The lady who creates the fabric of time-space lives around the corner from me. She’s always there on her porch, knitting, scowling and smoking Tiparillos. You work so hard, I say, and she grimaces “I have to…” but nothing more. Today, she was gone, and so was the moon.
Robert Ludemann is quietly retired and barely making a peep.
The wasp finds itself trapped inside a water glass held up against a window. It repeatedly slams itself against the window, rebounding off the water glass. Spent, it finally surrenders.
I slide paper between window and water glass, and free the wasp outside.
Surrender is not always what it seems.
Ellen Hansen is a writer and fiddle player living in Helvetia, Oregon. She recently retired from leading international tours. Her story “Surrender” just received first place in the 2019 Oregon Writers Colony 50 word story contest.
Late afternoon, early winter
Shadows lie heavy
Across this old wooden floor
In sleep, my cat’s ear twitches
Pulling in his paws a little
Oblivion
Feeling his fierce softness
Sunlight between the shadows
Seems to brighten
Then it’s just this old familiar ringing
That always comes
when I am still
Matthew lives in Maine in the fall, winter, and spring. He wishes more of his family lived nearby, and his cat, Mephistopheles, who is a great hunter and a compassionate comforter, and inspires simply by doing nothing.
It begins early evening, lasts twelve hours
Resolute, incessant, deliberate
Weighing down the coloured canopy still clinging to the branches
Seeping its way into covered porches, rusting brake drums, and the joints of old men
Cold, wet, relentless
I pull the quilt over my head, for just ten minutes more
Paul Hock wrote this story.
On the bank of a river
she’s never known
gnarled roots
call her home.
Reaching out
with twisted limb,
branches of trust
sing a hymn.
Perched upon
the cypress’ knee.
Within the silence,
He whispers a plea.
Running through
His metered veins,
a thousand lost stories,
a thousand beautiful refrains.
Grace Black, just another writer wearing down lead and running out of ink, one line at a time. Coffee refuels her when sleep has not been kind. Check out her blog at graceblackwrites.wordpress.com.
“Time for bed, princess!” trilled Mom.
Little Mia said, “Why?”
“So you can sleep, and have lots of energy tomorrow.”
“I don’t need sleep.”
“Of course you do, dear.”
Mia laid awake in her big-girl bed all night, wondering what sleep was and why everyone else did it so much.
This story was based on the prompt “what for” at TypeTrigger.
Mia will appear in Special People, my superhero-with-a-twist serial web fiction, in a future story.