They landed in the park-rec soccer complex, all those inviting geometric lines. We threw parties. The school band played the Star Wars theme. We thought they liked us; they said they did. Said they’d return. Now we build cargo cult ships – impotent rockets to entice. We watch the skies.
Thomas O’Connell is a librarian living in Massachusetts.
On a slow local train, off-peak, a man and a woman sat facing each other in an empty car. He wore a blue mask, she a yellow one. Silence pooled between them—soft breaths seeping through paper-thin fabric. Eyes flicked up, away. They remained together, bound solely by assigned seating.
Li Ruan, born and raised in Beijing, China, is a Manhattan-based educational consultant, emerging immigrant poet, and writer. Her work has appeared in Restless Books, Flora Fiction, Assignment Literary Magazine, Persimmon Tree, Storyhouse, Hamilton Stone Review, New York Public Library Zine, Lowestoft Chronicle, Discretionary Love, Cool Beans Lit, and Shot Glass Journal.
Robb Lanum is a failed screenwriter in Los Angeles who fell in love with the short form.
Let this war end, I pray, loosing Hellfire missiles on hospitals. Now is a time for healing, I say, posting selfies from the rubble. To question who bulldozed your home, and why I manufacture bulldozers, is unnecessarily divisive. Why can’t we coexist? Me, here. You, there. No, not there. Elsewhere.
Nadia Djamila is a writer from Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Sonora Review, ARTWIFE, and GomerBlog.
The story of the week for March 10 to 14 is…
The Chanterelle Hunters by Jenny Mattern
and
Images of You by Gabe Bonney
My sister says revolution has broken out back home.
Automobile horns honk, as if in congratulations.
I think of Cossacks’ whips. Tatiana shielding me. Pleading with factory owners for kopecks and mercy.
Time to plant new seeds. Smash tundra.
We embrace. Imagine our growth, roots rising into a new sky.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA fiction program. His stories, “Soon,” “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” “Tales From A Communion Line,” and “Community Time,” have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. His work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Ariel Chart, among others.
Most guys find religion in prison. Not me. I brought it with me.
Four years of Latin, prison chaplaincy volunteer. I communed with monks, priests.
Now I sit in concrete cell, Bible in hand, wondering if God sees the irony in me preaching to men with cleaner souls than mine.
Paul D’Arcy tells stories, all real and most brief. You can read more at pauldrc.com.
We were quite a pair on that final adventure. Me, seven months pregnant with your grandchild. You, nineteen months pregnant with cancer.
Afterwards, you sauteed our meager bounty in butter and garlic and served all of them to me. And one last time, because you insisted, I cleaned my plate.
Jenny Mattern is a poet, a crafter of stories, and a cake-for-breakfast enthusiast who lives in Montana with her husband and children. She has had poems published in The Poetry Pea Anthology, Cold Moon Journal, The Dirigible Balloon, and The Solitary Daisy. She also writes middle-grade novels and is represented by Nicole Eisenbraun at Ginger Clark Literary Agency.
Decades ago, your mother left a city burning behind her and walked until her shoes fell apart. The ones she loved did not follow.
She whispered their names into the sea, but the tide did not answer, and the gray horizon stretched empty before her, endless, indifferent.
Then you came.
Tom Busillo (he/his) is a writer living in Philadelphia, PA, with his wife Carol (who’s a much better writer) and his son Nick.
For decades we’ve travelled between stars, searching, yearning for contact.
Our findings? Just dead planets, ruined civilisations.
Yet all predictions concur; at least one civilisation should survive, to colonise the galaxy. So where are they?
I look back, at the settlements and outposts we’ve established along the way.
It’s us.
William Mitchell lives in East Sussex in the South of England. He is an award-winning author, having had early success with various Horror and Science Fiction publications before winning the Writers of the Future contest in 2012. His latest book, The Still and Silent Stars, offers an in-depth investigation into the likelihood of alien life and alien intelligence existing elsewhere in our galaxy.