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.
On the slope to the river a deer leapt across their path. Barely ten feet in front. Everyone froze. A big buck. Graceful, nimble, terrifyingly quick.
Some of the boys lost their breath. They had all seen. Yet nearly half didn’t believe.
Very often the forest dreamed its own dreams.
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.
The bottle was half-buried in the sand, its neck protruding at an angle, a cylinder of clouded and pitted sea glass.
The cork stopper had a thick wax overlay, showing its age.
The message inside was disturbing:
If you found this bottle, I know who you are. Be very afraid.
Ed N. White is a writer of Mysteries. A teller of Tales. A graduate of the University of Iowa with an M.A. from the University of Rhode Island, and a former faculty member there. A New Englander trapped on the Suncoast of Florida hoping for some snow.
She looks just as good as she did back in school. Slick. Smart.
I glance at my worn trainers as the bus lurches forward. She hasn’t seen me.
I can still hear her vicious words, feel her pulling my hair.
I tap on her shoulder. She turns around.
“Remember me?”
Eszter Molnar is a former teacher who lives by the windswept British seaside with her partner and two children. She has been published in one of the UK’s biggest subscription magazines for children. By day she cleans up after preschoolers; by night she writes picture books and Middle Grade fiction.
Create a universe. Twist a hand and just let the galaxies flow through your fingertips. Obsess over tiny details: the colour of a flower, that specific shade of orange in the evening sky. Scatter moons into orbit like grains of sand.
That is what it means to be a God.
Isla is a fourteen-year-old aspiring author doing her very best to get her ideas across. Hopefully after exams she’ll have more time to write!
This relationship feels hopeless,
Unadulterated frustration.
Yet…
To abandon now? Impossible.
Too much time invested.
Amazing highs,
But oh, those lows.
Sometimes unbearable.
“Walk away!” an inner voice screams.
But I can’t. I’m in too deep.
So with a cleansing breath and renewed resolve,
I pull out the half-finished manuscript.
Judi MacKenzie is a writer whose unfinished works are actually starting to growl from inside the filing cabinet.
He hadn’t planned it,
at least not consciously.
They were twins, after all,
each incomplete without the other.
He could not be a failure
without his brother’s disproportionate success.
It was a wild night of shared mayhem,
careening, crescendoing
to the perfect finale:
matching death dates.
Twins to the end.
Jackie reads 50-Word Stories and writes religiously. She has never submitted her work, save to this site.