Are you listening, Father? The difference is dosage.
Milligrams, it’s medicine. Grams, it’s snake venom. If your memory were better, you’d remember how much you’ve had today.
No, I’m not going to tell you. That’s my little secret.
A pill lies before you. Is it your first or your twentieth?
Graham Robert Scott’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, Pulp Literature, Barrelhouse, X-R-A-Y, and others.
He pushes his darkly scarred fingers into his ears. He spends most of the day like this.
He walks through the world inside his head.
He listens intently, to what or to whom we long to know,
but the fly on the wall of his mind will be trapped forever.
Deirdre Smith has dabbled in writing for as long as she can remember. She has recently started back to work as a teacher and Guidance Counsellor after a decade of being a stay-at-home mom to her three young children. She resides in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
That you asked the same question already four times today.
That your weakened heart may stop beating at any moment.
That you go to sleep each evening expecting not to wake.
That I know about Jennifer from the office.
That I stopped loving you twelve years and three days ago.
Alison is intrigued by how much goes unsaid in relationships.
I folded their socks, washed, and paired them. I collected them from the floors of their bedrooms, rolled, inside out, crumpled.
As they grew, I found them tucked down the sides of beds, inside duvet covers. A game of hide and sock.
Now they are gone.
I miss their socks.
Jane Langan writes fiction and poetry and is currently working on her debut novel. Her anthology of poems, Blood Kisses, is available now. Jane has been shortlisted for a number of writing competitions and has been published in several magazines. Besides writing, she enjoys photography and tap dancing. She has just completed an MA in Creative Writing.
Your postcards still arrive in my mailbox, even though they’re addressed to a woman who no longer exists. “I’m sorry. I miss you. Forgive me.” Words stripped to the bone like a rabbit caught between the fox’s tight jaws, the remains buried deep until they are hardened, turned to stone.
Kristin Tenor finds inspiration in life’s quiet details and believes in their power to illuminate the extraordinary. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including 50-Word Stories, Bending Genres, Emerge Literary Journal, Milk Candy Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, among others. In addition, her flash fiction has been longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and a Pushcart Prize. She serves as an editorial consultant and the flash fiction editor at CRAFT. Learn more at kristintenor.com or follow her on Twitter at @KristinTenor.
The story of the week for July 5 to 9 is…
Where It All Became by Rachel Canwell
“My case is simple, you shall see:
don’t listen to or heed his plea,
In jail he should remain our guest.
The prosecution now will rest.”
“The deed, if done, was in the past,
which disappears, and really fast,
so judge and jury please admit
you’re not clairvoyants; hence, acquit.”
Don Nigroni is a retired labor economist and volunteer Weed Warrior at the Heinz National Wildlife Refuge.
After a year of retirement spent plopped on the couch bingeing on-demand TV and enjoying the freedom from corporate deadlines that filled sleepless nights with worry, I’m thinking I better start setting my own deadlines and get my butt moving or else the inevitable deadline will arrive sooner than later.
Charles Gray is retired and living in Austin, Texas. He enjoys playing chess and writing.
They haven’t been here for a long time. And yet nothing has really changed.
The chairs are still hard and uncomfortable; the tea is still lukewarm and surprisingly bitter.
But the magic…
The magic is still there.
And hand in hand, eye to eye, they lose twenty years just gazing.
Rachel Canwell is a teacher, writer and blogger. She is working on her WIP and falling rapidly in love with Flash Fiction.
“Once upon a time” may often be no more than that,
when “love’s first kiss” is love’s last kiss,
your “ever-after,” hit or miss;
the one who was your welcome mat
now bleeds you like a kneading cat.
Banality replaces bliss,
an undertow to the abyss,
like Casey’s last at-bat.
Ken Gosse prefers writing short, rhyming, humorous poetry. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, he is also in The Offbeat, Pure Slush, Parody, Home Planet News Online, and other publications. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, now retired, he and his wife have lived with their dogs and cats in Mesa, AZ, over twenty years.