The story of the week for August 20 to 24 is…
The Recollection Collection by Mark Farley
RICHARD DAY GORE: God in Skinny Jeans
God sits in a diner, wearing skinny jeans, developing universes on an old PC.
Nearby, Betsy gathers strength for a breakup, a traumatic severing.
Her apparent anguish moves him to abandon godhood, connect as a human.
He stands. She leaves.
Her Bible follows her empty coffee cup into the trash.
After chasing his muse from Virginia to Manhattan, Richard Day Gore settled in Southern California, where he spends his time pushing
around words, paint brushes, and guitar strings. See more at richarddaygore.com.
TAMARA SELLMAN: Onset of Multiple Sclerosis, 1975
Grandmother said, Raise your arms!
Still, the pain seized the girl, her ribcage spasming. She dropped to the parquet floor, a cat on all fours writhing inside an invisible vice.
Then: release.
She heaved, young lungs refreshing, involuntary tears like raindrops to parquet.
Grandmother shrugged. Just a touch of pleurisy.
Tamara Sellman is a widely published poet and writer who works as a sleep health educator, healthcare writer, and MS advocate/columnist when she’s not crafting creative work.
PERRY McDAID: Nadia
Rage thrust brush through canvas.
A puncture through three days’ work: portrait of she who had gathered her stuff while he slept. Gone… yet she persisted like thallium poisoning.
Almost serenely he deposited the brush – loaded with the colour of his crappy life – beside the open tube of Prussian Blue.
Irish writer Perry McDaid lives in Derry under the brooding brows of Donegal hills which he occasionally hikes in search of druidic inspiration. He even finds it on occasion.
J BRADLEY: Truth or Dare
Jake decided he’d feed his cotton candy to the tornado outside our storm cellar. The tornado nipped at it, devoured it, and then moved on to other lives to destroy. The next day, the radio said something about cars and people and trees and shingles still stuck high above, cocooned.
J. Bradley is a two-time winner of Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions. He’s the author of Neil & Other Stories (WhiskeyTit Books, 2018). He lives at jbradleywrites.com.
KIKI GONGLEWSKI: The Conservation of Mortality
I remember your eyes shimmering like constellations the night we fell in love.
They say when we look at stars, space is so immense that we’re seeing light broadcasted from bygone histories. And even after death, our lives go on, conserved by light, traveling perpetually across the soundless, glittering darkness.
Kiki Gonglewski is a senior at Albuquerque Academy. She was a finalist in the 2017 state-wide “NM Girls Make Movies” screenplay contest, has won national recognition in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and has been published in the 2018 edition of Navigating The Maze, an international teen poetry anthology. Her six great loves in life are art, movies, Kurt Vonnegut books, astronomy, writing, and Korean barbecue.
MARK FARLEY: The Recollection Collection
The lonely widower broke into abandoned houses. Careful overnight work pulled lines of wallpaper down whole. Safely home, he hung them up and rested his forehead against them—breathing memories of crayon scribbles, the height charts of those who’d grown, and frames of lost portraits burned by the fading sun.
Mark Farley writes novels, flash fiction and the occasional poem.
SUSAN GALE WICKES: The Family Tree
Mama decided the family tree needed pruning. Sturdy branches could stay; twigs had to go.
I was flimsy. Always had been. God knows I tried to branch out.
She looked at me… a long, hard stare.
I turned away, but I could still hear the rustling of those graceful limbs.
Susan Gale Wickes is from Indiana and has never been removed from her family tree.
JOHN LANE: To Whom it may Concern
I kept my eye on you for a long time.
And what did I see?
Disobedience.
Blame-shifting.
Murder.
Lying.
Drunkenness.
And that was just the beginning.
Your poor use of free will
makes me reconsider your existence
as a race.
I will make my decision very shortly.
Deeply concerned,
GOD
John Lane is studying poetry at The Writer’s Center, and is an Army and National Guard Veteran who has been working in the aerospace industry for eighteen years.
FM JOHNSON: Unrequited Love
He loved her, and although she professed her own, evidence proved the contrary. Her caresses could not mask philandering nights and whomever she spent them with.
Fantasies of freedom consumed his thoughts… until she scratched behind his ears, murmuring “Good boy.”
Still, sooner or later, she was bound to leave.
F.M. Johnson is a writer from Richmond, VA. Her book, Tales of the Supernatural, is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble Book Stores, and her website, fmjohnson.com.