Faded yellow letters on a flaking blue sign beside the door of a long-abandoned building read: Mrs M. Martindale, music lessons, top floor.
Gregor, a beggar, frail, toothless, and alone, spends his nights huddled by the front step. Sometimes he plays his tin whistle. Sometimes a distant piano accompanies him.
John Young is an old chap living in St. Andrews, Scotland, a ancient town with an ancient university, home of golf and, allegedly, many ghosts.
Disdainful of the traffic, Bob, my golden retriever, bounded across the road towards me. This is very strange, I thought. Bob was killed by a truck two years ago.
As he cavorted and joyfully yelped beside me, I noticed that people had clustered around someone stretched out on the pavement.
John Young is an old chap, 73, a retired Criminal Justice social work manager in Scotland (CJS roughly equivalent to English / US Probation Service) and then University Hon Lecturer lecturing in Social Work ethics. He grapples with themes of limits, longings, and the images that these create.
She farted the color yellow. She perspired the color blue. Her most angry thoughts created a greenish aura around her head, while both her lusty imaginings and lightning-like pangs of envy created an orange fog around her feet.
Her tinder date was color-blind. It might have worked.
It did not.
There are no answers at kentoswald.com about why it is evolutionarily preferable that males are more likely to be color blind, but there are additional words.
When I saw him the other day, I felt the strangest urge to strike up a conversation. Most peculiar, seeing as we’ve hardly been close. But the moment passed and I saw it wasn’t him, remembered it couldn’t be so.
A curiosity indeed that we’re always friendlier towards the dead.
Gretchen wants to make being out of place her comfort zone, so she’s going to keep on sharing her thoughts.
The sign says “If you see something, say something.”
Today, on the subway in Boston, I saw a man wearing a black sombrero with a live parrot sitting quietly on his shoulder. No one paid the slightest attention to either one of them.
How I love living in the city.
Jeri Quinzio is the author of Dessert: A Tale of Happy Endings.
Started sewing today.
And again today.
And again today.
Mr. MacKelvie came knocking. Wondered is mom home.
Back to sewing.
I think today I really can’t continue.
Mr. MacKelvie came round again. The yard smells.
Today finished the ears.
Today finished the mouth.
Today got the eyes done. Shut permanent.
Tim Boiteau lives near Detroit with wife and son. He is a recent
winner of the Writers of the Future Contest. Follow him at @timboiteau.
It protects me while I sleep.
From the eight-legged reptile under my bed.
From the violent poltergeist in my kitchen.
From the woman in white with midnight hair down to her feet, who waits among the banana trees in my garden.
It protects me, the strange being in my wardrobe.
AJ Joseph occasionally writes at Words from Sonobe.
The man used to chastise the dog for drinking from scummy puddles beside the road.
That extra-hard leash-yank was what returned to him after the water was gone, when he and the dog both lapped at rare graces of liquid, the man’s knees muddied.
Eventually, the dog had to go.
Evan McMurry’s fiction has been published in more than one dozen journals, including Post Road, Euphony, Arcturus, Oddville Press, Lotus-Eater Magazine, Palaver, Mulberry Fork Review, and more. His story “Nothing Kinky” won the New Millennium Fiction Prize, and his story “Nixon in Heaven” won Exposition Review’s Flash Fiction contest. “The Fall of Rabbi Gold” was selected as a finalist for the Al-Simāk Award for Fiction from the Chicago Review of Books.
She won’t stop haunting me.
I can see her wavy hair. I can hear her sweet voice. I can smell her soap and fragrance. I can taste her red lips. I can still sense her as I walk over the ground where I buried her.
She won’t stop haunting me.
Chad Bunch writes speculative fiction from the suburbs of Saint Louis. He is currently trying to publish the first of many novels.
The students had dug a grave.
The children had sharpened their knives.
The cult had sacrificed a deer.
“Do you think bad luck will chase us?” someone asked Yanni, the leader.
“This isn’t Ancient Greek class.”
Something watched from the thicket, something of the woods, dark and ancient.
It smiled.
Avra Margariti is a Social Work undergrad from Greece. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, The Forge Literary, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and other venues. You can find her on Twitter at @avramargariti.