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.
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.
The story of the week for March 1 to 5 is…
Bonkers by Robert Markovich
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.
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.
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.
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.
He grew up in a jigsaw puzzle. A Christmas card. A tea shop watercolour. I grew up in a news report. An episode of The Bill. A photography exhibition of burning cars and women in bulky coats pushing tartan shopping trolleys through rubble. It was hell for both of us.
Amanda Quinn lives in the North East of England where she works as a freelance writer and tutor. Her writing has been published by Shooter Literary Magazine, Open Pen, Ellipsis Zine, Butcher’s Dog, and Spelk Fiction among others. She can be found online at amandaquinn.co.uk and on Twitter at @amandaqwriter.
They say I’m too happy. Too happy about the full moon shimmering, butter-colored lamps flickering, Tchaikovsky waltzes.
They devour graphic news, grimaces flicked on with ease.
I smile at train horns. Lit windows.
Grow up.
I bat them away. Bury the news. It peeks out.
My smile weakens. A little.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA 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 The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.
Let me tell you what insanity is.
It’s remembering a conversation with someone you met on the train forty years ago. It’s seeing her expression as you got off without asking for her number. It’s driving to her station for a week and not finding her. It’s having stopped looking.
Robert Markovich spent a lifetime in what is charitably referred to as service journalism, writing and editing stories about everything from cars to toilets, most recently at Consumer Reports. He is happily and gratefully retired.