MIKKI ARONOFF: The Old Man Looks for His Wife

Artistic, Poetry, Submissions, , , ,

Where’d she go?
Could I have mislaid her?
Or did she, in a feint, blur from view?
Did she take wing on a milk thistle puff?
Or, pressing heels into rippling flanks, riding the mare’s chord of song, land born anew on childhood’s moon?
Perhaps I dreamt her all along?

Mikki Aronoff’s work appears in New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Tiny Molecules, HAD, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, 100 word story, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww, The Offing, and elsewhere. She’s received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.

MICHAEL THEROUX: Smiles that Smell

Artistic, Poetry, Submissions, , ,

There are smiles that smell; you can tell ’em for miles. A whale of a smile (you know the kind, stretched in an arc outside the mind).

A hand’s breadth below eyes where no light lies. A big one, that smile: points turned up and back like two ready machetes.

Michael Theroux writes from his cubby-hole home office in Northern California. He is presently shifting from decades of developing and publishing science-based socio-political works toward publication of poetry and fiction. Much more satisfying…

DAN JOHNSON: 40 Acres Done Today

Artistic, Submissions, Top Stories, , , , ,

Bound for the elevator, fifth trip today. Afternoon sun setting. Heads turn, alerted by horn blasts and seeing fate and fated meet. Cloud of bean dust over the crossing settles on the twisted grain truck remains. Miles away a combine sits, engine ticking as it cools. Forty acres done today.

Dan Johnson was born in California and grew up in Illinois. Now retired, he spent over twenty years as a high school physics teacher and school administrator, who also loved writing poetry.

WENDY K MAGES: Hornets Treat & Trick

Adventure, Amusing, Submissions, , ,

Elsie, wielding a blue flyswatter, chases a hornet from her kitchen.

Escaping, it returns to the colony’s growing nest hidden in the ceiling. There, hundreds of angry hornets continue chewing through the drywall. The ceiling fan whirs, concealing their activity, until, bursting through, the swarm banishes Elsie from their kitchen.

Wendy K. Mages, a Mercy University Professor, is a Pushcart Prize nominee and an award-winning poet and author. She earned her doctorate in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her master’s in Theatre at Northwestern University. As a complement to her research on the effect of the arts on learning and development, she performs at storytelling events and festivals in the US and abroad. To learn more about her and her work, and to find links to her published stories and poetry, please visit mercy.edu/directory/wendy-mages

JOHN SZAMOSI: Yogi the Instructor

Amusing, Artistic, Submissions, , , , ,

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.

LUCAS HUBBARD: Checkpoint

Artistic, Submissions, , ,

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.

MONICA SHAH: Peer Pressure

Adventure, Odd, Submissions, , , ,

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.

JACK CAMERON: Remembrance

Artistic, Submissions, Top Stories, ,

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.

BILLIE-LEIGH BURNS: Snails Are Just Slugs With the World on Their Shoulders

Artistic, Submissions, , , ,

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.