Life is great. Health, mobility, liberty.
Then, an inadvertent moment. A slip and twisting tumble. The crash is sharp; the crack loud. Such a quick and simple thing.
But the scorching pain: deep, crippling, and endless.
Operations and rehab do little. Each move brings agony and depression.
Life is hell.
Bill Diamond writes in the Colorado Mountains. See more at bdiamondwriting.com
I tell her amidst our constitutional in Plastic Garden.
She lowers herself onto the grass, studying its frozen, wind-blown artifice, then plants her hand into a spongy anthill.
As the mechanical carbuncles stream up her pale skin, bites evoking winces, she whispers to them, “Like me, like me, like me.”
Tim Boiteau lives and writes near Detroit with wife and son. Find him at @timboiteau.
She was crazy, but not like others
She had the madness of a woman who lives as if every day were Friday
She was the one who thought that betting on her was better than going to a casino
She was the one who had never regretted anything
She was.
Candela Martinez wrote this story.
You told me the story of the blind man out in the rain: grabbing the bus stop sign and leaning into the wind. You were in the back of the car and wanted to get out and offer him an umbrella you didn’t have.
Some days are bad like that.
Kiah Mott has been published previously in Flash Fiction Magazine Online. She was also a finalist for the 2018 Moon City Fiction Competition.
Who knows why the black cat walked in front of us for two miles, occasionally looking back.
Not my cat, not yours. Just a black cat, late night walking down a three mile track.
And that disappearing trick with a mile still to go.
Eileen Carney Hulme lives in the North of Scotland. She has three full poetry collections published. See more at eileencarneyhulme.org.uk.
What makes me feel really sad is not that I am a sick old man and every part of my body is aching. Nor is it the thought that I am going to die sooner than one may hope.
It is my son’s assurance that his youth will last forever.
Victor is a Russian that could be thought of as a literary anglophile.
When Heinrich did not die at the apex of his actuarial bell curve, he felt intense relief; blessed. He loved his world as he never had; he felt the breeze as he sat on his deck overlooking the mountains; he squeezed the hand of his spouse
for one sublime second.
T.A. Young’s short story “Stooped” was published in The First Line magazine, summer issue 2017. His poetry appears in the October 2018 issue of Anti-Heroin Chic. You can find his literary reviews on his Instagram page, #thelitreview. He lives and works in New York City.
She felt safe in asking only a few trusted friends.
Do you question your motivations?
Most said no, they just did stuff.
She asked a spiritual teacher if it was important.
Don’t waste your time, said the teacher.
Now, when it bubbles up, she gets real quiet,
like a tree.
Matthew lives in Maine.
You take the room in back, just sink, bed, and chair. The haggard woman unlocking the door disappears quietly back into dust.
Alone, with nothing but a ray of moonlight to talk to, you tell it your life story, then wait for tomorrow’s visit, plead with it to never leave.
Jim Doss has published two books of poems: Learning to Talk Again and What Remains. He also published a book of German translations entitled The Last Gold of Expired Stars: The Complete Poems of Georg Trakl 1908 – 1914. In his spare time, he is an editor for the Loch Raven Review.
The lightning bolt struck, knocked me unconscious, threw me into the water.
Tom dove in, dragged me into the boat, started my heart.
Now I lie here, an active mind trapped in an unresponsive body. I think, “Did Tom do me a kindness when he compelled me to continue living?”
Warren Beatty wrote this true, autobiographical story.