The story of the week for July 29 to August 2 is…
In the Course of the Investigation by Bob Lucky
SHANTI CHANDRASEKHAR: What She Lets Go, What She Keeps
She shreds the cloak of past trauma. She defies present challenges.
Then, she stops fighting. She treasures her newfound peace.
A trace of sadness lingers somewhere within; the remnant is part of her now. If she lets that go, she’d be incomplete. She wouldn’t know how to grieve for herself.
Shanti Chandrasekhar writes and lives in Maryland. Her work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Braided Way, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.
JANNIE DZIADZIO: Mirror Image
I look into your eyes and see your time-weathered sixty-seven years in your face. I am twenty-three, vibrant, invincible, and hopeful. To see me, you look inside, at a former self. For me to see you, I look in the mirror. We are one, wondering where all the time went.
Jannie Dziadzio is a retired Intuitive Transformational Coach whose last name is impossible to pronounce.
BOB LUCKY: In the Course of the Investigation
When I showed up for my life, it was a crime scene cordoned off with flapping yellow tape. I begged to go in. I have to find myself, I argued. It was hard to explain. Now I’m the number one suspect and may get to the bottom of things yet.
Bob Lucky is the author of My Wife & Other Adventures (Red Moon Press, 2024), My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), and Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014). He lives in Portugal.
DAVE BONNEY: Sun Burned
Belly pressed against the warm sand.
Through half closed eyes, the golden hairs on my forearm bend like grass in the breeze.
The foamy ocean edge reaches up,
falls back,
tugging the sun burned memory of you out to sea.
We all swam here that day we got the call.
Dave lives in Sydney, Australia and works across various creative disciplines. Follow at instagram.com/davidnormanbonney
ROSE PADRICK: Transitions
Transitions. His death shreds my soul, workplace “downsizing” shreds my psyche, quick sale of my children’s childhood home and extensive vegetable garden shreds my heart. On to condo living, plants in pots, popcorn at seven replaces dinner promptly at five, neighbors not known for thirty years. A geranium blooms. Transitions.
Unretiring from the same company three times, two monthly columns running in the Happenings newspaper, blessed enough to live within ‘hollerin’ distance of five children, twenty-one grandchildren, five great grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren keeps Rose’s daylight hours busy, so most writing is done after bedtime. However, her bedtime and the rest of her life has recently changed dramatically, as interpreted in this story.
TIM BOITEAU: A Dendrologist’s Notes
Rhytidome porous, lacking typical woody odor.
Vascular cambium absent, xylem and phloem intermingling freely in byzantine beauty.
Phloem thin-walled, with aubergine coloring. Transported fluids carbon-dioxide rich, deficient in carbohydrates.
Xylem, conversely, a shocking, highly-oxygenated crimson.
The heartwood center is most singular of all: chambered, rubbery, precious to behold—and hold.
Tim Boiteau writes in Michigan. He is an Editor at Every Day Fiction, a Writer of the Future winner, and the author of two novels, with a third forthcoming. See more at timboiteau.wordpress.com.
DEB DiTOMASO: The Will
He lumbered into O’Shea’s like a beaten horse. I tipped my glass. He declined. I thought of the irony, him girdling the trees as our dad lay dying to birdsong. I signed the waiver, allowing him to gut and rebuild what should be leveled and turned into a dog park.
Deb DiTomaso is a graduate of Sacred Heart University with a bachelor’s in science. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, a dog, and a bunch of chickens. Crafting stories is her passion. Her middle grade novel GRAM RIDDER placed as a finalist in CT Tassy Walden Awards for New Voices in Children’s Literature.
BILL COX: The Web of Life
Lionel woke up one day and realised he was made entirely of spiders.
“We’re all part of you,” the spiders said, “and you’re the sum total of us.”
Aghast, Lionel doused himself in bug spray. The spiders died and Lionel with them, for, without community, how can an individual survive?
Bill lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. Although the city has been his home for decades, his heart lies elsewhere – beating once a century, within a small, ornately carved wooden box, bound by dark magicks, guarded by an ancient order of warrior monks, in a hidden monastery deep within the Forbidden Forest that now covers the ruins of the Lost City of Lemuria. That place.
CEZAR LIMA: Epiphany
I hadn’t known before that flowers could get fungus, but you made sure to teach me when you left that vase I gave you in the same corner for weeks. Back there, I was able to learn. Among spores, I realized that it wasn’t just the daisy that had died.
Cezar Lima is a Brazilian Electrical Engineering student at the University of São Paulo. He’s been into creating and developing ideas since he was young, always curious about how big the world can be.