What bothered Friedman most were the bird droppings. Washing them away from around the hotel pool, he gazed at the sea, mesmerized by his urge to take a plunge. However, the roof had been fenced off for safety, which struck him as ironic since the war had begun in earnest.
Nelly Shulman is writing in Berlin.
The katydids’ droning chorus; the song of the summer’s nights.
Julia let it wash over her, soothe her, standing at the water’s edge. The full moon’s reflection shimmered and danced across the hidden pond. She watched as bubbles broke the surface, drifting. Soon, his body would settle on the bottom.
Nick Young is an award-winning retired journalist whose career included twenty years as a CBS News correspondent. His short stories have appeared in the San Antonio Review, CafeLit Magazine, Fiery Scribe Review and Vols. I and II of the Writer Shed Stories anthologies.
Mister Adolphus Finnegan was a pleasant chap, if a little seclusive. His daily forest-path meanderings were routed so as to minimize chance meetings with other meanderers. He called these his “refreshing ambulations”, and continued them well into his elderhood.
He lived a long, well-refreshed, pleasant, but secluded kind of life.
This story was based on a title provided by @Keab42.
I stepped on a spider. I felt bad, thinking I had killed him for sure, but by some luck or spider fu he found a crevice in the sole of my boot, and when I lifted my foot his legs uncurled and he scrambled off, both of us supremely happy.
Peter Schireson is a Zen Buddhist priest and writer living in the Sierra Foothills of California. His poems and prose have been published in a number of journals, both in print and online.