“You believe in them?”
“Of course!”
“Rubbish, there is no such thing as superheroes!”
The speeding truck that crushed him got away.
“Only a miracle can save him,” they said.
Five hours later:
“Operation successful,” said the young surgeon.
“I take back my words,” he said when he came to.
Andy believes in keeping her bio shorter than fifty words for this one. To follow her mischief, click on www.andypaula.in.
As a kid, I got glasses.
I never wore them.
Didn’t want to see the world as it truly was.
Didn’t want to see who was reflected
in the mirror.
Pockmarked friends;
flawed broads.
Hiding them in my closet,
I rejoiced,
reveling in the life
God intended me to witness.
Daniel N. Flanagan is a Worcester, MA native. He is the author of three short stories and twenty-two poems, featured in Poppy Road Review, Three Line Poetry, and more. His first poetry chap-book is due for publication and purchase this Summer ’14. Check him out at DanFlanagan.webs.com and follow him @DanielNFlanagan.
A bat flapped over the twins’ heads as they entered the nave of the abandoned church. The faint whimper of an infant seemed to pull them toward the altar.
“Do you hear that?” Michael whispered to his sister Luci.
At that moment Luci bared her teeth and grinned. “I do.”
James Kowalczyk was born and raised in Brooklyn but now lives in Northern California with his wife and two daughters. His work has appeared both in print and online.
Match.com confirmed what Ryan and Darla’s friends had been telling them for years: they were perfect for each other. According to the website’s dating algorithms they were a 100% match.
Unfortunately, Eharmony said otherwise, and this was a good enough reason for Darla to reject Ryan once and for all.
Daniel Slaten is a Mountain Dew-addicted writer who currently resides and writes in Montgomery, AL.
Her face is matted with filth, her tongue swollen with thirst. She resists the temptation of flowing sewage and limps through her pain, through broken rubble. She searches until, her hands raw, she uncovers their blood smeared canvas shoes, tiny and abandoned. Only then does she sit down and weep.
Leslie Roberts is a teacher of EFL whose encounters with pupils from other lands often inspire amateur writing efforts.
Sometimes heralded by trumpet or the quacking of a duck, the phantom is released.
Mischievously, often maliciously, it materializes; only to be rebuked by coughing and the waving of hands.
Retreating into the fabric of both cushion and time, the ghost of wind past lurks, waiting to be released anew.
Craig spends his time avidly fishing for compliments and hunting for the right words. He has previously been published on fiftywordstories.com.
It’s his first shift at the trendy burgers-and-fries restaurant. Behind the counter is a whiteboard labeled “Today’s potatoes are from…”
When the trainer asks him if he has questions, he wonders whether it isn’t more important to know where today’s meat is from.
It’s his last shift at the restaurant.
A graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, Chad Greene experiments with twitter fiction @TheShortCourse.
I came of age in a time of no heroes.
The wars we knew to be right are now the history we learned as children.
The wars we believed were right became the history we wished hadn’t happened.
The wars we are fighting now? We pretend we’ve already won them.
Stuart Turnbull is absent without leave from the majority of life and finds that writing helps him remain that way — he occasionally blogs a story at diamondsanddross.blogspot.com.
She had loved him. He said he loved her, and she trusted him.
But a week before the wedding, he ran off with her little sister.
There was a note. And everybody believed it, until the day the pipe broke in the basement and the plumber went down to investigate.
Harry Demarest has retired after careers encompassing scientific
research, teaching at a university, software development, web
application development, and voter database compilation and
distribution. He is now spending his time with his grandchildren and
writing memoirs and short stories.
A day after the funeral the murderer sat smirking, counting his profits from the killing after finding refuge. The perfect crime, he thought. No one will ever come after me.
Then the doorbell rang. Moments later his accomplice ran in, his face pale.
“Is he armed?”
“Y-yes… H-he’s a… Zombie!”
Jason Huynh is a bored student who worries about accidental plagiarism.