Her gaze touched me in ways you cannot imagine but in ways I cannot forget.
Fixated on one another, our eyes met. In that moment, time became irrelevant and my longing heart became hopeful. Her presence touched my soul as quickly as she left my world.
An opportune love, lost.
Jimmy is an aspiring life coach who loves stories of all sorts.
“Hello, I’d like to borrow a book please.”
“Did you reserve it online, sir?”
“Sorry. No.”
“Have you got your Library Swipe Card?”
“Errr. No.”
“Tried our search engine?”
“No.”
“Touch screen app?”
“No.”
“Sorry sir, but I can’t help you. Next.”
“Hello, I’d like to borrow a book please.”
Chris Redfern’s short stories have been published within a variety of magazines and websites. Find out more at www.aatwatchtower.com.
“Jimmy, keep practicing that paradiddle, loud and in time.” It was up to the boy now. Dave lay back exhausted.
The boy banged that hollow log, eyes closed, finding comfort in the rhythm.
He played and played, his cheeks wet with tears.
The rescuers heard the call.
Was Dave alive?
Feeling optimistic after the success of her first submission, Anmari decided not to kill Dave off.
Hard up,
I rented a stairway landing.
Eight by six, the price was right.
Roped off a pedestrians’ passway.
Sold my etchings, then clothes,
next blood, one or two kidneys.
I shouldn’t have harvested
that poor man,
but once you buy the
chloroform
and surgical tools…
Pricing studio apartments
today.
Todd Mercer won the Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest and took 2nd and 3rd place of the Kent County Dyer-Ives Prizes. His chapbook Box of Echoes won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. Mercer’s poetry and fiction appears in The Lake, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Thema, Blue Collar Review, Right Hand Pointing, Apocrypha & Abstractions, Cease, Cows, Dunes Review and Eunoia Review.
“Kill two birds with one stone,” Jenny had told me every day for a week. “Do it before it’s too late.” She grinned like a Cheshire cat when speaking these words on Saturday.
Unable to keep the secret any longer, I told her: “I already did. Took three stones, though.”
Anna is a fifteen-year-old writer, music lover, and high school student in New Orleans.
The fortuneteller strokes my hand, the callouses along my fingertips. Her brow furrows. “You have the hands of a pianist… But that cannot be…”
My nostrils burn in a dark, musty room, air of silence shattered by empty notes only I hear. She shudders at my memories, proving herself authentic.
Denise Long writes from her home in Nebraska. She works as a freelance copy editor and an English instructor. In her spare time, she is also a wife, and a mother to two young boys. Her flash fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Burrow Press Review, Journal of Microliterature, and The Story Shack, among others. She occupies a small bit of online space at denisehlong.com.
“If I promise to lead you down the path to darkness, will you follow?” asked the pretty brunette in the horn-rimmed glasses, a twinkle in her eye.
“I sure will,” said the blue-eyed gentleman with the diamond cufflinks.
She handed him her chocolate chip scone and a pink business card.
Recently retired, Marian Brooks has begun to write some short fiction. Her work has appeared in Word Riot, Crack the Spine, The Linnet’s Wings, The Story Shack and others.
You were at the corner of Wisconsin and M, riding a unicycle in the December rain. I was stuffed in a Volkswagen with fifteen friends. I said you looked sad and you honked a bicycle horn in reply, then squirted me with a flower.
Your orange hair still haunts me.
Tom Howard lives in Arlington, Virginia, where he spends a lot of time roaming the hills with his wife beside a funny black dog.
The moon is a beautiful thing, gleaming in the dark night. It summons the werewolf and his eternal rival, the vampire.
One must stop and think: to be fanged or to be clawed? To move swiftly through the night, purged by day, or to only be true once a month?
Vampyreness wrote this out of love for the full moon and vampires.
“Are you sure? It’s a near white out.”
“Really, I’ll be okay.”
“They won’t find your body until spring.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Call and let me know how you’re doing.” She waited until his figure was engulfed by the storm and then dropped the cell phone battery into the wastebasket.
Ray Wirth has survived more than 30 Maine winters. He teaches English in Searsport, Maine.