DON NOEL: Earthworm Ruminations

Amusing, Artistic, Submissions, ,

In the garden, I meditate, motionless. Birds, ignoring me, flit to the feeder.

A fat earthworm scrunches and telescopes across the flagstones into the sunlight, toward the feeder. Seeking food? Do earthworms eat what birds spill?

Never mind. Robins eat earthworms. One pounces, plucks.

Pity. I might have gone fishing.

Retired after four decades’ prizewinning print and broadcast journalism in Hartford CT, Don Noel received an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University in 2013 and has since published more than two dozen short stories and non-fiction pieces, with two novellas and a novel still looking for publishers. See more at dononoel.com.

PRIYA BALASUBRAMANIAN: A Dream of Childhood

Submissions, Touching, , , ,

I am standing on wet ground outside my childhood home, under mid-morning tropical sun. The air smells of earth and newly banished rain. Adults speak indoors; their everyday worries are abstract, distant.

I wake up to a snowy Chicago morning, work on a weekend, and infant needing to be fed.

Priya Balasubramanian is a writer and physician. She’s written a novel, and no longer wakes up to snow.

LOU ROMERO: Best Man

Artistic, Submissions, , , ,

Your white veil is an impenetrable mist that I can’t get through.

Pastor: “The rings, please.”

I know your covered eyes are fastened on mine.

Louder. “The rings?”

I step forward, deliver the rings.

It’s not too late. Just give me a sign. Anything.

I step away. A coward’s destiny.

Lou is a retired archaeologist from the University of New Mexico.

MARY SHEEHAN: Lady Luck

Amusing, Submissions, , , ,

He put a rabbit’s foot in his pocket, scoured the garden for a four-leafed clover, and hung a horseshoe on their front door for luck.

Sarah suggested he hang the horseshoe points up, to keep luck from leaving.

He ignored her, yet again.

So she left. She had warned him!

Mary is Irish, superstitious, and a believer in luck coming in threes.

LINDA SCHUELER: Lost

Submissions, , ,

“What do you want?” asked the nurse.

What did he want? He once had a house, but all he remembered was a tumble and then pain. Then he had lost it all: mobility, independence, dignity, his house. Now he was lost.

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Linda writes for both children and adults. She blogs at lindaschueler.com.

PHILIPP M SELMAN: Nine Lives

Amusing, Submissions, , ,

Bored. I stretched out on the couch and took in the sunshine streaming through the gap in the curtains, luxuriating in the warmth.

For years, I’d imagined how great it would be to come back as a cat. And it was, but I’d never realized it would be so boring.

Philipp is a graphic artist, musician, historical martial artist, and professional copywriter. He has previously been published in Fifty Word Stories, and examples of his art, music, and writing can be found at pmselman.com.

ALEX MARKOVICH: Uprooted Childhood

Artistic, Submissions, , ,

Tattered memories: My first language, now long faded. A fence, reassuringly high, around a garden where time slept. Day trips through virgin forests, gathering wild berries and mushrooms. Suddenly, columns of soldiers goose-stepping in lock-step like a well-oiled machine. A week-long Atlantic crossing. Asking where, asking why. Getting no answers.

Alex has faint memories of 1930s Czechoslovakia.

MAURA YZMORE: Brad and I

Amusing, Odd, Submissions, , , ,

I hear a noise in my kitchen and come down to find Brad Pitt guzzling chocolate milk straight from the carton. He says his motorcycle broke down en route to Missouri. Brad, if you left me without chocolate milk before breakfast on a school day, I will have your head.

Maura Yzmore’s day job involves quantum mechanics, dry-erase markers, making bad puns, and lots of technical writing. She lives with her family in the American Midwest, where she also writes, draws, and indulges her love for coffee, driving, and kickboxing. See more at maurayzmore.com.

JENNIFER M SMITH: Caught

Adventure, Submissions, , ,

It was Jo-Jo’s plan.

Break, enter, grab the artwork, drive.

But, she was home. A shot was fired.

A delay – the painting, which one?

Then sirens and a chase.

He’d had years to think about it.

Vivid in his memory, the searing heat of the asphalt on his face.

Jennifer M. Smith is a thinker, a tailor, an author, a sailor, but she’s no thief.