She first got a bowl filled with earth, and planted two seeds.
She watered it daily. And I saw the seeds sprouted into lovely green leaves. She displayed them for photosynthesis and the leaves’ greenness deepened.
Until she suddenly stopped. And the boisterous greenness of her creature slowly withered away.
Jimoh Adeiza Abdulrahaman writes from Nigeria. He’s a fiction writer who’s passionate about humanity.
Alan reads aloud the text relaying Ken’s funeral plans. The more he reads, the less colour adorns Jackie’s face.
“You didn’t know,” he says.
“What happened?”
“Stroke. Last Saturday.”
She pictures Ken’s smile peering up from the cabbages, hand raised in acknowledgment. “But I saw him at the allotment. Yesterday.”
Anna Sanderson writes about the world as she sees it (with the odd twist and turn). You can follow her story on Twitter at @annasanderson86.
I gawped at the picturesque countryside spread out in front of me. Natural beauty everywhere. Fruit and flowers left to flourish in abundance; verdant trees made fluorescent by the glowing sun; and deck chairs. Yes. My beloved, crimson-coloured, disheveled, food-stained deck chairs: just perfect for watching the world go by.
Florence Turner believes that we should protect the natural world at all costs.
Polarized
Analyzed
Hypnotized
Sedated
All the king’s horses
All the king’s men
Never put Black back together again
All flights canceled
All ships docked
Sunrise
I kick the can
It’s heavy
My coffee waits
Stirs a young man’s dreams
Into these old bones
I pack the tent
And transistor radio
Patrick Yu notes that sometimes things can get very dark, but life is like that.
We’ve been here for years, laughing among ourselves at your silly stories of UFOs, balloons, and Roswell crash. Visitors from outer space! your newspapers say. Cover stories, we say. Not understanding your culture and language made us stick out at first, but we’ve learned. We mingle freely among you now.
Connie Taylor left California to become a commercial fisherman in Alaska. She fished salmon, crab and shrimp for twenty years before settling in Cordova to become a printer and art gallery owner. Now she’s a publisher, photographer, and author. See more at fathompublishing.com.
In a quiet Hawaiian neighborhood where nothing ever happens
we steal lilikoi to make them “splot”
wriggle through squishy red dirt, under fences, to escape the enemy
collect every flower in sight (a lot)
In a quiet Hawaiian neighborhood where nothing much happens
to our neighbors
we are what happens
This story was written by Erin Gilmore, who has to imagine the stories her grandparents never told her.
The last Martian watched mournfully as gun-wielding Earthlings and smog from brand-new factories smothered his once beautiful red planet. He bitterly remembered the day fifty years ago when a satellite from Earth landed and then left with a Martian soul. Breathing his last, he lamented “Your homecoming doomed us, Elon.”
Yogita Khandge wrote this story.
The story of the week for February 20 to 24 is…
Sunday Afternoon in Ward C by Mof Afdhaal
He played one of the scratched 78s he had found with the wind-up gramophone. Danced through the rubble with no one watching.
He had spent years telling himself that tomorrow he would start trying to meet someone. Now it all lay in pieces around him: the last man on earth.
Brian Maycock’s short stories have appeared recently in Paragraph Planet and Creepy Pod. He lives in Scotland.
Conversation didn’t hold as much interest as Tom Cruise running for his life on the fun-size flatscreen did. But in the misery of intrusive catheters and a relentless urge to retch, her soft snores from the visitor’s chair said “I’m with you to the end” better than any conversation could.
Moh Afdhaal lives in Sri Lanka and writes flash fiction. Find him on Twitter at @mohwritesthings.