Darkness swells around me, smothering time. My eyes know no light. My ears see the trickle of water through stone. For sweet short moments I am left alone.
It’s time. The soft pad of the beast, his gentle breath against my skin. The short, sweet moment before he begins again.
Richard A. Shury wrote this story.
I arrived sweaty and covered in snow.
I’ll show you her, he said, don’t be sad if she doesn’t remember.
She was bones and skin, on a living room cot.
Hi, I said, and her eyes replied, round and begging. I knew what she knew. Wordless, we sat, remembering everything.
Piper Pugh is a writer and educator living in Los Angeles, CA.
Four golfers wait on the tenth tee, handling their driver grips.
“Ron, how’s your wife?” Aaron asks his partner. “Haven’t talked with her in ages.”
Ron’s silence is fraught. “She wants a divorce. Now the kids’re gone.”
Awkward reticence envelops them.
“Fairway’s clear, good to go,” Dave announces. “Whose honour?”
Gary Thomson, in his aging tetchiness, finds diminishing pleasure in social jock talk.
Her tears wake me up.
There’s not much I can do about cerebral palsy, spinal scoliosis, epilepsy. Those are for hospitals and doctors.
The tears, though. Those are a father’s domain. Making silly sounds, singing favourite songs, I distract her from the discomfort.
Tears fade; a smile begins.
Hope endures.
Bill lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, with his family and a nagging sense that he has forgotten somethin, but can’t quite remember what.
Another year passes.
Once I had a thousand possibilities.
Now I glare at people laughing in the coffee shop.
I criticize people dancing in the grocery store.
And I growl at couples holding hands.
I hunch over bills and dusty history. I whisper silent apology, try to laugh; it’s cracked.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA fiction program. His stories, “Soon,” “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” “Tales From A Communion Line,” and “Community Time,” have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. His work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Ariel Chart, among others. He has been working on a short story collection centered around two siblings and their quest for the American Dream. Yash lives in Garden Valley, Idaho.
Color vanished from the world with his wife’s last breath. Murmured words of sympathy hovered at the edge of sound. Endless gray corridors led to the NICU. Masked and gowned, he stood beside the incubator, dark spines of hair visible among the tubes and wires. In that moment, color returned.
Suzi lives somewhere between truth and interpretation and writes whenever the words must come out and speak to others.
Would life have been easier if you had died? You left. My heart struggled, fearful and uncertain. Sadness watered my heart, transforming tears into caterpillars. You found purpose with a new love. I stretched and lifted skyward, chasing butterflies, searching new joy.
Then you died, and no, it wasn’t easier.
Eileen is forever chasing butterflies metaphorically as a source of hope and inspiration.
Belly pressed against the warm sand.
Through half closed eyes, the golden hairs on my forearm bend like grass in the breeze.
The foamy ocean edge reaches up,
falls back,
tugging the sun burned memory of you out to sea.
We all swam here that day we got the call.
Dave lives in Sydney, Australia and works across various creative disciplines. Follow at instagram.com/davidnormanbonney
You loved my fool.
The gooseberry bush grew uninvited, yet you took such care of it.
But now you’re gone, I let the thorns etch my skin and hook my flesh.
Yes, you could be prickly at times, but I’d rather you were still here to make me feel alive.
R.H. lives in Nottingham, UK, has several short stories published, and co-founded the Sutton Bonington Campus Creative Writing Group as a staff wellbeing event.
As a Darksider, I live in the absence of color: the impenetrable depth of the universe, the blazing of a star. Black and white.
Lightsiders can see sunsets of gold, pink, and violet. But also parchment earth, bloody scarlet of war, gray ash of nuclear blasts.
Still, I envy them.
Sherri Bale writes to the tune of waves crashing on the beach and the scent of salt in her nostrils.