Things I’ve done for money: collected cans for cash, sold chocolate, shoveled sidewalks after a snowstorm. Once I built an amusement park in the backyard and sold tickets. That was the summer Mom quit chemo.
I told jokes for a penny. She bought a hundred, and listened from her bed.
Jane Hertenstein wrote this story.
He flits between branches, his jaunty, upturned tail bobbing. I’ve seen him before, but never this close, and never singing fit to burst his tiny heart.
His head twitches left and right. Perhaps he’s just scared, but I need to believe it’s because he’s caught a sideways glimpse of spring.
Tamsin can’t sing or flit, but she’s definitely on the lookout for the end of winter.
She had always been afraid of heights.
Finally she decided that today, on her birthday, she would conquer her fear and go to the top of the tallest building she knew.
Looking out at the extraordinary view she knew this would always be a date to remember.
September 11, 2001.
Jonathan Cook is a one-time farmer, pharmacologist, stand-in head of an EU delegation, international training advisor, and current language school director. Throughout, he has retained an abiding interest in anything as long as it is well written…
He turned to see his replacement being greeted as he had been, with smiles, handshakes, and razzmatazz.
All too soon his own time had been ravaged with despair, hurricanes, and many tragic manmade disasters.
The Old Year listened to the chimes welcoming the New Year and whispered: “Good Luck, 2018.”
John B. Sinclair is a much-travelled Scot who has now returned to Scotland, where he enjoys freelance writing on a variety of subjects.
Three hundred years from now, they still have AA meetings. After the meetings end, before the attendees take off in their flying cars or hop on airlifts to their dingy floating halfway houses, some still chew nervously at the rims of their Styrofoam coffee cups, unable to grasp the future.
Thomas Tilton is pretty sure the coffee is mud.
While filling the pockets of her overcoat with heavy stones, she idly mulls over her long-held belief that removing a writer’s demons can also take away those angels that create wondrous prose. “Well, it doesn’t matter now,” she thinks, wading deeper into the River Ouse. “The angels have abandoned me.”
Henry F. Tonn has had his fiction and nonfiction published by some of the finest literary journals in America but his novel, “Ascent to Madness,” a historical novel about Zelda Fitzgerald, had been rejected by over two hundred literary agents. He blogs sporadically at henrytonn.com.
Every once in a while she gets the distinct feeling that no matter how hard she tries, no matter how efficient and attentive and understanding she is, things are never going to work out between the two of them.
She can’t tell if these are moments of despair or lucidity.
Helen Sparrow digs tea and idolizes her chemistry teacher.
My heart pounding in my chest, I watched as you lay on the white linen, still and silent. The fan’s breeze fluttered your hair and eyelashes. You looked cool, reposed, as though sleeping. I squeezed your hand and whispered for you to open your eyes, once more.
But you didn’t.
Melanie Cranenburgh lives in Western Australia and rescues wildlife in her spare time.
I used to collect mermaid scales at the beach with my brother. They were aluminium soda can tabs, but whatever—we knew they were really mythical, wish-granting scales. We used them for snow days until my brother caught pneumonia.
I stacked hundreds on his grave.
Even then, it wasn’t enough.
Like most kids , E.O. just used shooting stars to wish for snow days. During meteor showers, about 90% of the wishes in the region were likely made for snow, with the remaining 10% being divided between money, sports cars, and those hoping that their sadistic bosses would drop dead inexplicably.
Mikolo woke up tired. His hair felt heavy and his throat burnt. A masked man came into the room and gave him some water.
The man left and locked the door. Mikolo did his business in the corner. He could hear unbearable screaming from down the hall.
He was next.
Dan Shushko is a Ukrainian writer from Lviv.