She stared at the comet: a watercolour of greens and violets. The desert air smelled of rain and conifers.
A black swan, disorientated, descended beside her. It is already too late for us, but you still have a chance.
Yet they waited together, sharing the same air, the same fate.
Michael Anthony Fagan is a Scottish fiction writer, filmmaker, and educator. He is a high school English and Media teacher with Masters degrees in both Creative Writing and Screenwriting.
Let me keep my twirling in the grass,
colored chalk and hopscotch–
and my fears.
I held on tight,
whispered at bedtime:
Please don’t let her die.
Grandma’s scent–
the last time that I touched her skin
I cradled her like a child.
She was ninety-three
and I was
age-less.
Laura C. Alonso’s work has been published in In Posse Review, Linnaean Street, 3AM Magazine, SFWP, The Manifest-Station, and other literary journals. She is the former Senior Editor of Fictionline Press and former Fiction Editor of The God Particle, and her fiction has been a finalist in the Santa Fe Writer’s Project’s Literary Awards Program in 2001, 2002, and 2010, as well as a finalist for the Glass Woman Prize in 2012.
A chubby bright-green caterpillar crawls toward me on the city sidewalk. My son once loved catching creatures like it. Now he’s in college and I’m late for work, but I stop to lift the wayward crawler to a patch of foliage. “Be safe,” I say, as if I’ve learned nothing.
DK Snyder’s creative work has appeared in Cool Rock Repository and Dollar Store Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @millioncandles.
Memory is a fickle friend.
You took a piece of my heart and forgot to give it back. That’s how I recall our parting.
You’re famous now. In your tell-all book you spin a different story.
I’m barely worth a mention. Just someone who jilted you a long time ago.
John H. Dromey wrote this story. He thanks Nancy for her prompt.
When we first met
Your wide eyes met mine
And we entwined
Two vines, growing together
Your paws, polar-bear white
Immense, far-north:
Your spirit wandering
You left when deep winter set in
Before spring took her first breath
You left on a sunny day, your spirit drenched in sunshine:
Cloudless.
Katherine Darlington has articles in many publications including poetry anthologies and literary journals. She also has several published novels. This story was written in memory of her Anatolian cross, Zoey. See more of her work at katherinedarlington.com.
Come with me and I will show you a name on a brick. A brick, fading red, in a crumbling wall. Three rows up, twelve bricks along.
Written there long ago in the smallest, neatest hand. Before the sun set and the clock chimed. And the girl’s name changed.
Forever.
Rachel Canwell wrote this story.
As a boy he would steal away from home of a summer’s night and climb upon a wide fence post at the corner of the farmer’s field to sit and wonder at the star-filled sky. Now, as he lay dying, with eyes closed, he beheld the inner firmament and understood.
Nick Young is a retired award-winning CBS News Correspondent. His writing has appeared in the San Antonio Review, Short Story Town, Danse Macabre Magazine, Pigeon Review, CafeLit Magazine, the Green Silk Journal, Typeslash Review, 50-Word Stories, Sein und Werden, Flyover Magazine,, Sandpiper, The Chamber Magazine and Vols. I and II of the Writer Shed Stories anthologies.
My mother keeps photographs—cars buried under white hills, doors blocked ankle deep, trees casting blue shadows.
When I phone now, her voice is soft and tired.
When I visit sometimes, I catch reflections in her eye.
A snowman, an empty sled—puddles glistening on salted blacktop the following day.
Jacob Ian DeCoursey was born and raised in Maryland. He’s a master’s degree dropout and “essential worker” laboring too many hours for too little pay. Since 2007, his writing has appeared in numerous publications (many now defunct) both online and in print. Reflex Press has longlisted his flash fiction for their quarterly international competition. In 2019, during a stint of unemployment, he released his first book, Vivid Greene: and Other Unusual Stories. Follow at billy_collins_in_hell
The story of the week for December 27 to 31 is…
Point Price by Salman Ansari
“I know your secret.”
Shocked, I jerked away from the child who’d whispered in my ear.
Which secret? The possibilities—from innocuous to appalling—flipped through my brain at lightning speed. I feigned nonchalance.
“Really?”
He leaned in again. “You’re 61.”
“Oh, that.” I smiled weakly, relieved. “Don’t tell anyone.”
Laurie P. Mendoza is a 61-year-old elementary school counselor with a checkered past.