“This holiday is for chumps,” he says, without looking up from his laptop as I arrive home.
I hide the tulips behind me, lift the trash open, let the dumb card with the love poem I wrote slide, crumpled, into this morning’s uneaten eggs.
“Yeah,” I agree. Like a chump.
Rachel Hapanowicz may be a hopeless romantic. Or she may just be a chump. Either way, she enjoys Valentine’s Day chocolates, as long as there’s no red fillings.
Dear, sorry to have missed you today.
Saddened so to have missed seeing you today.
Sorry, my dear, I yearned for our being together today.
Today I missed you being here. Why weren’t you?
Dear? Are you even sorry you missed our day?
Missed today! Sorry to have you dear.
Lynn Kozlowski’s writing has appeared in such places as 50-Word Stories, The Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Poetry Breakfast, and failbetter.com. He has a volume of short pieces, Historical Markers.
He’s always busy with something, never cares where she’s been or who she’s seen. Ignores how she’s spending every spare second with old swim friends; doesn’t even notice when shimmering scales start to reappear.
Now she’s gone. And all he finds are her discarded shoes, drifting unneeded on the tide.
Deborah writers at an old desk surrounded by five hundred pet bugs.
On a flat patch of land just above the foothills, where snowmelt and rainfall regularly spilled over the rock cliffs to form a waterfall that fed our supply of drinking water, we devoted our lives to one another. Such love, like clean water, is seldom missed until it stops flowing.
Bob Thurber is the author of six books. Regarded as a master of Flash and Micro Fiction, his work has appeared in Esquire and other magazines, been anthologized 60 times, received a long list of awards, and been utilized in schools and colleges throughout the world. He resides in Massachusetts. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.
I cut another peach as he babbles about his weekend in Boston. Business trips we both know too well. The pretend game we’ve been playing for years.
Staring at his moving lips, I let out a sigh and relish the softness of the flesh as my paring knife slices through.
Wai Mei Wong was a former early childhood educator. She believes horror is the memoir of darkness.
For decades only one ring adorned her fingers, a symbol of their commitment.
At some point she decided to wear an additional ring on the opposite hand, a simple band.
Then, another, gaudier…
Nowadays he scans her hands as if trying to pick out a familiar face from a crowd.
Dave Myers (he/him) lives and teaches in Bend, Oregon.
She sits on the couch immersed in a book. Across the room, he watches TV from his recliner. Headphones on, to avoid disturbing her. A perfect picture of empty-nesters, apparently.
Kids, the bridge connecting the two islands, gone. An ocean tosses between them. Of silence. Words would raise a tsunami.
Preeti is notorious for shirking duties when engrossed in reading literary fiction, writing short stories and designing graphics. A former journalist, she now works as a marketing professional in Southern California. She digs her annual gig as a publicist for a film festival.
Cardiac ablation is the art of treating heart rhythm irregularities with freezing. Not like musical statues at our wedding, where the music stops, you freeze, and when it starts you dance. There will be scars. These stop abnormal impulses. Nothing reaches that part of the heart again. The feeling’s gone.
Rosaleen Lynch, an Irish community worker and writer in the East End of London, has words in lots of lovely places and can be found on Twitter at @quotes_52 and 52Quotes.blogspot.com.
He comes home late, breezes through and reminds me of that song. He smiles; this is how it’s done. How he’s always done it.
You are my trophy, that smile says. You are my possession.
I try to remember the day but I cannot. Time is endless. Back, forward. Now.
M. Blackmars is a writer in New England.
It could’ve been a sofa ad. “Second-hand, some surface wear, but generally in good shape.”
It made Keith chuckle, like Ann used to, before they got sunk by two kids, twenty years, and brutal familiarity.
***
Waiting, twisting her napkin, Ann wished he hadn’t picked this restaurant. It was Keith’s favourite.
Tamsin isn’t even sure that lonely hearts ads still exist, but would like to think that they haven’t been killed off by Tinder.