Driving through Yellowstone I see a blackbear at the roadside trying to teach her cubs to stand on their hind legs and beg for food. The kids aren’t paying attention; they’d prefer wrestling, climbing trees, digging up ground squirrels.
Interesting: the smart teacher is wrong, her unruly students are right.
John Szamosi is a wordsmith who publishes short stories, satire and occasionally poems.
From the evening’s last plane: a harried mother, two incorrigible toddlers. Once they behave, mom fumbles for passports—the other passengers grumbling, furious to delay their reunions, showers, sleep.
The passports aren’t there. All three start crying.
It’s ok, the agent lies. They are escorted away. The line moves swiftly.
Lucas Hubbard is a North Carolina-based writer whose work has appeared in Microfiction Monday Magazine, Defector, Maudlin House, INDY Week, and other outlets.
Sometimes he no longer craved meat. He just wanted an apple. But the others sneered, and he always succumbed, joining them tearing into flesh, greedily slurping the viscous, coppery blood. Once, he bit into someone who had just eaten a Granny Smith. It was the closest he would ever get.
Monica Shah is a writer, educator, bibliophile, poet, humanist, chocoholic, and dragon whisperer.
The story of the week for September 25 to 29 is…
Remembrance by Jack Cameron
Years after. He touched the pavement where it happened, hoping to feel something. Was it possible for a place to hold some fragment of an event? Might the wind have a whiff of her sandalwood perfume? Might the place where she stood be slightly warmer?
His hand felt only rain.
Jack writes true crime and crime fiction. He has a MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His work has been featured previously in Grit City Magazine, The Pitkin Review, and other publications. He is also the creator of TacomaStories.com. His serial crime novel A Better Lie is being released weekly on Substack.
A snail slicks up the wall, passes the hose-tap after morning coffee, reaches the sill as I grasp seconds of solitude. After the toddler storm of bedtime, I watch it scale the window.
With a flick, my husband resets its progress, announcing, “You forgot the laundry.”
It starts over tomorrow.
Billie-Leigh Burns is a writer from Liverpool. Her short stories and flash fiction have been published by Fictionette and Naked Cat Lit Magazine. She is currently working on a novel set in a dystopian future.
We were born 35 years and 500 miles apart, though that distance feels shorter somehow. Your path was cemented and dried before mine was even conceived of. I like to think that in a parallel universe, where fate is not so exacting, where time heals instead of corroding, they intersected.
Hannah Smart is a fiction writer and literary/pop culture critic. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, The Boston Globe, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Sunlight Press, among others. She is the founder and editor in chief of experimental magazine The Militant Grammarian, holds an MFA from Emerson College, and is a Ph.D. candidate and writing professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.
He’s always busy with something, never cares where she’s been or who she’s seen. Ignores how she’s spending every spare second with old swim friends; doesn’t even notice when shimmering scales start to reappear.
Now she’s gone. And all he finds are her discarded shoes, drifting unneeded on the tide.
Deborah writers at an old desk surrounded by five hundred pet bugs.
She woke to the aroma of pancakes.
Jack made pancakes every Sunday. His with blueberries and Greek yogurt; hers with bacon and maple syrup. She smiled.
When the bedroom door creaked open, it wasn’t him. It was their son, Daniel.
But while they chewed their pancakes, Jack was with them.
James Whitman is a writer, podcaster, and nerdy dad. He makes excellent pancakes.
In the quiet corner of her room, she sifted through old photographs, tracing the lines of forgotten smiles. Her fingers danced over sepia memories, each frame a vessel of laughter and shared secrets. The room whispered of days gone by, where two sisters once painted the world with their dreams.
Iyonmana Adesuwa is a registered nurse who loves to write.