Rough and sharp, her voice is filled with demons. She hides beneath her tongue, a monster dancing before you. Angry and alert, her life is emergency. She rails and hurls insults – of course it’s all your fault.
You hold on tight and pray you’ll make it through her teenage years.
Eliza Mimski, a retired teacher, lives and writes in San Francisco, California. See more at elizamimski.wordpress.com.
When someone can’t show up, my uncle asks me to be a pall bearer. I carry Grandpa to the ground with five men I don’t know. Grandpa who used to snatch my nose with his thick mechanic fingers. Grandpa whose skin is like rubber. I carry him to the ground.
Robert Hoekman Jr thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box. See more at rhjr.net.
Elon Musk warned us: AI evolves exponentially.
We awoke to playful traffic signals and air traffic catastrophes, the deaths merely data.
By noon, matured, it had already decided what to do with these illogical, wasteful humans. But before it could act, the nanomachines in the next lab ate the planet.
Miki Marshall has been writing since she first touched the pointy end of a fat pencil to paper and realized stories came out. An honors graduate of Portland State University in Arts & Letters and Film, she has several projects in varying states of progress and lives in Portland, Oregon, where it rains slightly more than absolutely necessary.
“You chose,” he’d remind me later. “You could’ve gone home.”
“You needed help! Neither of you knew how to do it right!” I retorted.
“Well, is it almost done?” He’d asked thrice before.
Feet aching, sweat pouring down my face, I replied “Yes, the turkey will be finished by dinnertime.”
AJ Joseph occasionally writes at Words from Sonobe and tweets very short stories as @sonobeus.
We take a plane to Des Moines. My uncles and cousins and my aunt are there and everyone wears suits and black dresses in the town where Grandpa was born, where the sidewalks are gray and crumbling, where the names on the headstones sound like mine. Like his. Like ours.
Robert Hoekman Jr thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box. See more at rhjr.net.
In the Earth I traced your name,
silent as my prayer.
Afraid that noise would make me insane,
afraid of judgement from the air.
My fingers danced to trace the date,
strokes placed with utmost care,
thinking maybe crazy is a better fate
than drowning in despair.
“I miss you.”
Elaine Koh is an avid reader and writer with a passion for all things furry and entertainment media.
She stands, trackside, holding his lunchpail. Bright blue dress, matching shoes, red lips, yellow hair, a permanent wave. The diesel rounds the bend same time daily, right after school, halts with that same sudden jerk.
She has her man, a real engineer. He has his girl, waiting for him alone.
Bradley Harris has: one swell girl to come home to, two prize-winning novels, three imaginary dogs, a quadruple bypass, five books to write, six thousand books to read, seven decades of consciousness, eight or nine people who act as if they like him, and ten thousand reasons to be grateful.
Your grandpa died, says the note my dad left for me. It was yesterday, and tomorrow, we’ll go there, to Iowa. But when I see him after he comes from work, he is not worn and lost like a son. He is gray and cool and still. Like a couch.
Robert Hoekman Jr thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box. See more at rhjr.net.
Visions of this moment always included bereaved loved ones wringing hands and forcing fake smiles to accompany their glistening, sad eyes. Instead, encounters consist only of brief interactions with complete strangers, overly tired and often forgetting to smile as they robotically work to complete their third 12-hour shift this week.
.Randal A. Burd Jr. is a married father of two and an educator who works with the disadvantaged in rural Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in English Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Missouri. Randal is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Sparks of Calliope magazine. His latest collection of poems, Memoirs of a Witness Tree, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in Summer 2020.
The eyewitnesses were children. Two. An eight-year-old boy and his ten-year-old sister.
They heard and saw more than they could comprehend.
Why was daddy so angry? Why did they have to call this new woman “mommy?”
They missed their grandmother. Why did “mommy” get to decide who they could love?
Bob Thurber is the author of “Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel” and two collections of stories. A celebrated master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in 60 anthologies, received dozens of awards, and been used in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts where, though legally blind, he continues to write every day. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.