The story of the week for October 9 to 13 is…
Desert Blues in a Minor Key by Jonathan Kosik
JONATHAN KOSIK: Desert Blues in a Minor Key
My grandfather’s beer hisses.
My grandmother hisses back.
Front tire this morning hissed at the valve stem.
We’re driving to Hollywood.
Desert ravines and teepee trading posts dot the Arizona highway.
“Mongrels,” Grandfather says.
Patchy coyote skips into our lane.
The canyon colors swirl.
On our way to becoming stars.
Jonathan Kosik is a writer and photographer who lives outside Nashville. He enjoys his daughter’s laughter and his wife’s fashion sense.
NIKKI DAVISON: Adopting
I live with them now. I like them. They have red hair and freckles, lots of freckles, the kind that sit close and blur into each other. I dotted orange paint over my face to look just like them. They cried and hugged me tight, my freckles smudging into theirs.
Nikki Davison is a writer, book hoarder and guinea pig rescuer from north-east England.
DAVID LOWIS: Limited
The answers came in a dream: the meaning of life; the purpose of life; how it all began; why it all began.
He awoke with a start, nudged his wife awake.
“What is it? Darling, tell me.”
He wanted to tell. He was desperate to tell. But language failed him.
David Lowis is tall and writes mostly short stories.
SETH ROSENMAN: Ankle Bracelet
“Bracelet’s OK?” Christopher’s probation officer asks.
“Yeah. Beeps in class when I need to charge it.”
“And having to stay in your lane?”
“Fine,” Cristopher says, unsure how to express that restricting his movement helps him see what he missed before. Unsure how to ask whether this is the point.
Seth Rosenman wrote this story.
STORY OF THE MONTH: September 2023
The Story of the Month is chosen from the Story of the Week winners announced from the past month.
The finalists for September were:
Is This Your First? by Emily Patino
Blink by Keith J. Powell
Moon Teaches Resistance by Joan Leotta
The Most Wonderful Thing in the World by Susan Gale Wickes
The winner of the September 2023 Story of the Month, and the $10 prize, is…
Blink
CAROL TYMANN: Just Smile and Move On
In the grocery store today
I skim several greetings
Rejecting one inane rhyme after another
He hovers
Mute to my “Excuse me”
Oblivious to personal space
Never removing a card from the rack
Or his eyes from me
As I leave with my choice
I hear a breathy “Happy Anniversary”
Carol Tymann lives in upstate New York where her instinct is to believe most people are innocently interested and kind, but sometimes she wonders about their motives. Is she too trusting?
JACK GALATI: Washington at Valley Forge
The brown bess watches him undress
at night, bones and naked, shivering
like men shiver.
Today, it is too cold to go to war,
he says, It is human to suffer;
and soldiers watch him as he sinks back
into his tent where he sobs silently,
like an old widow.
Jack Galati is an MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University. His fiction and poetry has appeared in a number of journals and magazines including Mignolo Arts, The Closed Eye Open, and Lone Mountain Lit.
BOB THURBER: (n + 1)th
In the year 9757 the great one died for the thousandth time so a celebration of the lives and loves of his/her/their incarnations was organized by familiar souls. Timeless glimpses of mistakes and failures were snap-flashed on the face of Earth’s moon, demonstrating countless imperfections working out happily ever after.
Bob Thurber is the author of six books. Regarded as a master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in Esquire and other magazines, been anthologized 60 times, received a long list of awards, and been utilized in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.
MICHELLE WILSON: Memento Mori
Breathtaking how photographs can yank you back into long-forgotten moments: birthdays, graduation, Niagara Falls with my hyper-competitive sister.
Blurred years whistle by. I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast. What I did before sneaking through Sis’s album.
This photo of my terrified face… falling a hundred water-soaked feet.
Michelle Wilson’s words have appeared in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Rejection Letters, Potato Soup Journal’s Best of 2021 Anthology, Maudlin House, Litro Magazine, The Drabble, 50-Word Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, among others. Her story ‘Fish Brain’ was nominated for Best of the Net 2022. She lives with her partner in Miami Beach, Florida.