Everything he lost came back,
even a bit extra.

The Fates restored
what was snatched away,
with interest paid—
a practical apology.

He climbed out of a bottle,
walked home from the railroad trestle.

His wallet anonymously returned,
jammed full; the sainted
truck-chasing dog—alive again;
his woman re-enchanted, forgiving.

Todd Mercer won the Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest and took 2nd and 3rd place of the Kent County Dyer-Ives Prizes. His chapbook Box of Echoes won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. Mercer’s poetry and fiction appears in The Lake, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Thema, Blue Collar Review, Dunes Review and Eunoia Review.