My cellphone buzzed unnaturally loud in the quiet cabin, making several boys stir. Grasping blindly, I muted it and held my breath until the room slowly returned to silence.
The next three hours crawled until reveille, when I could finally return my mother’s call and confirm my father had died.
A recovering lawyer, Liam MacDonald has written for decades. He finds some stories easier than others.
I pretended it was a museum, filled with the oldest stuff I had ever seen. Crowded and dusty behind smoke-stained glass. Relics from a world that no longer existed. No signs, but the rule was understood: “Do Not Touch”. Admission cost a kiss on the cheek and Nana’s cigarette breath.
Robert Ludemann is happily retired and getting better each day at not working.
The faculty’s all smiles, all compliments. Everyone chimes in. Everyone loves and admires our Administrators. Everyone is loyal. All is clean, shiny, bright. At least on the surface. Because everyone knows, or at least suspects, the new faculty hire, the “fair-haired boy” of the Board of Trustees, is a plant.
Wendy K. Mages, a Mercy University Professor, is a Pushcart Prize nominee and an award-winning poet and author. She earned her doctorate in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her master’s in Theatre at Northwestern University. As part of her investigation of the effect of the arts on learning and development, she performs at storytelling events and festivals in the US and abroad. To learn more about her and her work, and to find links to her published stories and poetry, please visit her Mercy University Faculty page and her website, Wendy Mages: Storyteller.
The strangest feeling that somebody is watching. I glance back before opening the door, treading lightly, so as not to miss the disturbance of silence. I slink into the room and tiptoe to the bathroom, flicking on the white light. I stare at my reflection, and watch as she blinks.
Zoe is a passionate cinephile and bibliophile. She spends most of her time writing, reading, or thinking about films.
The story of the week for October 27 to 31 is…
Cartwheeling Mama by Rita Riebel Mitchell
My brethren’s rotting corpses litter the plucked marsh, victims of the elements – an easier demise than mine.
First, I’m scalped.
Then, my organs are scooped out with a spoon.
Finally, with gouged eyes and a toothless mouth, I’m set on fire, my body paraded like a trophy on some doorstep.
Billie-Leigh Burns is a writer from Liverpool. Her work has been featured by 50 Word Storues, 101 Words, Funny Pearls, and The Hooghly Review. She is also a maths tutor and a bookkeeper, making her the only writer she knows who owns an ‘I Heart Spreadsheets’ mug.
In the hereafter and evermore a group of deceased literary artists obtained permission to haunt on Halloween with the stipulation their disturbances be directed only at living writers. The ghosts wailed. A whooshing wind boosted their warbling hum. Blaring bursts of clamor transported an unembellished staccato rhythm layered with ambiguity.
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.
Tomorrow morning, the spiderwebs will sag. I’ll clasp my trash-grabber, snapping up candy wrappers, empty sugar-shrouds nestled among fallen leaves. But tonight, the wind whistles through the trees and rattles the fence’s loose picket. My candy bowl is half full, and as another specter floats over my porch, I believe.
Tracy Royce’s work appears in 101 Words, Blink-Ink, The Dribble Drabble Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere.
Nobody tells you how much parenting you’ll do on stairs. (And, me, scared of heights.) From tying shoelaces, to exploring Souter Lighthouse, to throwing socks at one another.
Now I sit on the stairs outside your room, waiting for the WhatsApp message that’ll say you’re not coming over this weekend.
James Whitman writes from Sunderland. There are twenty-six stairs in his home, and he has parented on every single one of them.
The grandfather clock struck five, and Jack went to the window. The wild ones were crepuscular and attacked only at twilight. Closing the steel blinds, he noticed black dots on the prairie. The herd was gathering under the blood-red glow.
“How many more sunsets?” Jack wondered, returning to his armchair.
Nelly Shulman authored three short story collections. Her work in numerous literary magazines.