Cardiac ablation is the art of treating heart rhythm irregularities with freezing. Not like musical statues at our wedding, where the music stops, you freeze, and when it starts you dance. There will be scars. These stop abnormal impulses. Nothing reaches that part of the heart again. The feeling’s gone.
Rosaleen Lynch, an Irish community worker and writer in the East End of London, has words in lots of lovely places and can be found on Twitter at @quotes_52 and 52Quotes.blogspot.com.
I glance at the sign outside the church when I should be watching the road. Love Like Jesus, it says. A nice sentiment, I think, as the sun goes down in a profusion of toxic colors, like a ship full of chemicals burning intently at the edge of the world.
Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).
On a warm summer day,
I lay down under an apple tree.
Slowly dozing away,
I remembered the good old days
and wished to be younger again
to experience the joy,
I once had.
Suddenly, I realized:
One day, I will remember today
and will wish to relive it again.
Stella Fernandez loves reading and writing.
From the narrow galley behind a testy espresso machine, the beautiful seeker kid navigates coworkers, regulars, the tip game, and a sprained left ankle. Nose manual nollie shuv out. A fluke. Time heals, youth conceals, and this one’s already gaining the precipice, getting a decent jump on the unknowable gap.
Evan Harris is the author of The Quit.
My skin is late summer:
all golden sunsets
stained with raspberry,
stretched over pale tendrils of green.
My eyes are early autumn:
storm grey from a distance,
golden-green-blue up close.
And my hair is the last colors
before winter,
brown glimmering with fierce but faded
red and ochre and chime.
Maria is enormously fond of all the seasons. She’s enchanted by scurrying cloudscapes, and wildflowers that thrive in improbable places.
He leaves you both behind with the unanswered question of why. For some incommunicable reason, you conclude that your primary purpose now is to solve it. You pore over the plotted points of your shared timeline, charcoal pupils darting between them: frantic, determined, and leaving behind a spider’s laboured trail.
Laura works as a secondary school pastoral assistant and relishes sharing the therapeutic potential of the arts with young people. She writes to navigate life’s more painful moments and, although she has attended a writers’ group for over a year, has yet to find the courage to share her own work.
Married too soon, she lost herself. She became we; we became they. Over the years, there was no room for her.
Daughter. Sister. Wife. Mother. Grandmother.
Walking the line between solitude and loneliness, she hopes to come to terms with which was preferable. Waiting for answers, she begins to write.
Ruth Mannino is a retired math teacher, tutor, and business analyst, who has always loved to write. Meditation and mindfulness being a part of her everyday life, in 2020, she published Thursday Mornings: Breathe, Stretch, Listen, Love, a series of interviews she conducted with senior members of her chair yoga class. She has just discovered flash fiction and finds it motivating.
To the beat of pre-dawn drums, we girls pretty ourselves, then form a circle, united yet apart.
The order in which the boys may choose is long-decided. They assess, appraise, make their final decisions.
Drums stop, silence echoes.
The first boy steps forward, chooses me.
My family will be happy.
Laura Besley writes short fiction and squeezes her writing into the bookends of her day. She has lived in Holland, Germany, and Hong Kong, but now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Her flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers, was published in March 2020. She tweets at @laurabesley.
The story of the week for June 14 to 18 is…
Father’s Day Again by Bob Thurber
I still can’t get through a week without thinking about her.
Some deep-rooted memory sparks, my heart ignites, my thoughts wander.
She feels close. Alive again. If not in this house, this town, then the next.
In my heart no time has lapsed since I last saw my daughter’s smile.
Bob Thurber is the author of six books. Regarded as a master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in Esquire and other magazines, been anthologized 60 times, received a long list of awards, and been utilized in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.