Fireworks finale—a descending canopy—envelops them. “Whoa!” Her five-year-old’s hand, she holds. Through his eyes, awestruck, she watches. Her husband’s forced-enthusiastic presence, this moment excludes.
Faraway pops-and-crackles, she hears from her bed. That little hand, she misses. Her now-adult son will hold her hand when she needs, she trusts.
Motherhood and writing are two things Shanti Chandrasekhar finds most rewarding and fulfilling. She writes from her home in Maryland.
I give you my water shoes. You wade out first into the cool, murky water. Mosquitos lick the surface, buzz between us. Bits of rock jab into the bottoms of my feet. I leap to you and you hold me fireman-style. Purple haze settles in the sky. Mountains bow down.
KB Wright is a teacher and writer. She enjoys traveling to new places in real life and in fiction. She can usually be found crocheting and listening to a good audiobook.
On the way to the crematorium a large beer truck inserts itself between the hearse and the cortege, then, despite signals to overtake, tenaciously holds its position. In the moments of sad gladness, down the line of following cars, the laughter ripples. “Harry would have appreciated that,” they all agree.
John Young is an old chap grappling with themes of limits and longings. He lives in St Andrews Scotland.
Two sisters, best friends, ran to the pool’s edge.
Nostrils filled with chlorine, sunscreen, peanut butter. Mother called, but twenty minutes was forever when shimmery waves signaled.
Everything—the cherry Koolaid mustaches, the sticky fingers—would be wiped clean.
They bent knees, inhaled sharply, pinched noses, then jumped, holding hands.
Melanie Maggard is a flash fiction and short story writer living in Seattle. She works as a psychology professor for an online university but hopes to grow up to be an author some day.
With ketchup trickling from her broad grin, his daughter looks like a cheerful, diminutive vampire.
The food is too fast, the street is too crowded, the fireworks are too loud. She is loving every single minute, and her mother will be furious.
Both of these things give him deep satisfaction.
Tamsin wishes she wasn’t too cowardly for fireworks and broad grins.
At a Munich park, we sat and laughed together, as lonely travelers do. He bit an apple, and I took a bite of bratwurst. We toasted, clinking the sweet red apples on our juice jars, chorused “apfel,” and took a swig… then spit, and spewed… and hooted!
Deutsch: Essig!
Vinegar!
Casey Robb’s careers have included physical therapy and civil engineering. Her creative non-fiction has been published in “Texas Magazine,” and her poetry has won numerous awards and several trophies, and has been published in a variety of journals, including “The Classical Outlook,” “Ekphrasis,” “The Edge City Review,” “The Comstock Review,” and “The Lyric.” Her first short story was recently published in “Menda City Review”.