You were worried about mosquitos so I ditched the water collection bucket. Without downspouts or a rain chain, the waterfall drilled into the concrete keeping us awake. The bucket hadn’t been much quieter. We didn’t sleep much usually, but not for any good reasons. I worried about mosquitos finding love.
JR Walsh’s works are at itsjrwalsh.com.
In a college speech class, the professor merely said, “Your topic is ‘moving.'” Frozen, I only spoke about going from class to class.
Now, I would have said I scrubbed the floor when we broke up, put my furniture in storage, took one last look. And left.
Paul Levine’s writing has appeared in The Kansas Quarterly, Permafrost, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and The New York Times, among others. His recent memoir, The Venice Literary Review, is available on Amazon and other outlets. He lives in Venice, Florida.
The next morning, she finds yesterday’s coffee
still in its carafe beside the sink.
Suddenly she is folding
herself onto the kitchen floor,
holding herself in her own arms.
She is here, breathing in, breathing out.
Alone. In their kitchen. With the coffee
he made.
The last thing
he made.
Jennifer L. Freed likes writing very short stories, which often tell themselves with line-breaks. She is the author of When Light Shifts (Kelsay books, 2022), a memoir-in-poems about the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com.
She cast enchantments throughout the house: the closets to appear larger than reality, the refrigerator to always smell like a favorite food, the living room to be the perfect temperature for whoever stood within. But it wasn’t until she enchanted the mirrors that someone made an offer on her house.
A one-time teen mother and high school dropout, Larina Warnock is an educator with a doctorate degree in rural Oregon.
Colorful banners waved in the chilly air. A sleigh of huskies passed by in the distance. An icy sheen sheeted their thick fur. Their pawprints were artifacts written on the cold, still pages of snow. Not even seconds after leaving their mark, their presence faded, one snowflake at a time.
Jerome Newsome has work in Aftermath Magazine, Fifty Word Stories, Vestal Review, and Flying South.
I put them away. Into the leather suitcase with the stains and the very sturdy locks. No layers of bubble wrap, no scented tissue paper, not even a handful of mothballs. I shoved it in the darkest corner of the closet. And, ignoring the scratching noises, I locked the door.
Amy lives where the high desert is shadowed by the soaring peaks of the Sawatch Range, also known as Salida, Colorado.
I hike to the hilltop for sunset and interrupt a murder. Hoarse cries of distress signal my arrival. Air buffets my face as inky clouds fill the sky. In moments, there is nothing left except a single black feather at my feet. It makes a jaunty addition to my hat.
Fiona is a mathematician and new writer. Visit her website at fionahevans.com.au or find her on Twitter at @FionaHEvans.
You figure it would have gone down in darkness, but it was only two-fourteen on Wednesday afternoon. It was horrible, yes, but certainly not life-changing. She took the cat, told me to F myself, then stormed out the door. Within hours, after a night filled with darkness, I moved on.
Lance Polin was once a high school English teacher. He taught writing to students very well. He had a passion for literature, but grew bored trying to teach it to indifferent children. He got frustrated, got unrelatedly hurt, then retired. Now, sitting around with a wife and two children, with a dog he likes better than any of them, and a cat far too nice for his genus, he sits and writes and writes and writes. He is selling a novel right now, pitching a screenplay, submitting short stories, scribbling poetry, writing comic books and a long biography of a one-time fringe celebrity and their thirty year quest to regain a prominence he never actually had. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Screenwriter’s Guild, and has been a finalist in short story contests more than once.
A boy with cornflower eyes drops his cotton candy and cries, briefly, before remembering himself, his father, and his father’s fists.
He trashes his spoiled spun sugar, kicks concourse dirt onto a kid’s new candy apple, and feels better by feeling worse.
These are the makings for an all-American story.
You can follow Joree at @joreenovotny.
I hadn’t seen him in fifty years. He should have gone to jail. But nobody would believe a kid, not back then.
No apologies now. He gloated and bragged, a smug smile on his face.
On my way out, I wrote on his chart, “For religious reasons, no pain killers.”
Harry Demarest claims that there is some truth to this story.