Over a decade underground
on tree sap survival
creepy crusty shells
crawl through earth
leaving exoskeletons’
nutrients near trees.
Emerge meta-morphs,
wings as stained glass
in green tinted bodies
with falsettos in tune
to a summer’s ending.
Only weeks left above ground
attracting their mates
to lay eggs by trees.
Judith wrote this unable to ignore critters that remind her of the circle of life.
Suffocating under the weight of the moon, I left—down the street, across the town, into the plane, toward the sunrise, over the sea, out of my seat, onto the bus, between bright towers, among the strangers. Then night fell over the strange new land and the same moon rose.
Karris Rae is a fiction MFA/MA candidate at McNeese State University. Her chapbook, We Obedient Children, recently won the 2024 Etchings Press Chapbook Contest in prose. Her short work has appeared or is forthcoming in 100 Word Story, Fourth Genre Magazine, Eunoia Review, Mount Hope Magazine, and Gargoyle Online, among others.
In the bushes the sparrows busily chirrup and flit. Unconcerned by my presence. Indifferent to what shelters within the shadows. Oblivious to what is hidden and strains at the tether. Unscared even as I creep forward and reveal my trembling hands and fractured mind. Silent witnesses to an unfolding secret.
Matthew Shepherd lives in Essex in south-east England where he enjoys developing his creative writing, especially flash fiction and poetry.
Earthworms emerge, seeking air.
They are there in the driveway, stranded
on the steaming asphalt,
where my two small daughters find them.
They squat close to look, then
rescue: gently lifting slimy strands
of pink and brown,
they lay them down in sunburned grass.
I watch, then kneel
to help.
Jennifer L Freed is author of When Light Shifts, a memoir-in-poems about the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage. Her daughters have grown up, but she still remembers the day they rescued earthworms. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com to learn more.
You wear the words like a medal, even after the coffee cups have been emptied and carried away. It is sunny outside and there is no rush, so you saunter, looking in shop windows. Your sister’s words have more weight than those of Anna Wintour, Yves Saint Laurent or God.
Hetty lives in Scotland and works in publishing. Her writing has been published by Writers’ HQ and Northern Gravy. When not reading or writing, she likes exploring new places.
The story of the week for August 12 to 16 is…
The Case of Upside-Down Carassius Auratus by Rachel Hapanowicz
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.
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.
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.
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.