The sounds of the forest dull around me. My eyes no longer focus in this gloom, making me squint and blink. Separated from my pack, cursed to walk on two legs.
In the ditch water a pink, hairless face, flat and round, stares back.
One bite was all it took.
Tracy Fells has over 85 stories published in online and print journals. She won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Canada and Europe. Tracy tweets as @theliterarypig and is seeking a publisher for her short story collection.
The story of the week for September 30 to October 4 is…
Mother Always Asked Uncle Art to Babysit by C. Christine Fair
“I’ll never forgive you,” the man whispered so only God could hear his voice. “I’ll hate you until the day I die.” He stared at the massive cross looming over him, his eyes filled with rage.
Then he forced a smile, turned to face his congregation, and started the sermon.
Ethan Noll works in a welfare office and writes as often as possible.
I met this intriguing woman on an internet dating site, fascinated by her profile line that said she was a welder on a deep-water offshore oil rig.
We’d been hard at it for three months and two days.
The Texas authorities dubbed her the “Ninety-nine-day killer.”
I was that close.
Ed N. White is a writer of Mysteries. A teller of Tales. A graduate of the University of Iowa with an M. A. from the University of Rhode Island. An unapologetic self-publisher of Thrillers and Middle-Grade mysteries. A New Englander trapped on the Suncoast of Florida hoping for a little snow.
We didn’t live there anymore. Hadn’t for a decade.
And yet, as flames licked at the windows and devoured the roof, as smoke belched into the twilight sky, I stood on the hose-wet lawn suffocating, asphyxiating on the fumes of my childhood while firefighters tried—failed—to stop its burning.
Angela Teagardner has been selling books for twenty years – not her own though, not yet. A bookseller for pay and a writer for passion, she’s been writing stories and poetry since middle school. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, daughter, and two extremely cranky cats.
A youngster came home from school with scraped knuckles and a torn shirt.
“Fighting again? I think your classmate Donnie is a bad influence on you. Have you been playing violent video games at his house?”
“No, I haven’t. Donnie won’t let me. First I have to win a fight.”
John H. Dromey’s short fiction has been published in Mystery Weekly Magazine and over one-hundred-fifty other venues.
Sleeping outside, away from the din of the city, they had a window into the glitter of a million worlds, and all it took to blast their minds free of Earth-bound problems was to stare into galaxies just hanging there, waiting for the next trillion years to come and go.
Linda Saldaña is an escaped tech writer now addressing the meaning of life 50 words at a time – or maybe a little more. Recent work can be found in Poydras Review and Every Day Fiction.
On the day the old woman died, her clock stopped. It couldn’t be fixed, but Kate, her granddaughter, kept it for its sentimental value.
When Kate married, the clock had pride of place in her apartment.
One day, Kate came home with some news: “Darling, I’m pregnant.”
Tick. tick, tick.
Judy Upton wrote this story.
I found him in the garden, grinning like a great white shark.
“Everything okay, Gramps?”
“NASA says a skyscraper-sized asteroid will hit this city.”
“Their calculations were wrong.”
“What?”
“They say it’s going to splash into the Pacific.”
The shark grin submerged, leaving only his usual flat face.
And quietness.
David Derey wrote this story.
Another day starts. You wake weary and late. Whip on a dress suit, hairspray, lippy, and name tag. No time for brushing your teeth. No matter. You never smile at the office anyway.
Clutching a tepid coffee, you’re out the door and running, racing towards the end of your life.
GB Burgess works from home now and smiles every day.