Forty Winks stands at the precipice, gauging the distance left to travel, weighing out options. Her time is almost at an end, and knowing that, she craves existence even more.
The drop, deep and treacherous, is the only way. She jumps: too late. The alarm pierces through her.
You wake.
Niamh writes, travels, and meets people who like to share stories.
The moon’s surface was bleaker than I’d imagined.
From here the Earth looked lonely. Most of the land was gone, overtaken by melted icecaps and nuclear war.
We all lost in the end, but here we were, waiting for salvation in the moon’s welcoming arms.
The tides might yet turn.
Nathan Hystad is a writer from Sherwood Park, Alberta. He has been published by Saturday Night Reader and Kraxon Books. He also has a story in Tickety Boo Press’s anthology Malevolence: Tales from Beyond the Veil and in North 2 South Press’s Whispers from the Past: Fright and Fear anthology. He enjoys writing micro-fiction and has been published at Micro Fiction Monday Magazine, Fifty Word Stories, and Horror in a Hundred by Hellnotes. When he isn’t writing short stories, he is working on a full length novel. You can see his writing blog at nathanhystad.ticketyboopress.co.uk.
There’s a gulf between what Chris wants to say and what he actually does say to Andi.
Without this last bit of truth, he’s afraid they will never be able to live the life he can envision them living together.
Unfortunately, secrets come with the territory when you’re a superhero.
Daniel Slaten writes short stories and poetry in small notebooks and on sticky notes.
The spider spun her web, studiously ignoring the brooding human so intent upon her labours.
Suddenly resolute, the figure raced away, his wake almost dislodging her.
“What was that all about?”
“Nothing, Wallace,” she responded casually, dispatching her mate in an act of post-coital whimsy, unaware of the ironic parallel.
Derry man Perry McDaid is currently fiction editor with Liquid Imagination and on the board of silverpen.org. Widely published, his poems, stories, reviews, and articles have appeared in diverse and international magazines, anthologies, and websites. A prize-winner with short stories, poetry and articles, the Irishman’s work can be found both in hard copy and online. Eschewing demands for one “voice”, and spanning genres, he writes from many perspectives on subjects from the comic to the profound. He lives with his family beneath the mostly misty Donegal Hills, walking back roads where he can inhale the mystic inspiration of long-dead bards and druids to concoct the weird, wonderful, and downright disturbing.
When I am an old woman, I will be a milkweed seed pod drying in the sun, wrinkled and spotted.
You will pull me open on the seam until my silver-white floss pushes through, and you’ll blow my sweet, tender seed to the wind until I am an empty shell.
Laura J. Frantz is not yet an old woman. See more at laurafrantz.com.
It’s all left hand turns. Flaps. Slats. Landing gear. Hook. All down. As you make the last turn, you acquire the lights.
Make your corrections. Roll wings level.
Eyeball the third wire.
Wheels slam into the deck. Throttles slammed to the limits.
The hook holds.
Okay. Ease back the throttles.
Jim Purdy is a retired engineering manager who lives in Oregon and spends his day with his faithful dog who never gives him disparagement. She wags her tail as he reads her whatever he has just written.
Editor’s Note – some context from the author:
While I doubt many people know an arrested carrier landing is actually called a trap (and every trap is graded by the LSOs, with a perfect third-wire trap getting a grade notation of simply “OK” in the logbook), most folks will get the idea behind a 50 -word description of what it’s like to stick a thirteen-ton airplane onto a runway shorter than a football field which moves about 60 feet every second (assuming the carrier is making headway at 30 knots). Oh, and the runway is at approximately a 10-degree angle as well, just to keep you on your toes. It’s even more special if it’s pitch-black dark and the sea is roiling in fifteen-foot swells and you’re at the end of a four-hour mission.
Limited point of view poses a challenge for writers.
Ouch! I just experienced a sharp pain in my shoulder.
I need your help—you, the viewers.
I’m dying to know who stabbed me in the back.
I’m exaggerating, I hope. Should the wound be fatal, I’ll stop my narration immed—
John H. Dromey has had short fiction published in Black Denim Lit #7, Gumshoe Review, Plan B Magazine, and elsewhere.
“Apparently she wasn’t coping with the divorce,” said the lady from 19B.
The man across the hallway put it down to drugs.
Even the postman had an opinion.
But when looking upwards, the uninitiated passerby would see only the billowing nightgown, a strange flightless bird moving wordlessly, determinedly towards death.
Megan has just started a PhD in Writing at Murdoch University in Western Australia. Despite the vibe of this particular submission, she’s moderately funny, and she’s got the blog to prove it.
The story of the week for November 3 to 7 is What Passes by Jennifer L. Freed.
Beautiful prose packed with emotion. I think we’ve all come to expect nothing less from Jennifer!
She placed the baby in the kitchen sink.
“Oh, the soap!” She walked quickly to the bathroom. “There it is,” she said, smelling the soap’s cool fragrance.
She heard the baby crying
and ran
so slowly it seemed.
The hot water was gushing cold: she’d forgotten the laundry was running.
C. Jenise Williamson is the founding coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Bowie State University. She has published in Painted Bride Quarterly and other literary magazines as well as in the anthology Enhanced Gravity: Washington Area Women Writers. She lives in Greenbelt, Maryland.