It’s her.
I long for the coconut scent of her chestnut curls, but I still fear her when lips meet bottle.
She turns the corner.
Not her.
I do not know if I suddenly felt my world drop because it was not her or because I wanted it to be.
Marisa is a graduate of Providence College with degrees in psychology and theatre.
A middle aged man climbed atop a stool and screamed, “This is my world, get used to it!”
Everyone stood around petrified. A small child walked over to the man standing on the stool. The boy pushed the man off.
“This is our world,” the boy said standing over him.
Brock Burns is a college dropout, who does freelance writing. Recently he has started writing stories for fun.
I pour the pale figure a steaming mug.
A smack of the lips; a sigh.
“It’s the only thing I miss,” in a wistful contralto. “They don’t make it right up there. All these caramel and mochalatto and Sumatra roasted subtleties when I want diner grade black. You’re an angel.”
Dee Maselle writes steamy romance. She makes her home in infinite alternate universes.
His life filled with words he hated. Cancer. Radiation. Chemotherapy. Inoperable.
He hated that everything should be compromised to have a chance.
He hated that everybody told him how sorry they were, like it was their fault somehow.
Above all, he hated that what he really wanted was another cigarette.
J.D. Hager lives in Northern California with his wife and a small collection of farm animals. When not writing short stories he goes undercover as a middle school science teacher. His code name is Mister Hager. More of his words and wisecracks can be found at jdhager.wordpress.com.
To professors and students unseen since graduation, he writes novels and plays, film treatments with moments for experimental work before sighing and hitting the commercial again. You know, to pay the bills.
He tells his parents he waits tables. They already know everything.
On good days, both stories are right.
Jason Peck’s work has appeared in more than two dozen newspapers and magazines across Pennsylvania and Virginia, with fiction either published or forthcoming in Seven Eleven Stories, Bloom Aluminum and Third Wednesday. He also serves as one of the founding editors for The Hour After Happy Hour, which recently celebrated its inaugural issue.
Resistance is futile you have been assimilated.
Your mind will experience
a gradual desensitization.
You are not alone.
Your are within the many.
It comes with no pain.
Ignore those over 50.
Do not try to shut off your phone, internet, or computer.
Resistance is futile you have been assimilated.
Patrick once gave up the internet for a year in real life, but then again he is over 50.
Emergent leaves of yellow and green slowly unfurl. Upwards they reach, like the needy hands of a child. They whisper, never cry, for they only have the voice that the wind compassionately lends them. Nature, a generous mother, showers down upon her children the necessities of life, light and water.
Priscilla lives in Canada where spring arrives late and does not stay for long.
Today I am awake.
Today I am alive.
Today I am not wasting any more time.
Today I am going to get out of bed.
Today I am going to love myself again.
Today I am going to tell the truth.
Today I am
deluding myself, about all those things.
Catherine Buck is an “emerging writer”, and is spending her summer dreaming of critical acclaim. She is currently based in Philadelphia, soon to be transplanted to Texas.
Seeing the empty porridge bowls on their return, the bears tiptoed upstairs.
They checked Little Bear’s bedroom. The bed was ruffled!
Then the Middle Bear’s bedroom: likewise ruffled.
But in Big Bear’s bedroom the bed was neat. He exclaimed, “You lazy lot! Don’t you make your own beds?”
Stuart Larner is a chartered psychologist. He has published poems and stories in magazines and newspapers and for the stage, as well as articles in scientific journals. Stuart has written an ebook in verse, “Jack Daw and the Cat”, and a novel about cricket entitled “Guile and Spin”. See more of his work at stuartlarner.blogspot.com.
Private helicopters and jets whisk coddled, air-smooching trophy wives off to be detoxed, Botoxed, Gucci’ed and Armani’ed. Yacht captains are given their sailing orders. More wings are added to megamansions. Indolent, entitled Trust Babies wreck this year’s batch of their daddies’ Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
Your stolen pension funds at work.
Carl Dinerman is a retired ex-physicist and ex-telecom website designer with untreatable delusions that he could be an entertaining writer.