On the day the old woman died, her clock stopped. It couldn’t be fixed, but Kate, her granddaughter, kept it for its sentimental value.
When Kate married, the clock had pride of place in her apartment.
One day, Kate came home with some news: “Darling, I’m pregnant.”
Tick. tick, tick.
Judy Upton wrote this story.
I found him in the garden, grinning like a great white shark.
“Everything okay, Gramps?”
“NASA says a skyscraper-sized asteroid will hit this city.”
“Their calculations were wrong.”
“What?”
“They say it’s going to splash into the Pacific.”
The shark grin submerged, leaving only his usual flat face.
And quietness.
David Derey wrote this story.
Another day starts. You wake weary and late. Whip on a dress suit, hairspray, lippy, and name tag. No time for brushing your teeth. No matter. You never smile at the office anyway.
Clutching a tepid coffee, you’re out the door and running, racing towards the end of your life.
GB Burgess works from home now and smiles every day.
Death heard the newborn’s cry and began his inevitable journey.
Sometimes he can save them early, but too often the path is arduous and slow. He weeps when he reaches them in old age: by then they have suffered a life too long, in all its illusion and false hope.
Tom O’Brien is an Irishman living in London. He’s been published in numerous places across the web and has been anthologised in Blood & Bourbon, Blink-Ink, DEFY! and twice in the Uncommon print collections. He’s on Twitter at @tomwrote and his website is tomobrien.co.uk.
Art’s avuncular fingers plunged deep into my girlish flesh,
plowed furrows,
planted seeds of rage that grew into Sequoias that stretched upward
to scratch his deeds into the very sky
beckoning Mom’s eyes,
demanding that she countenance his crimes.
Then, having at last seen, she might beg me for absolution.
C. Christine Fair is an associate professor within the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has published poetry in the Dime Show Review and The Bark and has pieces forthcoming in Clementine Unbound and Badlands Literary Journal. She also published a short story in New Reader Magazine. Her scholarly website is christinefair.net; her blog is shortbustoparadise.wordpress.com. She tweets at cchristinefair where, for some reason, she has some 42,600 followers.
The story of the week for September 23 to 27 is…
Super, Dad by Robert Hoekman, Jr.
and
Create by Isla Elizabeth
We’re getting older. We’re running out of time to do all the things we wanted. We planned to cruise the coast of Scandinavia and dance under the Aurora Borealis. But things keep getting in the way.
The ice sheets are melting. The Arctic is burning.
We’re running out of time.
Juliet is an adult education tutor, crafter, and conservation volunteer based in Edinburgh, UK. She blogs at craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com and tweets at @craftygeenpoet.
The sign says “If you see something, say something.”
Today, on the subway in Boston, I saw a man wearing a black sombrero with a live parrot sitting quietly on his shoulder. No one paid the slightest attention to either one of them.
How I love living in the city.
Jeri Quinzio is the author of Dessert: A Tale of Happy Endings.
Three blocks away, someone asks how much for the Czech wolfdog.
Strangers have inquired before, but this is the first she stops to think it over. Four years pet-minding, and his owner refused to write her a reference.
“Ten bucks,” she says.
The chocolate brownie gelato is cool and sweet.
Graham Robert Scott’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Nature, Blink-Ink, and Pulp Literature. See more at hemicyon.wordpress.com.
He had so many abilities to bestow, my dad. He could tie shoes, tell time, build tables, fix carburetors, throw, catch, hit. But for all his superhuman powers, he contained almost nothing else, and he withheld most of it.
And stoicism, I’ve since learned, is far less heroic than advertised.
Robert Hoekman Jr. is a writer and editor, and part of the Litmus Collective. His nonfiction work has been featured by Fast Company, WIRED, Huckberry, and many others.