A mother holds her baby close while proffering neon green ear plugs to other plane passengers. “He’ll definitely cry!” she says, smiling while waving the bright bag in the air.
Twenty thousand feet over Burbank, the baby starts crying. Our eyes already closed, we can’t help but laugh and smile.
Justin Tran, a graduate of Indiana University, spends most of his time traveling for work. He enjoys writing stories based on the odd personalities he meets on his journeys.
Editor: This story is a prequel to The Juggernaut. You can also read the sequel, The Trapped Submarine.
“It hasn’t been tested!” his crew muttered.
“I’ll volunteer, Cap.”
“Why you Piper?”
“Stupid, sir!”
Later…
“Piper, your wife’s been in to see me. She’s some woman, all right. Made me promise to bring you home! Anyway, when we’re through we can celebrate with this here whiskey I’ve been saving.”
Connell Wayne Regner had successfully avoided writing creatively since he wrote spontaneous lyrics to music some years ago. Although from a linguistic background, he has serendipitously succumbed to fiction. His other dabblings can be found at paragraphplanet and wtdmagazine.wordpress.com.
“We share everything. I stay in cave. You hunt. Prey’s body is mine; head and tail are yours.”
The bigger one was infatuated with the other’s beauty. “What should we call this?”
“Marriage.”
“Good. And you won’t leave me until we die.”
“Agreed. I love you!”
“What does that mean?”
Saeed Rezaee, from Iran, holds a B.A. in English Translation and shares his creative writing at teanglish.com.
I am an anchor. I keep you moored, while I plumb the depths. You are the thing that matters. I am just the slowly rusting passage of time. You are my love and I am your anchor. I sense a new undercurrent. I want to drag you down with me.
Gary writes poems, short stories, and novels. Some can be found on his Scribophile account, others on his somewhat neglected Tumblr.
I stand at the window, watching the trauma helicopter land. I perform the ritual: touch glass, touch wood, touch skin, and the wounded will live.
The nurse puts me back in my hospital bed.
All month the helicopter lands; all month I stand at the window.
I lose the baby.
Laura J. Frantz lives and loves outside of DC and blogs at laurafrantz.com.
The plane was loud, and the explosion louder, but the air is much worse than both. Unfeeling, it whips my ears as I drop. It’s not the air’s fault, though; I am falling through it.
I should have worn earplugs. My flight is now more deafening than the screaming children.
Corey Orthmann is a freelance writer and mercenary wordsmith-for-hire based in Los Angeles, California.
He sat outside the bank, his hands in his pockets, where they caressed lint, two quarters and empty dreams. It was Friday and also the first. Businessmen and the elderly walked in shoulder to shoulder to do business. He wished he could join them. He missed the rank and file.
AR Neal got bit by the writing bug back in the late 1970s while watching Rod Serling and reading Ray Bradbury. Although she has worked in education for more than a quarter century, she has never been cured of her penchant for speculative fiction. Find some of her flash fiction at www.starvingartist.wordpress.com.
Susa was beautiful. Videophone calls from London to Rio kept his love alive.
Now, outside the café where they met, he would surprise her when she arrived from the beach.
Her tanned body reflected in his sunglasses, as she nonchalantly brushed past to kiss Paulo, her husband, the café owner.
John B Sinclair is a much-travelled Scot who has now returned to Scotland, where he enjoys freelance writing on a variety of subjects.
He smirked. “Well the principle don’t rule us here!”
“Huh?”
“You said you wouldn’t do it outta principle. I was making a joke.”
“Those words are spelled differently. The principal is your pal.”
“Mr. Jansen ain’t my pal.”
“No, it’s a mnemonic device, for remembering the spell–”
“Just smoke it!!!”
Caroline Shapiro is a writer and aspiring zookeeper living in Tucson, Arizona.
Children aren’t mean. Sometimes they just lack common sense.
For example, at the party I was in charge of the pinata. Finding one, hanging it up, getting some big sticks.
We were having a lot of fun until Mrs. Pinata from down the block showed up, looking for her kid.
Joe Malone is living in a mud hut in South Sudan. Read more from him at http://joem18b.wordpress.com/.