George sits in his pitch-black room, his pallid face lit by the flickering computer screen. He runs his left hand along his right forearm to remember the feel of human touch on his skin. He smiles at the person who touches his heart on the screen. It’s okay. It’s enough.
Lisa is a Tokyo-based writer who loves coffee, dogs, and talking about Terrace House.
I give him a teddy bear and tell him it will keep him company, someone to talk to, while I work.
He returns him minutes later, saying the bear won’t stop talking about scratching his bum on trees and digging for bugs.
Such is life in quarantine with my husband.
Sharon Gerger loves to write and play more than she likes to work.
Month-old pinpricks in the ditch of her arm, her chip outlined in the tight khaki of her back pocket. Her sponsor says the next step is a job. Applications, follow-ups, interviews. They smile at her. She smiles back. The job is hers, but “drug testing is required.”
She leaves again.
Crystal Ellwood is currently an English professor at both New England College and Cumberland University in Lebanon, TN. Her work is forthcoming in HauntedMTL’s 101 Proof Horror anthology and The Spectre Review.
The fairy godmother appears
And disappears
The willow wilts, until another noon
Intimate details of a concealed life
Become clearer
Bright days encroach on moonless night
Yet, no prince knocks—
she never gave anyone shoes to wear.
You knew this wouldn’t last;
Then she lost her job at the dressmakers’.
Mandira Pattnaik is an Economics graduate who lets her degree gather dust while she word-weaves. Some of those pieces have made their way into Spelk, Lunate, Gasher, Star82, and fiftywordstories. She tweets at @MandiraPattnaik.
He stands on the corner, holding a sign that reads: Hungry. Please Help.
I reach into my backpack and hand him a turkey sandwich through our car window.
He nods his thanks, lowers on one knee, and feeds it to his dog.
“Don’t worry,” Mom says, “tomorrow we’ll bring two.”
Lisa Reynolds is an internationally published writer, living in Eastern Ontario, Canada. She writes short stories that focus on social justice issues. “Sharing A Meal” was inspired by an act of kindness she witnessed in Toronto, Ontario.
The story of the week for May 11 to 15 is…
Our Good Luck by Jennifer L. Freed
Once upon a time, there was a girl who was a jigsaw puzzle. Everyone loved her because she could arrange herself to be whatever anyone wanted. Then, one morning, she looked in the mirror and realized she did not remember who she was anymore.
Then she fell all to pieces.
J.C. Pillard lives in Colorado where she works as an editor and data analyst. She has previously published stories with Broadswords and Blasters and Fall Into Fantasy 2019. She spends her time gardening, reading, and, of course, writing.
Ensconced in a wheelchair, my mother holds up her feet and wiggles them, showing off new pale beige moccasins, fur-lined, soft and roomy for her swollen feet. “My sister got them for me,” she tells a nursing home attendant, gleeful. But really it was me, her daughter, become unimaginably old.
Jacqueline Doyle’s flash chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. Find her online at jacquelinedoyle.com and on Twitter at @doylejacq.
A much-published academic,
Prof. Dennis Wrong was quite a guy.
Filled with truly shrewd polemic,
his several books rank pretty high.
Now this would be all well and fine
but for one point adamantine:
It was for years good ol’ Den’s plight
to be called Wrong though always right.
Author’s Note: Dennis Wrong (1923-2018) was a widely acclaimed NYU sociologist.
George J. Searles teaches English and Latin at Mohawk Valley Community College and has also taught for Pratt and The New School. The editor of Glimpse, a poetry magazine, he has published many poems in other small quarterlies, along with three volumes of literary criticism from university presses and eight editions of a widely used communications textbook. He is a former Carnegie Foundation New York State “Professor of the Year.”
A year later, we give thanks—
that it was then, not now,
that we could be there
in the hospital with him, for days,
that so many friends could come and go,
give last goodbyes, lean close,
and not once did any of us worry
about sharing the same air.
Jennifer L Freed mostly writes poems, which have appeared in various
journals and anthologies. See more on her website: jfreed.weebly.com.