The worst kind of haunting is when the ghost isn’t dead.
Last I heard, you were halfway across the world and still breathing. But I still feel you here. Sometimes I can hear you rattling chains. I think I see you floating through my walls. And everything’s out of place.
Erin Appenzeller is by day an English major and by night also an English major. She has never lived in a house without a few ghosts and is full of both bees and stories.
In the years after Luke left, Daisy’s recollections of their relationship fragmented. Like dandelion seeds caught in the breeze, superfluous memories were whisked away, leaving her just a lone stem to examine. His essence. Had he been the person she thought she knew?
She wondered how she’d been so blind.
David Lowis is a fledgling writer from Surrey, England.
I know this may be a shock, coming from me. But I regret it.
No, not loving you. LORD knows, that’s the best thing I’ll ever do.
The mistake was letting you fall for me—when I knew you’d be the only one to live with the consequences.
V. C. Slade is a writer and amateur adult in California. She can be found at vcslade.com.
He asked if it was her card, knowing it wasn’t. He’d fumbled the shuffle, and now his hands were shaking even more than before.
But when he met her eyes, she was smirking. “I liked the little spin move at the end.”
An eternity passed. He found himself smirking back.
Anoop Bhat is an aspiring roboticist and a causal parkour artist. One day he hopes to see a robot doing parkour alongside him.
Should I reach out and take her hand? Will she shake it off? Can I pretend we just touched accidentally? That would be tough. Do I look at her when I take hold or do I pretend like it’s nothing? Tight squeeze or loose?
What if she holds mine back?
Richard Baigent has always wanted to write and has just started.
First the whispers
Then the shadows
His skin bites
Alert
He stands braced
Screams flash back
Demons taunt
Alive again…
He must…
He fails…
She wakes him
He leaves the sweat-soaked sheets
Hours later
She makes oatmeal
He almost smiles
A goodbye kiss
She revisits her spell book
And laughs
Patrick Yu says: It didn’t work out in the end.
She watched him as he slept, how the moonlight spilled across his
body, sliced by venetian blind shadows. She eased her hand into his
half-clenched fist.
He didn’t stir.
She pried open his hand. Pulled the ring over the hump of dry knuckle.
It slid off easily.
He didn’t stir.
Tim Boiteau lives near Detroit with wife and son. He’s a recent
Writers of the Future Contest winner.
My mother’s memory of the poems surprised me. I’d sit with her and listen to her recite, after years of never hinting that she knew any poetry. I wonder if she was reminded of the young farm girl she once was, standing in front of her father, practicing until perfect.
Janine lives and writes in Portland, Oregon where she can’t help but be influenced by the leafless trees shrouded in fog. Winter has its beauty.
Fifty years, my love, fifty years ago. We barely knew our outer selves, but joined at inner core.
From stolen moments in the fields, we followed separate paths.
The years grew long my love, with bodies wrinkled and grey. Now space and time have disappeared, sweet love evolved to more.
Eileen is a grandma twelve times over, who, now retired, has switched from writing as part of her employment for others to writing along her own creative path. She has a poem recently published in Mothers of Angels 2.
The stockings were hung with melancholy.
There had been three stockings in the decorations box. Mr. and Mrs. Jones hung up two. They dropped the third into the trash, almost sickened.
Mrs. Jones turned on the radio. Elvis Presley was crooning, “I’ll have a blue, blue, blue Christmas… without you.”
Tylor James is a twenty-five year old writer living in New Richmond, WI. He writes dark fiction and has had stories, poems, and essays published in such anthology books as ACCURSED: A Horror Anthology, Emerging American Horror Writers: Midwest Region, Emerging Wisconsin Writers: An Anthology of Non-Fiction, and Willow River Writers Anthology. Tylor is prolific, having written forty-five short stories and one novel in the year 2019 alone.