A crow snatches the dead body of a fat rat in a nondescript alleyway. The rat is too big, but the bird is determined. On wobbly wings, the crow carries its passenger into the air towards a hazy sun that the dead rat cannot reach with its pink toes alone.
Sophia Baran is a writer with a fondness for trail running with her dog and squawking at birds along the way.
After bouts with vertigo, I step onto the ferry and pause; the floor shimmers with waves. Saints and witches walk on water, but I am dizzy on a boat. There is an anxious line of sightseers behind me, though. I take a desperate breath of air and begin to swim.
Colleen Addison completed a PhD in health information. She then promptly got sick herself. She now lives and heals on a small island, writing stories of various length about her life.
Poisoned by my own blood, I lie there drained. Infused toxins coursed through my veins. Hair loss. Cell death. Sloughing off old self.
Then Transplantation Day arrived. One tiny IV bag of life-saving proportion. For three weeks, I cocooned in a hospital bed.
When discharge came, I unfurled my wings.
Christa Planko is in remission, surviving leukemia after undergoing a bone marrow transplant. She is happy to flutter about today, sharing the story of her life-saving transformation.
The father cut the umbilical cord even as the lights flickered. The newborn looked determined to survive. There was some perfunctory crying, but she calmed down as soon as she latched on to her mother’s breast.
“I will keep you safe,” her mother whispered.
Outside, the bombs had devoured everything.
Jahnavi Gogoi’s poetry has been published in Indian Review, Coffee and Conversations, RIC journal, Café Haiku, Presence, Five Fleas, Haiku Girl Summer, tsuri-doro, Enchanted Garden Haiku journal, Zen Peacemakers, Fresh Out: An Arts and Poetry Collective, The Daily Verse by The Wise Owl, Haiku Corner by The Japan Society, Shadow Pond Journal, The Leaf Journal, haikuNetra among others. She lives in a quaint town in Ontario, Canada with her family and occasionally tries her hand at fiction and essays.
Diet #304: day one. I emerge at dawn hoping no one will see me jiggling and wobbling in my tracksuit. Overhead a kookaburra begins his song, laughter echoing years of torment. I pause. Go back and feed my pain with buttery toast? No, this time I’ll have the last laugh.
Sandra James writes from a rural property in Central Victoria, Australia. Her first collection of short fiction, My Muse Wears a Purple Collar, is available on Kindle.
After the fluid was sucked from my brain, other systems crashed. A bag on my leg, helmet on my skull. They said I could forget about walking. And then my sister came in, full of our secrets. “Remember when I taught you how to pick a lock? Pick this one.”
Cheryl Snell lives to tell the tale.
After Momma died, the ring promised me disappeared.
When my sister died, I found it in a box with a note. “Momma thought I’d lose it. Pawn it. I had to prove I could care for it, like you would.”
I sighed, warmed she’d succeeded. Momma’s ring was hers. Forever.
Liz Mayers writes short fiction from Long Island’s North Shore. Find her at lizmayers.com
“Heart murmur. It could be indicative of first-stage heart failure.”
“Doctor, I’m about to run my first marathon!”
“I strongly advise against it.”
Tomorrow is the race and I am running it. It’s win-win: If I die, he is a good doctor. If I make it, I’ll find somebody better.
Johannes Springenseiss is a world-citizen raconteur. He mostly writes speculative fiction and creative essays.
“I will make this bad week good,”
she says with the tenacity of a teenager
clinging to the lie of a broken curfew—
the tire flat; the phone dead.
Hunting and pecking key after key,
certain each stroke will not just create
a new world,
but wash away the old.
Cathrine Goldstein writes a whole lot of gritty, real-feeling “stuff.” Most of it takes place in NYC. She also eats boat loads of chocolate pretty much every day. To find out more about her bestselling novels, award-winning plays, and other writings including articles, short stories, and poetry, please visit CathrineGoldstein.com