He closed the door behind him and looked over the room. A melancholic expression was drawn across his face.
It was curious how ordinary things had acquired very special meanings while they were together.
She was gone, but everything else stayed the same, a cruel reminder of their broken story.
José Jaime is from Spain and is studying at university.
The tide of approaching adulthood pulled them from my shore. Strolling slowly where I once set a brisk pace, picking up random shells, desperate for some word, all I get is static. Then a familiar voice, almost forgotten, asks why I expect they’ll return when I never did.
Oh, mom.
Lee DeAmali keeps the porch light on.
Clare sits in her car, heater at full blast. She knows she should keep driving but the lights of the house, her home, have her mesmerized.
She looks longingly at her past. The deep snow makes it look as if nothing has changed, the SOLD sign buried beneath a drift.
Candace Kubinec posts her stories at storydribbles.wordpress.com and her poetry at rhymeswithbug.com.
She dabs vanilla on her wrists, thick, dark and pungent, like her memory of the night before he went to war. His child plays in the garden where they will stroll. He’ll see his son, for the first and only time, his firstborn, bearing another man’s name.
Casualty of war.
Sharon Calkin is a family history writer and poet. She lives in Pasadena, CA.
For months the space next to me had been empty. Yet tonight, it was occupied by a stranger. My husband glared at him.
“How could you do this to me?” he whispered.
“Til death do us part,” I replied.
My husband glowered. His ghostly figure slowly disappeared into the darkness.
Patricia Santillan likes climbing up chairs because she is too short to reach the top cupboard. Because self-love is important to her, she loves hugging herself. Her most recent publications can be found in Leaves of Ink and Fairy Talez.
He hadn’t thought of her today. (Much.)
Then, his friend’s boy with his innocent question, “What’s your favourite colour?” (Couldn’t know the pain it caused.)
“Yellow,” he replied. (But what he really meant was: saffron sparks. Those lemon lights of stranded stardust that campfires used to summon in her eyes.)
Jo Withers is in a strangely sentimental mood. It won’t last.
Two rockers in the corners. One’s been empty for years.
Pictures line the walls, smiling faces from younger days. The kitchen echos memories. Remember when? Can you still smell those biscuits?
Clocks tick like my heart beats. Tick, tick, tick.
He’s moving out, but a part of me will stay.
Amanda is a writer and dreamer by day and a mother of four by night (when will they sleep?).
“It’s good to see you.”
It wasn’t.
“I hoped we could talk.”
Wished we didn’t have to.
“It’s been too long.”
Not long enough.
Leaning against the air-hockey table, shoes white against the slushy stain, she replies:
“It’s been two days, Tyler. And I only came to get my backpack.”
Kerry teaches English with the comfortable assuredness that he is almost often not wrong about it.
She told me that the cruelest part of it all, after it was over and she was finally allowed to leave the hospital and come home again, was that they had taken the crib away without even telling her.
They pretended like it had never been there to begin with.
Dave Novak works in a fairly serious office that sends him to strange and mysterious places throughout New Jersey. Whenever he feels like being more or less serious, he writes. You can check out his works and thoughts at dumbstupidfakestories.wordpress.com.
Well heck I finally deleted you
from my phone,
from my conscious mind
and then you had the nerve to show up in a dream,
all friendly and conciliatory.
I leaned against your shoulder, into the feel of you.
Sure, we can be friends
Sweet (did you whisper back?)
Nothing.
Robin Lubatkin does circle time with the very young and what she calls “songhealing” with the very old.