It was a problem from day one. I’d never wanted a roommate, but simply couldn’t swing the apartment any other way.
I plumped the pillows and placed them precisely in their preferred positions on the pristine couch.
Then I huddled down in my bean bag and waited for the enemy.
Susan Gale Wickes is from Indiana. She enjoys writing short stories and poetry and has never owned a bean bag.
Olga was fast as a muscle car, one of those girls. There on Friday, gone by Monday to care for a sick aunt in Florida.
We knew better. We knew she’d be back in nine months, flattened, her brass tarnished. Smudged with the fingerprints of all who had driven her.
Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Sun Magazine, Hotel Amerika, BOAAT Journal, diode, SmokeLong Quarterly, and in the forthcoming anthology New Microfiction: Exceptionally Short Stories (W.W. Norton, 2018). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.
After paying in cash so there would be no paper trail,
after sneaking it in under his shirt,
after hiding it all weekend in the back of the freezer,
after thawing it in the microwave while she bathed,
he put the dead mouse under her pillow,
and then he waited.
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, despite severe vision loss, he continues to write every day. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.
The story of the week for May 21 to 25 is…
The Art of Disappearing by Patrick Mc Loughlin
One side of his syrinx trilled a curse to his family’s murderer. The other warbled his children’s favorite melodies through sobs. His friends comforted him but discouraged his screams: “You’ll die, by predator or exhaustion.” He always replied: “Can’t die. Already dead.”
The humans nearby praised, “Pretty bird. Beautiful song!”
Nature both terrifies and captivates boomer trujillo. Find more of his work at boomert.info.
Sometimes the debt would appear as a massive sinkhole in the living room floor, one into which he dreaded he might one day dive, to be chewed up and consumed within the abyss of its distended belly, the monster’s savage lips smacking sharply somewhere miles above.
Sometimes he ignored it.
Ran Walker is the author of fifteen books. He currently teaches creative writing at Hampton University in Virginia. See more at ranwalker.com.
The new Authority made changes.
My comrades looked on with wide-eyed but silent alarm.
We had to assert ourselves now, or we were surely lost.
I opened my mouth wide. “WHAAA!!!” I wailed at full volume.
The others joined in.
The new babysitter quickly flicked back to the children’s channel.
Mary Sheehan writes from the occasionally sunny south-east of Ireland.
The platform’s empty. The train isn’t due for almost an hour, but I’m in no hurry.
Someone left yesterday’s newspaper on the bench. Another celebrity wedding. Another mass shooting. Same old, same old.
Tomorrow will be different. “Woman saves child,” it will say.
This time I’ll stop him from falling.
Kim McGreal lives in the UK with her husband, daughter, and a cat that believes scritches are more important than writing. She can be found on Twitter @kimsfic.
They met on the sand, slow waltzing to wavesong under a rainbow of stars and deciding love should last beyond forever.
Now he whispers those memories and her smile smooths the wrinkles of their pain.
He catches her last breath with a gossamer lasso and ties it to his heartbeat.
A.J. lives in Australia and wouldn’t mind being reincarnated as a kookaburra. She’s on Twitter at @manicol1.
T-minus ten seconds.
Six.
Five.
“Start the main engines!”
Two.
One.
Zero.
“We have liftoff!”
The crew has been training for this event for a millennium. They will be heroes.
The planet is in sight—only a few more minutes. Their mission: overthrow.
Destination: the third planet from the sun!
Jody Kish lives in the country, and loves to write stories and poetry.