“I want to see it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She frowned at the sticky red placenta in the blue plastic pan.
Could the newborn see it? He eyed the afterbirth and sighed a breath of apathy towards his now-lifeless life-support.
She couldn’t know he’d eventually feel the same about her.
Liz Lambson is a Jane of all trades who might write you a song about painting with cross-stitched sheet music propped on a hand-carved wooden stand. She does things like this when she’s not watching her kids.
Sirens scream while lights, like fireworks of red and white, slice at twinkling skies. Engines slow, firemen race inside for the old couple.
Blanket-wrapped, on the street, they whisper: “Think they’ll figure it out?”
The Chief sadly reports: “The cause is under investigation.”
They nod, squeezing closer, bedroom sheets smoldering.
MJ is an aviator, author, and speaker on ways risk and fear can work to our advantage to dream and explore. She is preparing for suborbital space flight.
They’re telling the truth when they say that life is short. I could see that early on.
But they don’t tell you that life is also very long. It’s long enough to start over, and it’s an eternity to live with the person you’ve become.
Survival isn’t what you’d think.
Rachel Peters is a writer, teacher, and swimming pool operator who lives in Richmond, VA, with her husband and their dog, who looks like he might be part chow and part lab. Her work has been published in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology and is forthcoming in Boston Literary Magazine.
The girl waved her hand, a little flick of a wave, but I still knew her words mattered very much, and so I listened.
Here, she didn’t understand where people go when they die.
So many beliefs, I began to explain.
Instead I closed my eyes and saw the sun.
Sarah Henry is a teacher. She also doesn’t know what happens after life, and doesn’t care to think about it very much.
Burdock-boy was always here, surrounding himself with interesting and artistic people to mimic. Always there, always grey. First to please, first to laugh, first to exploit.
Quietly I entered the house, and I saw him with my wife.
The bur-boy has become a parasite-man. And the only good parasite is…
Marko Trivuncevic is a writer, poet, and short movie director from Serbia. Currently he’s working on a novel, writing a script for a miniseries, and generally enjoying life.
The Story of the Week for March 9 to 13 is…
Striking Twice by Gina Lyle.
Whimsical poetry hits a soft place in my heart, and Gina did a great job with this piece that reads like prose but feels like a poem.
His soft-spoken words made my mind reel with joy. Our phone calls lasted for hours and I couldn’t get off the line without telling him, “I love you.”
I constantly would post memes that were about him, ones only we could understand.
All I have now are voice messages.
Brittany has a dog named Blacky that constantly distracts her from her writing. She loves to write and listen to The Weeknd.
Mom said she married him because he had a mustache like Tom Selleck.
When I was younger, I had to explain to adults the blemishes on my cheeks were borne out of affection.
Now I stand at his service accepting whiskered condolences, future marks from strangers no one will question.
Rob Parrish grew up near the Mississippi River in western Illinois. He is an MA student at Mount Mary University with an emphasis in creative writing. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his dog, Coltrane.
“Wait!” bellows Thunder across the black landscape.
In a flash, Lightning returns. Deaf and beautiful, a moment of devastation; then darkness.
A beat.
A low groan echoes in pursuit. Fat tears fall. Intense light crackles as Lightning dances.
A beat.
Thunder howls through the skies, rumbling serenades to Lightning. “Wait…”
Gina Lyle is a Scottish and English Literature student in Edinburgh, currently enjoying a creative writing course and all the culture of the city.
My appointment with Mr Jones is on the fifth floor. Now living off vodka, Mr Jones was a prawn trawlerman. He keeps his windows open permanently to air the flat. In 1970 he organised a rock festival that is remembered as “an unmitigated disaster.”
My brief reads simply, “Help him.”
Haley’s Comet works in the field of Adult Social Care in the North of England. His recent forays into writing under his real name have been largely academic and research-based but have also included reviews of music and old computer games on niche fan sites. Other recent attempts to smuggle critical analysis, social commentary, and surrealism onto his Facebook status have been largely unheralded and gone unnoticed except for by his mum who rings him to ask if he is feeling all right. Haley’s Comet is 41, unpublished, and has never made a single penny out of creative writing. He did once create and self-publish a comic about a cat though, despite his inability to draw.