windows and rattled their bones. Then he’d warm his hands against her burning cheeks. In this way, they made it through the nights.
Sam Hall is a young writer from England. When he’s not writing, Sam likes to worry about not writing.
YUHYUN HWANG: Eyes
You rub your eyes and enter a galaxy. Stars explode in the back of your eyelids as you careen through a bright tunnel. For a split second, you find yourself at the edge of the universe, when suddenly you are hauled back to Earth.
You feel more awake than ever.
Yuhyun Hwang is a high school student and writer who lives in Seoul, South Korea. She loves to read, write, and paint in her free time.
DEB DiTOMASO: Life of a Boat
An old boat dreams in a patch of brittle reeds, lulled by the elegy of summer passing.
Sentiments of paddle dips and skimming through duckweed. Giggles over water striders.
The plunk and bob of casting lines. Kisses from dazzle-dancing dragonflies.
Pining for a chance to chaperone one last moonlit romance.
Deb DiTomaso lives in Connecticut with her husband, a dog, and a bunch of chickens. She’s a career nurse with a lifelong passion for crafting stories. Her work has been placed as a finalist in CT Tassy Walden Awards for New Voices in Children’s Literature.
ROBERTA BEACH JACOBSON: Far From Any Harbor
mountains protect
the quaint village
keeping it remote
although unmapped
the hamlet is spotted
by whirling drones
excited tourists
skip through the gates
spilling into streets
hiding in shadows
villagers tremble
silencing their lutes
once the music stops
the tourists retreat
no longer enchanted
at nightfall
villagers gather
strumming anew
Roberta Beach Jacobson is an author, poet, painter. She makes her home in Iowa.
SUSAN HEISNER: You May Rely On It
Wickham Wax Works docent, Marilyn, unearthing from cold storage the figures for the “Wickham Soothsayers” installation, levered open the last wooden crate to find her late granny, Florence, staring up at her. Marilyn carefully pried her long lost Magic 8-Ball from Granny’s wax fingers, wondering if it still held answers.
Susan Heisner, aka the wyowordslinger, writes for fun and connection.