Driving home, work remains my passenger.
Time slows, and sound hollows. Glass floats before my eyes. What’s happening?
Another car striking mine.
Goodbye, my gentle daughter… another cup of tea, please.
Goodbye, my playful son… one more game of catch.
Thank you, my loving wife; this morning’s kiss still lingers.
Mike explores the fluidity between what was, what is, and what might be through speculative fiction.
If I had power to save that hour
I wouldn’t be time’s slave.
Each hour is lost and time’s the cost
I’ll pay to reach my grave.
The hours accost and each has bossed
my sinews, heart, and soul
and each I’ve crossed left me time-tossed
within life’s salad bowl.
Ken Gosse usually writes whimsical, rhymed verse. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, later in Pure Slush, Home Planet News, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Spillwords, and many others. Raised in Chicago suburbs, now retired, he and his wife live in Mesa, AZ, with rescue dogs and cats.
My cellphone buzzed unnaturally loud in the quiet cabin, making several boys stir. Grasping blindly, I muted it and held my breath until the room slowly returned to silence.
The next three hours crawled until reveille, when I could finally return my mother’s call and confirm my father had died.
A recovering lawyer, Liam MacDonald has written for decades. He finds some stories easier than others.
I pretended it was a museum, filled with the oldest stuff I had ever seen. Crowded and dusty behind smoke-stained glass. Relics from a world that no longer existed. No signs, but the rule was understood: “Do Not Touch”. Admission cost a kiss on the cheek and Nana’s cigarette breath.
Robert Ludemann is happily retired and getting better each day at not working.
The faculty’s all smiles, all compliments. Everyone chimes in. Everyone loves and admires our Administrators. Everyone is loyal. All is clean, shiny, bright. At least on the surface. Because everyone knows, or at least suspects, the new faculty hire, the “fair-haired boy” of the Board of Trustees, is a plant.
Wendy K. Mages, a Mercy University Professor, is a Pushcart Prize nominee and an award-winning poet and author. She earned her doctorate in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her master’s in Theatre at Northwestern University. As part of her investigation of the effect of the arts on learning and development, she performs at storytelling events and festivals in the US and abroad. To learn more about her and her work, and to find links to her published stories and poetry, please visit her Mercy University Faculty page and her website, Wendy Mages: Storyteller.
The strangest feeling that somebody is watching. I glance back before opening the door, treading lightly, so as not to miss the disturbance of silence. I slink into the room and tiptoe to the bathroom, flicking on the white light. I stare at my reflection, and watch as she blinks.
Zoe is a passionate cinephile and bibliophile. She spends most of her time writing, reading, or thinking about films.
The story of the week for October 27 to 31 is…
Cartwheeling Mama by Rita Riebel Mitchell
My brethren’s rotting corpses litter the plucked marsh, victims of the elements – an easier demise than mine.
First, I’m scalped.
Then, my organs are scooped out with a spoon.
Finally, with gouged eyes and a toothless mouth, I’m set on fire, my body paraded like a trophy on some doorstep.
Billie-Leigh Burns is a writer from Liverpool. Her work has been featured by 50 Word Storues, 101 Words, Funny Pearls, and The Hooghly Review. She is also a maths tutor and a bookkeeper, making her the only writer she knows who owns an ‘I Heart Spreadsheets’ mug.
In the hereafter and evermore a group of deceased literary artists obtained permission to haunt on Halloween with the stipulation their disturbances be directed only at living writers. The ghosts wailed. A whooshing wind boosted their warbling hum. Blaring bursts of clamor transported an unembellished staccato rhythm layered with ambiguity.
Bob Thurber is the author of six books. Regarded as a master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in Esquire and other magazines, been anthologized 60 times, received a long list of awards, and been utilized in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.
Tomorrow morning, the spiderwebs will sag. I’ll clasp my trash-grabber, snapping up candy wrappers, empty sugar-shrouds nestled among fallen leaves. But tonight, the wind whistles through the trees and rattles the fence’s loose picket. My candy bowl is half full, and as another specter floats over my porch, I believe.
Tracy Royce’s work appears in 101 Words, Blink-Ink, The Dribble Drabble Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere.