My favorite science teacher explained tectonic plates shift at the same speed as fingernails grow. We couldn’t keep our eyes off our hands that day. My nails had pink polish.
Fast-forward a few decades. Now living in California, I admire my tectonic red nails and wait for the big one.
Roberta Beach Jacobson is the editor of Cold Moon Journal.
Your clothes are shredded and sitting in flimsy charity bags.
Letters, turned to ash, like the empty promises they contained.
My phone, scrubbed clean of photographs.
Yet I still see you, haunting every crevice of my day.
And at night, you innocently stroll around my dreams, oblivious of my nightmare.
John Holmes is a flash writer who loves to cycle. This year, he has pieces in Fractured Lit, Paragraph Planet, Ellipsis Zine, Fragmented Voices and 101 Words. Winner of The Times (U.K.) short crime story.
He wanted to sleep.
But credit card bills demanded. Inbox hummed. Deadlines crept up.
Time got away.
When he made it to bed, he tossed, turned, dreamed of speeding down hills.
He consumed Diet Coke. But he still imagined soft surrender, slumber.
Nightmares lingered, meandered.
He flicked on every light.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA fiction program. His stories, “Soon,” “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” and “Tales From A Communion Line,” were nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Ariel Chart, among others.
I was impolitely ordered to leave the supermarket today
and I still don’t know the reason.
Being a good Samaritan, I was helping an elderly lady
who couldn’t reach a top shelf item.
Suddenly a manager was shouting angrily at me.
So I put down the old lady and left.
Gene Newman wrote this story.
From the sky a heavy rain of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies fall to the earth. Some risk collecting the money from their driveway and gutters. Many are killed by the coins falling on their heads. The phenomena last for weeks then abruptly stops.
We were warned about climate change.
Denny E, Marshall had had art, poetry, and fiction published. One recent credit is fiction in Potato Soup Salad. See more at dennymarshall.com.
Sitting in the dark, watching the clock. My stomach is in knots. The words the lawyers want me to say, I go over in my head. “He’s not like that,” I’d defend. But he was. I knew that side of him.
I turn off the alarm clock and the phone.
Melissa Kelly is a poet and Short Story writer from Long Island, NY. You can see some of her work in WestWard Quarterly Magazine, Plum Tree Tavern, Soft Cartel, Amethyst Review, Hedge Apple, One Art: a journal of poetry, and Trouvaille Review. See more at melissaannettekelly2020.blogspot.com
The story of the week for November 8 to 12 is…
Only a Minor Miracle by Sam Hall
She sees him in the distance, through the morning mist. It is like a punch in the gut that takes her breath away.
Twenty years since she’s moved away.
As she gets closer, his face changes. It isn’t him, but for a split second…
She remembers her eulogy and shudders.
Andrea Damic lives in Sydney, Australia with her husband and a seven-year-old daughter. She is an accountant by profession, but writing was always her first love. The only time she can actually write is at night, when everyone is asleep. She has had a few stories previously published by 50-word stories. She has written two children’s picture books (no publications yet) and is working on a novel as well.
It was just a Sunday picnic to talk things over.
It was just an ant bite.
It was just my finger swelling, red, ballooning.
It was Accident and Emergency.
It was ring cutters.
It was just my wedding ring in two sudden halves.
The ant saw it coming, not me.
Dettra Rose is an award-winning flash fiction author. A born and bred Londoner, she now lives in Australia. She calls both places home. Find her at dettrarose.com and on Twitter and Facebook.
Vast is my vision,
deep my support,
keen my attention,
to all I purport
will fuel another round
of intentional misreport.
I raise my racket,
and serve into the court
of House and Senate matters,
and civilly comport
with grace and age and reason
as I subtly distort.
Don Magin, husband (of 1), father (of 5), grandfather (of 15 so far), great-grandfather (of 1, also so far), retired chemist (reborn as a science and math teacher), and Santa-Claus-look-alike, lives in Bon Air, Virginia with his wife of 53 years. He has had stories and poems published in several online and print publications.