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.
Rose sat in the part of the park that light didn’t reach. Around the edges, people moved like ghosts. The odd sound of laughter crossed the air, where she received it like a lost language.
Beyond purgatory, buses went to places that didn’t exist anymore; cafes, bars, cinemas, and home.
Patrick Mc Loughlin is an English Language Teacher in Ireland and dabbles in writing. He also dabbles in painting and music and someday hopes to do more than dabble. He lives in the west of Ireland where it’s hard to concentrate.
Molly set the deadline to shed her excess weight – the county picnic.
Dieting was slow, so she ditched a few body parts. Success! Check that scale.
Her pound-shedding continued. At the picnic, Molly was nothing but a pair of sparkly pumps.
The mayor declared, “Best darn shoes in the county!”
Roberta Beach Jacobson is a humorist from Iowa. See more at RobertaJacobson.com.
The dead got up from the battlefield. Some played with their wounds. Others witnessed the horror of what they had become. As they walked away a young private looked back and saw their bodies where they’d fallen and sighed, “If all this is for that, why did we bother coming?”
Connell writes a bit and no more.
The painter painted the world black. Black trees, black grass, black clouds, black tomatoes. Van Gogh-like brush-strokes, thick with sorrow, melted around us. Even little girls smiled with teeth black as watermelon seeds. Everything so biblical we ran to the river to wash away our sins in dark, inviting waters.
Jim Doss lives with his wife and three children in Sykesville, Maryland, and earns his living as a software engineer. He has previously published two books of poems: Learning to Talk Again, and What Remains. In partnership with Werner Schmitt, he also published a book of German translations entitled The Last Gold of Expired Stars: The Complete Poems of Georg Trakl 1908 – 1914. In his spare time, he is an editor for the Loch Raven Review.