LYNNE BARRETT: Backyard Chair, Miami

Artistic, Submissions, , , ,

Across thirty years, my legs have lost an inch or so. Sometimes I sway. But I’ve held you: Pregnant. Nursing. Mourning your mother; reading your son tales.

Now you track the plane-free evening skies. A starling mob. One intent hawk. Through clouds, thin moon. You lean back. And I hold.

Lynne Barrett’s story collection Magpies received a Florida Book Awards gold medal. Her recent work appears in Orange Blossom Review, The Hong Kong Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, River Teeth, and Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing. See more at LynneBarrett.com.

EILEEN MARDRES: Close Call

Amusing, Submissions, ,

Wrong place, wrong time, wrong ID, and a cop car slowly following her. Deep breath, big smile, “can I help you officer?” A bank robbery? Here? Now? Suspect resembles me? I’ll go with you. Teller remembers: hair, coat, height, age, the same.

Thankfully the culprit wasn’t also eight months pregnant.

Eileen searches her own memory bank for possible subjects. Life being lived twice over.

MARIA CARGILLE: Cracked

Artistic, Submissions, , ,

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall is all the paramedic can think, shivering as the ambulance screeches away. But this fall had been deathly intentional, the aftermath bloody…

He breathes a shaky, sincere prayer of thanks to the King; this time, the soldiers’ efforts have been enough.

Humpty will live.

Maria Cargille wrote this story. The darkness of nursery rhymes has always intrigued her.

PEGGY GERBER: Visiting Grandma

Artistic, Odd, Submissions, , , ,

Outside a fierce wind blows as the temperature plummets inside the drafty old house. Grandma sits in her rocking chair as Emily lovingly wraps a shawl around her skeletal shoulders.

Sipping a cup of tea, Emily turns to her grandmother and says, “Tell me again, Grandma. How did you die?”

Peggy Gerber is a poet and short story writer from New Jersey. Her stories have appeared in many publications including Terror House Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and many others.

JOREE NOVOTNY: Roots

Artistic, Submissions, , , , ,

Rutabagas, incandescent. Golden turnips, soft as flesh. Caramelized carrots, parsnips roasted and crisp.

She chooses to remember the vegetables sliced and seasoned by her grandmother’s hands, translucent as Vidalias.

The rest of her roots, she knows, belong mangled in the disposal. Feeble skins and rotting corpses, bitter fennel, putrid beets.

Joree is an anti-poverty advocate who moonlights as a writer when she’s not recovering from putting her toddler to bed.

PATRICK YU: hello darkness my old friend

Artistic, Poetry, Submissions, , , ,

The crisp wind
Threatens the embers
Boiling my rock soup
It seems
My soup might falter

I take flight
And dream of a different day

Grounded
I realize
My social isolation
Has left
My pot lacking
The ingredients
Of life
It’s all a metaphor
The empty pot
Food for thought

Patrick Yu is looking forward to a vaccine and a return to normal.

CHRISTOPHER VALLES: I’m-aginary Friend

Amusing, Submissions, , ,

My imaginary friend came back today. I hadn’t seen him in a very long time. He had grown taller and had traded his jean shorts and t-shirt for a sport jacket and a collared shirt.

He screamed when I smiled at him.

I guess I wasn’t so imaginary after all.

Christopher Valles is a young Latino writer from Chicago. He is currently a senior at Brother Rice High School and will attend Oberlin College in the fall. His short story, “Five Man God,” received an Honorable Mention from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

JIM LATHAM: Expectation Management

Amusing, Artistic, Submissions, ,

He was older than she’d thought he would be, but, in fairness, she was older than she had ever thought she would be.

Something they already had in common: her erroneous expectations.

Not a bad start, she thought. Mom always said, “When you lower your expectations, you raise your average.”

If you like, keep in touch with Jim at his Substack.

ERICA PLOUFFE LAZURE: The Haircut

Artistic, Submissions, ,

An ex-girlfriend cut his hair free one night over too much grocery store prosecco, too long ago. And now his hair grows long and he thinks of her, of her scissors, whenever the wind blows through his hair. And he wants to forget her, but the wind continues to blow.

Erica Plouffe Lazure is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Sugar Mountain (2020) and Heard Around Town (2015), and a fiction chapbook, Dry Dock (2014). Her collection of short fiction, Proof of Me + Other Stories, is forthcoming by New American Press in 2021. Her fiction is published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Carve, Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The MacGuffin, The Southeast Review, Phoebe, Fiction Southeast, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Hippocampus Magazine, The Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Exeter, NH and can be found online at ericaplouffelazure.com.