The same hemisphere always faces Earth. When they chose us for the mission, I said I’d cover any station. They sent me to the dark side, out of sight a year. My life depends on the heater and the halo of light from the lander. Let me tell you what absolute quiet sounds like.
Todd Mercer’s short collection, Ingenue, was a winner of the Celery City contest. Recent work appears in Blink Ink, Friday Flash Fiction, and Six Sentences.
Despite the disasters, both personal and professional, that characterized Madame Isabel Kosinski’s days, she found renewal in the half hour when she was alone, standing by her Chevy Caprice in Rosemont Park, having two cigarettes and a cup of coffee, every day, rain or shine, surveying the netless tennis courts.
Paul Lamar lives with his husband, Mark, in Albany, NY, where–in better times–he teaches, reviews theater for a local paper, and conducts a chorus. Alas!
Sitting on the grassy hill,
the day goes by slow.
Then night falls.
I reached for stars in the sky,
wanting troubles to
end and die.
Only at night can the soul
and body and mind
take a rest.
So, I pray that in its splendor,
the night is long.
Vivian Leung lives in Scottsdale, Arizona and has always held a love for music and writing. One of her goals in life is to land a career in healthcare. There are few things that are more rewarding to her than helping others.
It is evening rush hour in my city Glasgow.
I hear a solitary blackbird singing
no longer silenced by the snarl of roaring engines
and angry drivers.
The blackbird’s song is sweet but I yearn to hear it no more
meaning normality has returned to free me from this self-isolation
John B. Sinclair is a much-travelled Scot who has now returned to Scotland, where he enjoys freelance writing on a variety of subjects.
I found him in the garden, grinning like a great white shark.
“Everything okay, Gramps?”
“NASA says a skyscraper-sized asteroid will hit this city.”
“Their calculations were wrong.”
“What?”
“They say it’s going to splash into the Pacific.”
The shark grin submerged, leaving only his usual flat face.
And quietness.
David Derey wrote this story.
I am in greenery. I needed peace more than I knew.
Peace is the sigh of life, a sudden loosening in your body and your soul.
I sit in that park for an hour, and stand up to leave, only to see another path.
“Oh!” I breathe, prayerfully, “There’s more!”
Anna finds life to be an overwhelming cacophony of beautiful sensation. She writes so that she can capture even just a little bit of it.
Wilson is always left behind at the end.
Alone in the theater, he is waist deep in velvet chairs, all patrons discharged into the aortic pumping of a New York City evening.
Solitude.
The last systole of music ascends to the rafters and all conversation absorbs into the carpeted floor.
Molly Hill lives, writes, and runs a lot of trail miles in her home state of Minnesota, even in the winter.
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.
People were lined up, waiting for a table, standing too close to her chair. She was almost touching the butt of a heavy-set, bleached blond, overweight woman who was describing her “last” trip to Paris in excruciating detail.
She quickly downed her glass of red wine, stood up, and left.
Bobbi Lurie is the author of three poetry collections: The Book I Never Read, Letter from the Lawn and Grief Suite.
Lily and Lile worked in the same library, and they had very different views on the topic of censorship.
“But don’t you think–” whispered Lily.
“Shh!” said Lile, shushing her.
“Shhhh!!” shushed Liza, one of their coworkers.
“Shhhhhh!!!” shushed Lily enthusiastically.
“SHH SHHHHHHHHH!!!” shushed their manager over the library-wide intercom.
This story was based on a prompt suggested by Nancy Cavanaugh via Facebook.