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thanks for the reminders!

Hey, I’ve been thinking about love too … and grace.
Looking forward to seeing you.

Donna, I like your thought that love is bold. Hadn’t quite thought of it like that before, but you are so right. Love causes us to do some pretty bold things!

Be bold! Be beautiful! Be yourself!

Carol, Vijaya, Cheryl and Linda — big hugs. I’m glad we’re in this together!

Thought you would enjoy these three reflections on St. Paul’s verses here: http://blog.adw.org/

Love Perfects and Completes All: The Conclusion of St. Paul’s Great Treatise on Love
Love is as Love Does: A Meditation on the Litany of Love In St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians
On the Danger of Excellence Without Love

Great reflections! I love reading about the original text and the meanings it originally reflected. Thank you!

Dear Donna,
Great thoughts to start a day. Thanks. Celebrate you, just the way you are.
Never Give Up
Joan Y. Edwards

Congratulations to Tanita!!!

Everyone said she was only running from her feelings, trying to avoid grieving. The truth was, she'd grieved every day for seven months as the cancer in her mother's chest spread throughout her body, into her lungs and down to her bones. Death was on that doorstep long enough for Stella to deny it, to cuss it, to bargain for a trail treatment, and to sob for days on end. By the time her mother drew her last breath, she'd already accepted it.

“Okay, here’s the thing.” Byrne gave the basketball a hard spin between his finger-tips and caught it again. “Originally, there were two different races – one with brow-ridges, the other without. The ones with ridges were rare at first, but then later they became dominant, probably because the females liked that ridgy look.”

“He only touched my breasts. That’s all. It’s not a big deal.” I said. The child protective services officers had taken us out of third period. We were escorted to the teacher’s lounge. Lynn and I staring at each other, wide-eyed, wondering how much trouble this was going to land us in. We knew why CPS was there. The week before during our girls youth group meeting we’d been asked to open up to God, to share our problems with our Heavenly Father, and either Lynn or I – we can’t remember who said it first – had shared that our stepdad molested us. I realize now they probably only used that “open up to God” line to sniff out the troublemakers who were sneaking out, having sex and smoking pot or those who would give up names. Little did they expect to hit jackpot that night. Everyone left the room wiping tears away, hugging each other, assuring us everything would be kept secret.

Viola croaks on me in the backwater banjo-picking town of Sunder. No amount of pleading or sobbing can bring her back. I stand there and watch as two supersized hillbillies roll her body onto a removal truck. Part of me knew she'd never make it, but I had to give her a chance. I couldn't just leave her trapped in that junkyard. And she got pretty far for a '58 Chevy.

He owned one of those automatic coffeepots, the kind where you set everything up the night before—the filter, three scoops of Folgers, poured the water in—only he always forgot to do all that shit, and the coffeepot beeped every morning like a dry bomb ready to explode. That’s why he never bought, or used, an alarm clock. He’d gotten so used to the coffeepot going off at five a.m. that he didn’t need one. But dammit if he didn’t need a cup of coffee.

Six smiling faces stared back at Trevin Lash in an otherwise undecorated apartment. It wasn’t until after the children were killed, years ago, that he hung their pictures. He touched his cheek just below his left eye, running fingertips over six black dots. The marks of a murderer.

I was six years old the first time I died.

Liz
[email protected]

Eleanor Ann cursed silently to herself as the old lady swerved into her lane as she approached the intersection. She had a lot on her mind this morning and dodging traffic wasn't one of them. Officially, she was approaching an age that was really no different from the year before. But in her mind, 45 was the tipping point. It was the beginning of the end so to speak; the time that everything began to flow downhill. It was harder to do everything--from getting out of bed in the morning to bending over and tying her shoes. Walks around the block were becoming less fun and her breasts; well they hadn't been anywhere near perky in about ten years. Yes, life for Eleanor Ann wasn't turning out quite the way she expected and honestly, she didn't really know what to do about it. "Watch it, lady!" she exclaimed as the old lady swerved in her lane again. "I'm miserable, sure, but I'm not ready to check out yet. Maybe you need to have a driving test or something."

One thing I have come to learn, is where there is soil, there are roots. And it won’t be long before they come for me. I can feel them already, stretching through the dirt, reaching for me like a corpse from the ground, calling to me. I kick myself towards the door, my back against it. I scream. I yell. I bang on the old wood with my fists. I call for someone, anyone, to help me, to let me out of this soil walled room. But no one comes. They’ve left me, all of them. Even Dylan, the one person I had left. I watched him swim away, he didn’t even look back. There’s nothing but silence from the dungeon on the other side of the door.

The orphanage was locked up tight—like a prison. One Kollin had to escape. He tiptoed around the perimeter of the boys’ sleeping chamber. His empty pallet lay forlorn in the midst of the sleeping boys, but Kollin was on a mission. The doors stood directly ahead of him, but they were probably locked. They were always locked. The gates to leave the compound were always guarded; just as the oldest boys were guarded coming and going from their jobs. Gods forbid that any of the orphanmaster’s labor force run away in the night.

I sat in my well-worn Lazy-Boy watching Monday Night Football, cursing the Minnesota Vikings, cursing Dan Dierdorf, just plain cursing, when The Roommate walked in, raised a magnum of Anchor Steam and said, “Off your ass, Jack, we’re celebrating!”

The lightships always came to port on Sunday. Sometimes if I looked hard enough from my boardinghouse window, I swore I could see this planet’s murky brown sky change color. Fragments of blue and white, like pieces of broken stars, signaled the great ships’ arrivals.

Drowning Macbeth was an accident. We hadn’t been planning anything so off-script as that, even though our plays usually wound around themselves and did funny things at the end. There were only four of us, so we combined roles and collapsed scenes to make the plays our own. It was never neat when we got to the end of a play. Miss March, who taught literature and wore a bitten pencil in her hair, would have hated it. But we never invited anyone to our performances, not even our brothers, though they sometimes helped out with rigging up the sets and finding some of the more obscure props. They could have asked to watch, I suppose, or maybe they had and we’d forgotten because it was so long ago. Mostly they left us to ourselves and made it seem like they never had time for our antics. And, anyway, what fun is a ruined play to a bunch of boys who train dogs and hurtle up and down trees and are planning to be dragon-wranglers or wood-mages?

They called her the pig-woman. No one said it to her face of course—that would be suicide—but they all thought it just the same. She had a great meaty head, a face like a grapefruit gone bad, and a vast, swollen body that left the meat traders desperately trying to get the words “price per pound” out of their heads.

I shouldn’t shape at school. That knowledge is always there, like someone used a staple gun to fix the warning into my grey matter. Sometimes I do it anyway…and then I feel guilty.

Arianna Mercer

That summer, there was garbage everywhere. Huge piles of black plastic mouldered under the sun in the parks, while the stench of decomposing fish heads and rotting diapers slithered into our scented, suburban homes. In apartments high above the city, women fanned themselves with old copies of Elle and Harper’s Bazaar while men turned up the air-conditioning and installed domestic trash compactors. Dogs nosed out decaying chicken carcasses, rats chewed on sour milk cartons. The wind, fetid and hot, flung newspapers and discarded magazines across suburban parking lots, as if it meant to repaper the world page by page.

I've always loved my father. What's not to love? He's famous (moderately), he's talented (conceivably), he's gorgeous (arguably), and he stays far far away from me, never substantial enough to matter in day to day life. Which is fine. It's like knowing the daydream about being a secret princess is true, without any of the worries of a future figurehead queen.

The goats hoofed at the rails of their pen trying to escape, baah-ing and bleet-ing with desperation. Gheorghe pushed one upon its face back to the ground and set down the pail of water, then leaned over the pen. “Damn it Dan! You forgot to fill their trough.” No wonder the goats made so much ruckus, they'd gone the whole morning without any water, or grain. He lifted the pail over the pen rails and emptied the water intended for his horse into the trough, the goats trampling over themselves to reach the cool drink. They sucked and slopped the water as fast as they could, nudging the other out of the way to get every drop. A hot day like this was not a day to forget to water any of the animals. His brother was going to owe him big.

I was born the day the lights went out. I’ve lived sixteen years in the dark. Light. Without it I can’t find anything. The underground bunker is freezing and I feel my latex covered fingers tightening up as the warmth abandons them. I move empty crates around attempting to find the bag of rice Mom swears she stored down here. Some light would really help.

My life began on the sea. Not with my birth, for that had happened in the large state room of our London house with the curtains drawn against Mother’s screams and Father pacing back and forth, his neck damp with sweat. Yet their toil and agitation was not for me, but for the brother who arrived in this world and then departed it even before my appearance. Their grief was so heavy that my emergence from the womb was of no more consequence than the expulsion of the afterbirth.

Sabrina stands on the Revere Beach shoreline basking in the crisp ocean air. Cool gentle breezes stroke her hair as she watches the morning sun dance off the rippling waves. Not even the nervous babble of the police officer, shouting into his radio for backup, could destroy her moment of peace. She's home, and, to her, nothing else matters.

“One of you will die.”
Did she just say die? My gum is lodged in my throat, I can hardly breathe. Coughing a little, it goes down, a lump rises; surely, she’s kidding. Death? It’s a joke right? Staring at the closed eyed woman exhaling and inhaling heavily, she’s either going to pass out or her eyes will open and be blood red like something out of a horror flick.

Know this, Jarrod. I will not sing. I will not wear a twee waistcoat, nor allow any damn bird to fly about my head or perch on my back as I work. I will not work. I will not say things like ‘Oh my paws and whiskers.’ I will not scamper. If provoked – and being approached with a hat or bonnet or shoes to wear is provocation enough – I will bite. And draw blood. And I will not – I absolutely refuse – to listen if she sings.

(Sorry if I double-posted; my computer's acting wonky)

It’s hard not to stare at someone with leaves sprouting from her head and skin like birch bark, but I manage not to. For one, the gas station cashier isn’t the first weird-looking person I’ve seen in the past six months and she won’t be the last. For another, if I stare at her too long, she might start wondering if I can see her real face. And if she thinks I can… well, I only have an idea of what would happen based on past experience. But that’s enough for me.

Charlene Gentry didn't know what to expect when she died. She wasn't necessarily an evil person, so would heaven welcome her? She wasn't an angel, either, so would hell be her destination? Not that she had a choice, but she assumed those were her only two options.
Certainly not 5542 Sycamore Lane.

When I look in my mirror, I see a girl of flesh and bone. She may not be a beauty queen, but her features are not plain or disfigured. Why is it no one else can see me? I walk by the same students I’ve gone to school with my whole life and not one of them bats an eye. Even the school bus driver misses me every morning – he doesn’t see me either, which means I have to huff it on foot to make it to homeroom on time.

Tessa lived in the most beautiful city in the world and she knew every inch of it: the nooks and crannies of Enki’s Grand Cathedral, each seat in the old amphitheater, the exact location (down to planks of wood) of all three hundred and seventy bridges, and every rose bush, shrub, and lemon tree. Nobody in the city knew it as well as she did. Tessa held a perfect map of Beldessario in her head and she had never seen it.

A tan and orange beast of an RV was roaring and shuddering down the highway. It was moving at its normal pace, which was a speed that made highway lines tear by, while the sky hovered above like a bad memory. Cynthie had made so many memories lately that she couldn't tell you when they all began if you'd asked her. "My life feels like a dream," she told her dad one day from her spot in the back of the RV. "You know how you said that if you try to think about the past while you're dreaming, you'd realize you were in a dream?"

Sometimes, there are places that feel like home. As familiar and comforting as a cup of hot chocolate. And not just any cup of hot chocolate, but one topped with whipped cream, dark chocolate shavings and a cinnamon stick. A place where you know beyond a shadow of any doubt that you belong. Well, this isn’t one of those places.

Heather awoke in the middle of the night, convinced she had lost something. At first she grumbled and told her subconscious that of course she'd lost something, as Alex had stormed off a week ago, and could it please leave off the hysteria and let her get some sleep? She rolled over onto his empty side of the bed and punched his pillow before burying her head under it. But the conviction stayed. Not Alex. Something else was lost. And the trouble with being a practicing witch was that when some deep intuition sat up and told you 'something is wrong,' you couldn't be sure it was just nerves, even when that meant flopping out of bed and into a ratty bathrobe and blundering into the kitchen to make tea at four in the morning.

Amy Rose Ardan pushed the hair out of her face for the fourth time, but this time, she put the pen down and slid the script covered paper into its envelope. She wrote ‘For Beckie’ neatly across the front, licked the flap with a grimace and pressed to seal it. Reaching down, she grabbed the duffel and placed it in her lap while she rooted through it. Okay, she thought, got the special passport, and the GPS. The boat’s papers are… here, good. She rustled through the papers making sure they were complete. The duffel went back to the floor and Amy stretched out on her bed, ready to lie there for the next six hours. Waiting. As she’d been trained, she went over the plan one more time. The weather was predicted good, with, atypically, north-westerly winds fresh enough to move Guppy at seven or eight knots. Sunrise would be at half past six. When the sun broke over the horizon, she wanted to have been underway for at least thirty minutes headed on course 097 for Providenciales Island.

She’d seen one once before - years ago, with Cameron, in the grove by the seaside. Its little round body flitted between palm fronds like a tiny jeweled fairy. They were supposed to turn it in. But they hadn’t. They’d watched it all afternoon, until finally it leapt into the sky and flew away, back over the Outer Wall. Their secret.
This one seemed even more out of place, amidst the asphalt and the early evening glow of the rail lines in the podcar lot. For a second, she thought she was just imagining it. But then Ethan saw it too.
“What is it?” he asked, gaze transfixed on the emerald blot making its way across the dull bronze shine of the hood.
“A beetle.”

The woman in the chair was a disaster. She sat in it, the lime velvet upholstery wrought with cigarette smoke. Spilled red wine stained the worn fabric with purple blotches like fat, throbbing veins burst from exhaustion and overuse. An explosion lay beneath her innocent questions. I smelled it. Disaster seethed across the blocks and between us like the stench of burning waste. It was in the stairwells, walls, the etched cracks and divots of concrete. I smelled it on her, this familiar stranger, with the keen sense of a tired but hunting dog.

Two hours before Dallas Langdon saw the first zombie, she sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair backstage at the House of Blues in New Orleans. A table covered with microphones and wires stood in front of her, and a fancy camera was pointed toward it. A tray of cupcakes coated with bright pink frosting sat at the edge of the table.

My favorite part of these contests is browsing through the entries... but I don't envy you the task of having to read so many, nor having to pick finalists! Good luck, and thanks so much for hosting this!

Here's mine:

The gravel of the rooftop pressed uncomfortably into my belly as I lay at the building’s edge. Waiting. Over the last month I’d established that Monday mornings the target would come here, to this back-alley doorway, out of sight from the public eye. He was careful, never arriving at the same hour, always taking a different route. But not careful enough. I knew he would come. And today I had brought my rifle. Today was the day he would die.

I have thirty seconds. My thighs are on fire, but I crouch low to the mat and circle him, moving in and out quickly. I shoot in and grab his leg, then explode up through his body. Again. And again. Sweat streams into my eyes, but I couldn't see him clearly even if he was really there. I watch him, my imaginary opponent, as Three Doors Down blasts Kryptonite around my head. If I go crazy now will you still call me Superman? I check the clock behind the basketball goal, and go again.

"I give her less than a minute 'til she smurfs."

“It’ll be okay,” Jaime said, and if he wasn’t dead, I might’ve listened to him. Not that it mattered whether I was listening. He’d stuck to my peripheral vision for the past week, acting like my own personal commentary track. Last night he’d nitpicked my graffiti and hummed Top 40 hits during the security officers’ interrogation, and now, in the headmaster’s aggressively beige office, he’d launched into optimist mode, which was even worse.

I skipped home on Halloween night, the happiest five year-old in the world. My bucket felt heavy with sweet treasure as I dashed to our front porch. My foot slid from beneath me, spilling me forward. The plastic bucket flew into the air. Candy rained down as my chin split on impact. I had slipped in egg yolk. A group of rambunctious, and rather thoughtless, teenagers had egged our house. Worst still, they had smashed all four of our carved pumpkins. The happy faces of our jack-o-lanterns were left a desecrated mess of broken squash. My parents ran to me, their sobbing daughter. They worried at the sight of blood, but I wasn't crying for my chin. My tears were not for the scattered candy or ruined pumpkins. That night, I cried because the spell had been broken. In that mix of egg and blood and shattered smiles, I saw a new truth. My world of wonder could also be a very cruel and ugly place.

I soared down to Earth and hit the pavement of the school parking lot without a sound. Elizabeth bounded down the stairs from the building, brushing by all the people I couldn’t see. An electric smile lit her young face. Today was her day. She’d earned her trip out of Hell. This was the only part of my job I enjoyed.

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She spat.

Everyone spat. The gutters of Five Points ran thick with spit and offal and the unmentionable sick of everyday life. Annie picked up the habit from Ma whose tobacco habit only added to the seeping stink that trickled down the streets and corners.

This wasn't the first time the Law of Unintended Consequences bit Alex Jarrett on the ass, but it was definitely the weirdest. That included the time he accidentally turned a private investigator into a werewolf with nanotech. He walked into the basement lab of his exclusive Beverly Hills mansion with a hangover and before he'd had his coffee yet , which was the exact wrong time to be confronted by a two-headed rabbit--with two different heads. The original was white with pink eyes, and the new one was gray with tan rings around its eyes.

I first saw him in the cemetery. I remembered it vividly. How could I not? It was the night he had come for my parents. The fresh November air came off the sea coast smelling of salt and mystery. I later discovered that was his smell. It was the week of the ‘Festival of the Dead’ and no one was supposed to be in the cemetery after midnight, but I was there. The third night, that’s when the captain was to come and lay claim on his souls, and I saw him.

The cold welcomed me with open arms as soon as I opened the doors. I buried my face deeper in my scarf. I did not want to be ungrateful, but I had just woken up and traces of my warm bed still lingered on me. Only then, with a deep breath to gather my courage, did I throw myself into the awakening streets.

Mum died yesterday. My brother killed her in the end. I tried once, almost sixteen years ago, but Mum was stronger back then. She survived. A miracle, they called it. She’d cheated fate.
Why did she try again?

She appeared in late afternoon, like some two-bit floozy who hadn’t slept til dawn, at the tree line where our mowed grass ended and the wild woods began. Gene and I couldn’t help but stare. With the leaves stuck in her hair, and the way she squinted at the sun just begging it to melt the slits of her eyes, and her nekkid-as-a-broken-jaybird body, we were left to conclude that the only possible explanation was that she’d been born in a hole and abandoned there. But we knew the ranch woods better than our own leathered skin; never once in our seventeen years had we seen a girl our own age out there. We’d never seen anyone out there at all.

It wasn't her tears so much that bothered him. It was the fact that they spilled from her eyes like slow moving rivers of sludge, dark and oily and contaminated.

Ryoji hadn’t been in this much trouble since that terrible day three weeks ago when the chickens escaped. Master Yamato hadn’t yelled at him yet, but there wasn’t much need for yelling. The old man’s stare, devoid of the slightest hint of emotion, said it all without uttering a word. Ryoji fell prostrate, arms outstretched, nose smashed against the bamboo mats on the floor. The bamboo’s earthy smell filled his nose, eliciting thoughts of his own room over the western gate: a place he’d give anything to be right now instead of here in the main hall of the Fox temple, cowering before its master. Masao sat beside him on his knees, arms folded over his chest, lips twisted down in an exaggerated frown. Just like he exaggerated everything else. Of course, given the trouble Ryoji was in for interrupting his friend’s trial, it wasn’t much of an exaggeration this time.

My name is Ant. At least that’s what Mama told me when I was three. When I turned nine, Mama told me my name was Christopher. I remember how hard it was to remember my new alias – not to mention how difficult it was to write it in school. I’ll never forget that day in fourth grade when I accidentally wrote ANT in large capital letters on the top of my worksheet. When Mrs. Bowman – my teacher – waved it in the air to ask the class who this mysterious “Ant” was, I froze. Heart pounding loudly in my ears, I remember watching as she passed out the rest of the papers until she realized that it was I who had written the unfamiliar name on the page. When she questioned me about it, I lied and told her it was a nickname.

Tomorrow is the day. It’s a day of firsts and a day of lasts, and it is the day that I will become my own again. Tomorrow, I will be Released.

John Henry Foster pushed his executive chair away from the desk and carefully scooped up the earrings and panties from where they had been sitting alongside his computer. These, along with a pair of high-heeled shoes that had been positioned under the desk, were obligatory for those times when he updated Ana Claire Johnson’s Facebook page. He crossed the bedroom of his Portsmouth flat and placed the jewelry and underwear carefully in their respective places. The shoes he put neatly back in the wardrobe. Switching the computer off, he picked up his well-thumbed copy of The Holy Bible and settled down to read a few passages. This was how he preferred to relax, lying on his bed digesting the Word of the Lord. The book spoke personally to him. He endeavoured to live his life according to the scriptures – after all, was the Bible not written with him in mind? The peace and quiet of his bedroom was the perfect atmosphere to reflect upon God’s words.

I met Evie Michaels the first time she died. As her guardian angel, it was my responsibility to escort her to the pearly gates. But I never expected the gatekeeper to send her back, or Evie to pull the free will card at the ripe old age of six. Her actions that day created a breach between our two realms. A breach that’s been discovered and now must be closed—to save her soul as well as mine.

Blood dripped from the ceiling and slowly ran down the walls from randomly shaped smears that marred the otherwise gleaming white paint. The furniture in the living room lay in various states of disarray. The sofa was overturned, the bronze and glass coffee table shattered. The splintered wood scattered around the fireplace looked as if they once formed a rocking chair.

Jim Stantz spent the final moments of the second-to-last day of his life on a stool at The Friendly Stop Bar & Grille. He was drunk, and he spoke loud to no one in particular.

Ebony's legs shook as she slowly put her weight down on the back of the chair, stretching to dust the top shelf of the tall bookcase. Always better to have the hardest one to reach done first. No matter how many times she’d done it, Ebony always hated this part. Heights, the bane of her existence. Well one of them anyways. Her legs shook as the wood groaned then creaked, and her heart dropped as the back of the chair leaned in toward the seven foot shelf. She wobbled and lost her balance. She grabbed both sides of the wooden monstrosity and the knick knacks rattled. That’s when she heard it. The loud thump of his plastic vase hitting the tiled floor.

They found your body in an empty bath tub. Your face was turned toward the wall and your black curly hair hid your face. You were fully clothed, wearing your favorite leather jacket and ripped jeans. Your feet, snuggled in loose-laced combat boots, were hanging over the edge of the tub, almost like you were waiting for someone to pull you out, to save you from whatever it is you needed saving from. What did you need saving from, Maxwell?

I was going to prove Romonus wrong today. Even though I hadn’t been able to jump the old man’s deuced firewalls or cipher out his security protocols, that did not mean I didn’t have other methods of stealing Dad’s lecture. More direct ones.

Trudy was, without question, the most annoying person I knew; so it was just like her and her flair for melodrama to turn up dead last Saturday and completely ruin my weekend. And I’d had plans—shut up! yes, ACTUAL plans, with ACTUAL people—who are you, my mother??—but where other dead people might have had a little consideration, Trudy very rudely up and died right smack in the middle of my first real date in more than a year, without even bothering to return my sweatshirt first.

The basket in Lorna's arms was heavy with woolen blankets, and heated stones to ward off the late March chill. The old woman behind her, Lorna stole through the shadows and crept up the steps, gripping the basket to her chest. The houses were all dark this time of night but in a few hours, the lights would wink on, the day would begin to stretch and awaken. The couple who lived here would find the baby on the steps. The voice behind her insisted, “She is the Celestis Navite. She will be the savior of this world. If you keep her with you, he will find you. He will kill her then he will kill you. He knows.“

The universe has its own voice. It doesn’t speak in any known language or have anything remotely cogent to say, but it is there if one listens. Perhaps it is the summation of all things: the energies given off by the stars and planets, the souls of all living things come and gone over millenia, the actions of untold billions of organisms dissipated into the vast expanse of space. It is a conglomeration of everything, settled into the sediment of existence, buried too deep for the minds of humanity to recognize, and beyond the reach of their awareness. Felice Halladay was, however, aware.

The thing about secrets is they’re not always secret. Dad had his. Mom had hers. And I had mine. My secret was that I knew Mom and Dad’s secrets. I guess that’s not much of a secret anymore. Maybe it never was. Maybe they always knew I knew. Maybe they didn’t care. Or that they cared too much. I played along for as long as I could. Like when I was seven and found out Santa Claus wasn’t real by stumbling upon Dad nailing together the dollhouse I had asked for in a letter to the North Pole. He didn’t know I knew. I played along for as long as I could.

I assumed the interview had ended. Alice Alderwood had stopped answering questions several minutes ago, and now rested her head against the train window, eyes closed. I started to put away my notebook when she spoke again, "Uncle Max was crazy. But, he basically raised my father. Me too. He taught me so many things. I hadn't realized just how many of them were impossible until I'd been gone for years. But, he taught me that in order to think properly, the body must move. That is the most sane thing I know." She smiled and opened her eyes, "But Uncle Max was crazy."

Far, far out in space nothing waited in a box much too large to contain it.

A burnt apple smell pervaded New York City. All anyone talked about that morning was the juicy, crisp and slightly smoky smell. The sun rose, the humidity blasted, and the subways trundled along their way, but as far as anyone was concerned, the apple smell was the only thing really happening. Doctor’s appointments took too long and were delayed. People on subways were unusually friendly. Talking about the smell was like talking about a particularly humid day: absolutely necessary even though everyone else was already doing it.

A haze of thick orange smoke hangs like a threat over the southeastern corner of the market. I groan and step behind a fruit vendor’s stand, where I can peek at the magicians through the slats of an empty crate. They’re supposed to be at the docks today, harassing the Islanders and making eyes at their pretty women. Yet there they are, blocking my only route to the saddler’s shop like they knew I was coming.

Jenna went to her first brothel two years after an emotional breakdown. She removed her sunglasses and squinted in the brightness of a late June evening. The grey building, with silhouettes of two buxom women on the sign, was only a few streets from the main dual carriageway going out of Sheffield city centre. Jenna knew the route well. She shoved her phone and loose change deeper into her pocket. She had left her diamond wedding ring at home.

I was standing ankle-deep in rotten pumpkin flesh when I found out my daddy had moved into the bunker without us. When my mama said there was a “bug in their marriage” the Earth stopped spinning for half a minute. Even the south-flying Canada geese stopped honking over our heads and The Doors got all fuzzy on Matthias’ transistor radio. I believe it was those pumpkin seeds sliding between my toes that kept me from flying out to the edge of space—because when the world started up again and the ground slipped out from under me, somehow I was still standing.

My brother is going to pay with his car keys. At least then I can buy myself something to eat other than mayonnaise. Stealing them shouldn’t be any more difficult than opening a treasure chest in Zelda. I equip myself with a life-sized metal Keyblade, ready for battle if Aaron charges at me with his battery-operated lightsaber.

Up until that fateful Friday the Thirteenth, Jacob Beanblossom’s claim to fame had been the ability to fart on cue. But that was about to change.

When a princess misbehaves, most kings and queens send them to their chambers. Not mine. No, my parents send me to the dungeons. And I don’t get to just sit there and “think about what I’ve done.” I have to clean. It probably says something about my temperament that we have the cleanest dungeons in all of Farfel. Even now, as I sat on my royal *ahem* and polished the bars outside the second-largest cell for VIPs only (Very Important Prisoners), I was hard pressed to find one speck of dust. Of course, that might be because I’ve been on dungeon duty every day this week. Let me just say—cleaning out chamber pots? Not. Fun.

Something was blocking the door. Breathing shallowly into the crook of his elbow, the soldier’s boot crashed into the dry wood. Dark smoke seeped from its seams like water from a cracked pot. He kicked again, and again, yelling his frustration. The door barely budged. He didn’t have time for this. At this rate, tunneling through the stone wall would be faster. Something shuffled behind the door, and his heart did a nervous somersault. Someone was still alive in there. If only he knew who it was.

Sophie’s knees crushed against her forehead, her breath hot on her face. The small wardrobe she hid in felt like an oven. A rush of prickly heat spread down her arms as her mother cried out. Sophie clenched her hands tight over her ears. Their apartment door had broken into a thousand tiny slivers, scattering across the floor and colliding with the pale pink walls. The ornate silver knob dangled from the ruined cherry panels.

Everything ends. Peace. Distress. Good days. Bad dreams. Life. It all ends eventually. Generally this is something I find very comforting. But generally, I’m not doing everything in my power to postpone an ending.

Death is a cold-hearted bastard. I would know. Being 16 shouldn’t make me an expert at much, but I could tell you more about death than most things. Why would someone know that dying leaves skin dry like shoe leather? Or that the act of dying itself will leave a man’s eyes dark and cavernous like a shameful secret? These are details I wish I could scrub out of my mind, banish them to the darkness where they belong, but I can’t because wherever I go, whatever I do, death lurks and waits to be discovered.

Three weeks after Nora’s body washed onto the shore of the river, Ivey climbed Catbird Hill to sing her spirit a lullaby. It was easier than apologizing.

Jessamine swung one arm above her head, trying to make the long, awkward sleeve of her oversized trench coat slide down to her elbow, while holding a crystal ball in the other. The man in front of her, bright goggles atop his head and a top hat clenched in his fists, peered eagerly at it as she fluttered her slender fingers in the air. She could tell he was desperate and that made everything easier.

My cell has four white walls, a little window too high for me to see through, and a doorway. The doorway looks empty, inviting, but I can’t walk through it. When I try, it feels like invisible hands are grabbing hold of me, gripping my arms and legs, my face and all down my front, and then I’m thrown backwards and end up with an extra bruise from the hard white floor. It’s not just an ordinary force field though. My guards can walk through it either way, no trouble at all. And I can throw things through it, like a shoe. I only have one shoe now.

Christina Cameron

It has to be tonight, the soon to be father was thinking as he races down the highway it’s colder than usual for this time of year and the falling snow is reflecting the light of the headlights looking like diamonds floating in the air sometimes so thick it seems like he is driving straight into the sun. He has a very important meeting in the morning and if he can make a good impression on these people they could become investors in their fledgling programming company. The only reason they live in this god forsaken place is the remoteness aids in the security of their company and isn’t too far away from civilization that they’ll have a difficult time promoting the new software. At least this time of year the daylight is almost twenty four hours now so it could be far worse he was thinking, the baby might have decided to get here early when it was really cold or worse yet still dark.

Today is my 6,570th day of life. When you say you’re eighteen, people think you’re young. But when you throw around a number like that—almost 7,000 days—they start to realize no one is as young as they think they are.

In a stream of stars that humans labeled the Orion Spur, in the galaxy they called the Milky Way, in a large city named Chicago on their home planet of Earth, in an alleyway off of N. State Street behind a bar called the Zebra Lounge, Eli found a giant lizard unconscious in his gutter. His gutter. Where he slept.

Echo Raney worried constantly about her pants falling down, and most of the time she wore skirts… what kind of sense did that make? Her decision to go to Camp Catskills Drama Camp this summer instead of Camp Pakawanka, the camp her mother had gone to and her grandmother had gone to and her great grandmother had gone too.. you get the picture…was a victory like no other. She just couldn’t HANDLE the thought of riding lessons, with a helmet, who was she Athina Onassis? Or having to play tennis… or wear those collared white shirts with the navy shorts.. EWWWW. She had fought hard for Camp Catskills and she would stay strong… the very nature of her over dramatic nonsensical way of turning things to her side.. would see her through.. She’d gotten that spectacular talent from her Aunt Crazy, her daddy’s sister. She remembered fondly how Aunt Crazy made black bean soup for New Years Day brunch three years ago and everyone freaked out because it wasn’t the traditional black-eyed peas.
“Her only job was to bring the black eyed peas,” Her mother whispered to her grandmother who then in turn whispered it to her great-grandmother… “And she can’t even get that right!”
“Now we’re ALL going to be cursed with bad luck!” her cousin Joy Ellen exclaimed, mashed potatoes trying to escape both sides of her cheeks.
“PLEASE!!” Aunt Crazy yelled at the top of her lungs..” Get a life!!” Everyone shrank back in horror… and Echo personally vowed that day, to be just like Aunt Crazy when she grew up.

In the movies, people wake up slowly. At first it’s just a finger twitch, or an eyelid flutter. They don’t usually wake up screaming. Cassie woke up screaming.

“A disgrace. That’s what they are,” I overhear. One head nods, then another. “We go hungry. We work our fingers to the bone. Them—” the man points, “they reside in the largest house in town.” I refocus on the building these strangers speak of. Like the past fifty-four days, I stare across the street at the Ipatiev House and yearn. Perhaps it’s closer to fixation—I fixate on the wooden fence revealing only the tops of its windows. I don’t yearn the same way as these men though. No, their insults fist my hands into balls. I suffer, waves of longing and rage, because my family is inside and I am not.

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It was an irreverently normal day when Emryn saw his wife laid to rest. There was no hushed silence in the small church plot, which nestled into the side of the Swansea valley. No dark rain clouds gathered overhead to reflect the mood, and there was no chorus of skylarks singing a mournful requiem above the final resting place of his last love; nature, as only he could know, was as imperturbable as time to the sanctity and demise of life. He looked one final time upon the soft brown coffin as the priest spoke his comforting but hollow words, and the mound of dirt was prepared which would mark the passage from person to epitaph.

When the idea of leaving—of just getting the hell out of there—finally came to him, it felt like the best idea he’d ever had. Savoring the tiny speck of excitement he felt, Will Brown tiptoed to the garage and started pulling camping gear down from the wire shelving that ran along the back wall. When his arms were full, he turned and regarded the two parking spots. Leigh’s Odyssey would have been the better choice, given its superior storage space and all-wheel drive. It probably had better ground clearance too, which would have been good for where he was going. But it wasn’t there. It was in a junkyard somewhere.

I wake up inches away from death. One foot to the right and I would be falling from a twentieth-floor balcony. Just one foot to the right and that freefall would take me somewhere, maybe somewhere beautiful, somewhere without pain or memory or warmth. Just cold, dark nothingness. There’s a strange kind of beauty in melancholy.

Paddington is central London, central means busy, busy means going unnoticed, unnoticed means blending in, blending in means I’ll be anonymous. For fourteen days straight I’d told myself that, and yet fourteen days after my arrival my feet had yet to go within ten inches of the front door.

In the early morning hours of the third day of the third month of the year, at the precise moment the second hand on the round analog clock which hung in the waiting room of Saint Joseph’s Hospital ticked over to 3:33 and 33 seconds, a baby was born. The waiting room in which the clock hung was empty, save one pudgy, unshaven man sitting in the corner of the room examining a racing program from Buda County Weiner Dog Races & Slots. Shoved in his pocket was a betting slip with Copper to win and Tyson to show. Certainly he could not have been waiting for a baby to be born. No, there was only the birth mother who lay hyperventilating on her back in Birthing Room 201 on a steel gurney equipped with squeaky wheels and sweat soaked linens, her feet up in stirrups.

Susan Warren Utley

A chisel, a hammer, a wrench. A sander, a drill, a power saw. A laser, a heat gun, a flaming torch. Nothing cuts through the bangle. Nothing I conjure even makes a scratch. I had to try, just to be sure. But the silver bangle encircling my wrist can’t be removed. It was smart of my mother to secure it in the middle of the night while I was asleep, unable to protest.

Dawn over Boston Harbor peeked amidst the capital city's buildings and shone brilliantly through the floor to ceiling windows of the thirty-first floor penthouse as he resolved to pull off the silk tie, opting to open the top three buttons instead. Feeling a tiny bit rebellious in the action, King Corrin smirked at the sun, absentmindedly touching the precious silver and gold lodestone ring on his right hand, an ancient habit of self-preservation.

Oh shit. Anyone but him.
Lauren froze at the top of the stairs, too stunned to move. Although the gallery loft held several dozen people drinking and chatting, they melted into background noise as she gazed across the space to Taggart Olson—Tagg to everyone who knew him.
And boy did she know him.

Aurora scrunched in her favorite corner of the couch, glaring at her family, and at HER. The family and SHE carried on oblivious, playing their silly card game as if it was the most fun thing in the world. Which it wasn't. It was gin rummy. Aurora didn't exactly know what she would consider the most fun thing, since things had not really been very fun at all since her mother died. But still. Whatever “most fun” was, it was not these people being silly and childish over a card game. Her father, sisters, and HER. Ms. Martinez. Aurora's former guidance counselor from Fox Chase Middle School. And now, apparently, her father's new GIRLFRIEND. Her pale face got red with fury just thinking about it.

The mobile slowly turned, humming a soft lullaby to the baby sleeping below. Its light cast a soft glow of dancing fish about the ceiling and walls. The house was quiet; exception given to a rather loud cricket who managed to escape death at the hands of the leopard geckos, and now roamed the house chirping contently. A small shadow, avoiding the silver rays of the new spring moon, slithered up the spiral staircase. The mysterious darkness stole over the top, gliding soundlessly down the hall pausing briefly before slipping under the nursery door. The shadowy figure concealed itself in the darkest corner beneath the crib and waited.

Pucker Up. It's two-eighteen on the morning of my college graduation and the number one item on my to-do list is coating my toenails with this clever polish, a light coral shade that's so glossy I can practically see my own reflection.

Cassidy was as sallow and pale as old chalk under the hospital’s florescent lights. Her blond hair was greasy and tangled. Her whole body seemed to shake and she had a rank, metallic smell like old blood. Mercy did not trust herself to be civil. Cassidy was nearly dead. It wasn’t the time to air her grievances.

We used to have a language, a culture. We used to have islands, a chain of coral atolls that stretched across the still turquoise seas. We used to have a home. That was all before I was born. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a harsh dry cabin, blinking dust out of my eyes as Grandma told me the stories her grandmother had told her about how when she was a very young girl she used to swim above the corals, that even then were dying but were still beautiful in places and home to vibrant coloured fish. As she told me these stories, Grandma herself was already slowly dying. Her lungs were scarred by years of breathing harsh desert air, her health weakened by bouts of the cholera and dysentery that swept through the desert camp every few years.

The stars shone over Zamora. A boy lay awake, his mother’s arms his only defense against the night. It had been a summer, a winter, and most of a springtime since the city gates had opened. Zamora was under siege.

“Part of me wants to run away screaming. But where can I go? What can I do? The only family I have are the man I was created to marry and the teacher/maid he hired for me, Reena. Sure I‘ve met a few people in the nearby town, but I don’t really know them. Besides, they are probably loyal to my betrothed, the Titan, Epimetheus. No, there is nowhere I can go. This is going to happen no matter what I do. Tomorrow, at the ripe old age of 6 weeks old, I will be married.”

Rather unluckily I happened to be invisible that day. Invisibility will give anyone a headache, and it always gives me a sore throat as well. Any sort of anthropomorphic conjuration will—I think it’s swallowing the runes—but invisibility is the worst. Of course, being unseen has advantages that sometimes make up for giving oneself the equivalent of a nasty head cold.

Tuck hated that all but the most deaf of humans could hear him coming. With every step, his left knee let out a shrill squeak of metal scraping on metal, and his right ankle cracked loud enough to echo down the dirty back alleys. His corroded metal foot clomped down on the metal walkway running alongside one of the many muddy side streets of New San Francisco, the rotting industrial center on the planet Magnus. The other foot, in no better condition, swung unsteadily by to plop down ahead of the first. With every step, what was left of the synthaskin that once sheathed the feet crumbled and flaked off. The pattern of footfalls continued, an inconsistent thump on the rickety walkway creating a syncopated beat with the squeaking and creaking joints connected to the feet. Lurching along above the feet, on top of a body equally broken and tattered, Tuck's head remained fixed straight ahead, eyes scanning the surroundings in frequencies throughout the electromagnetic spectrum. His original designation was TUC-67/c, but no one had called him that in over 150 years.

My heart is frost bitten. The ache in my chest is so pronounced it hurts to breathe. I feel as if I’ve just sprinted 400 meters, in temperatures below freezing, with my mouth wide open like a fish.

Friday, April 10, 1818

My dearest Rosalind,

Alas, I’m being banished to the hinterlands. Perhaps that is a trifle melodramatic, but Mama is most vexed about the trick I played on Mr. Drayton and has decided to ship me off to Aunt Mary’s immediately. I really don’t think that so much fuss is called for, after all, there was only one toad and it’s not like his hat was permanently ruined. However, Mama refuses to see it that way. She had an attack of her nerves, and after much fainting and fluttering declared that she couldn’t take it anymore. And despite her faith in Aunt Mary (a shameless tomboy like me should be easy for a woman who raised two sons), Mama has decided to send Alex along to keep an eye on me.

Kristin Standley

By the time I was 31 my liver was shot. My love affair with vodka probably helped this. I should have been concerned when I started introducing people to "my good friend vodka." I had sold my soul to the highest bidder three times, because honestly, who's going to collect on that? And I officially have the worst dating life on record. I looked down at my meal: a white Russian and raw cookie dough. On second thought, maybe this is not the best breakfast.

I sat in the parking lot with a can of lukewarm beer and a snickers bar and waited for Art Howard to emerge from the monolithic black building that towered before me. Inside the car it was hot, and I could already feel the perspiration sliding down my sides from my armpits, each bead leaving one long wet trickle. My window was cracked just a tad because I didn’t want any one of Huerto’s nearly one-hundred employees to notice their Vice President of Operations drinking in his rusty old Grand AM at two-thirty in the afternoon. The air conditioner’s compressor had burned out some time last summer, and I had never gotten around to getting it fixed. Rodrico, my boss, often asked why I didn’t buy a new car. “Memories,” I told him. “This car helps me reminisce about times long past. High school girlfriends. Hills overlooking valleys. Fumbling hands and misplaced contraceptives. You understand?” He would just shrug and laugh and go back to whatever nonsense he was busying himself with. The truth was I didn’t have any particularly special memories about times had in my old Grand AM. I just found it hard to throw things away.

The sun was just beginning to rise when the Dragon crested the hillside. It was an accepted fact that any maiden, offered to the Dragon, if she survived from sundown until tea time the next day, would be freed and a new, more pleasing sacrifice chosen. You can imagine Millicent’s disappointment then when the great scaly beast came looming over the top of Hagar’s Hill. The huge body was held aloft by great wings which looked to her as if they were two sheets of unspoiled night, preserved unharmed from the killing grasp of dawn’s first light for the specific purpose of bearing the monster to her. It was a poetic thought, and Millicent was proud of it. When she survived the Dragon’s visit, she resolved to become a roaming poet instead of a house wife; though she was certain the town would feel as great a sense of loss for her wanderings as they would for her death.

When I was a college girl, the Pennsylvania Turnpike was my carotid; it ferried my life between heart and head. Every Friday, two other lovesick girls and I left our studies at West Chester University and made the one-hundred-and-seventy-mile journey to Penn State. We took the Turnpike over the round green hills of southern Pennsylvania to Harrisburg, then swung northwest on Route 322, cranking the gears lower and lower as the highway tilted steeper and steeper. Trees got taller, mountains rockier, and farms and houses scarce. The main artery narrowed until we reached the vertiginous cliffs known as Seven Mountains. The cliffs were the work of men. Men had drilled down into the rock, dropped dynamite into the holes, and blown off the sides of the mountains. You could still see the gouges, like claw marks made by a giant grizzly bear as it fell. We girls would hold our breath and hurtle between the towering stone faces and the freefall. Ours was pretend fear. Amusement park fear. Movie fear. Years later, one of my students died on Seven Mountains. He fell asleep at the wheel, hit a stone face, and pitched his car spinning airborne, like a football.

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It wasn't my idea to keep this journal. The school psychologist, therapist, mind screwer, whatever you want to call him, suggested I do it. He said it might help me deal with the post-traumatic stress of the last year. I'm not stressed. I think everyone else in this tiny town was traumatized. After all, ninjas do not show up in corn fields every day.

The woods called to him; they always had. Ever since he could remember, Michael had had an overwhelming desire to find out what lurked beneath the branches, what lay hidden in the underbrush. He dreamed of pirates and buried treasure despite the fact that the nearest ocean was twelve hundred miles away. But with age came wisdom and a deeper longing to understand this connection to the forest his father so despised.

He was disturbed to realize that he was naked and hanging on a cross. When he turned his head, he saw that both arms were outstretched and tied with ropes to the two arms of the cross, and his shoulders were going numb from his body weight being held up by them. His legs were tied together. He had no idea how he had gotten here, or why he was being so abused.

“Gran, come on, we’re here!” Gladys did not understand why her youngest granddaughter had been so insistent about coming to this old house. She couldn’t quite manage the door handle on the SUV that her son insisted was the safest mode of transportation to the beach house, so her granddaughter, her youngest and if truth be told, her punahele, her favorite, yanked it open and held out her arms to help her Gran climb down from the back seat. Smoke billowed out behind her and her granddaughter wrinkled her nose. She knew she was going to be scolded-again-for her own good.

This story is true. True in the sense that it really happened and not true in the way my English teacher is always talking about how things are true if they really mean something to people. I don’t understand what she means when she says that and I don’t think I agree but when she says it she always gets that sentimental look on her face so I know it’s important to her and it’s probably going to be on the test. I always pay more attention when she gets that look on her face. Anyway, this story is true, but I changed the names and the places. Partly because Momma always says you shouldn’t air your dirty laundry, that’s what white trash people do, and partly because I know if my family found out I’d told our story that I wouldn’t ever get anything for Christmas ever again. I know if I write it all down none of them will know I did it because they don’t really do a lot of book reading. I made the publisher solemnly swear not to ever sell the rights to be made into any sort of movie, especially not a TV movie, because then I know they’d see the movie and recognize themselves and I’d be in a heap of trouble.

It was a hot day, and I spent it as I spend most hot days—-standing on top of my poop.

-- from There's Seamen on the Poop-Deck! (A Gay Pirate Romance Novel)

When Mr. Chaplin came home one particularly soggy night, the last thing he expected to see was a large gaping hole where his house should be. Most neighbors were asleep and those who insisted on exploring their refrigerators in the dead of night didn’t seem to notice the house-shaped hole or Mr. Chaplin standing before it.

Daniela Torre (Thanks for the opportunity!)

Who am I? Wouldn’t you like to know? I would, too. All I can tell you is that I’m not normal. Normal sixteen-year-old girls don’t have a body count. They don’t wait and prey on the innocent. And they certainly can’t kill you by just wishing it. I am not Mara Irons, although, that’s what everyone calls me. What they don’t know is what’s hiding inside of me- who what I really am.

“What are you doing?” I heard Gloria’s irritated voice ask from the direction of our front door as I shook out the last few bills from my wallet’s billfold into the garbage. I turned around, quickly shoving the wallet into my pocket, to face my angry, sweaty girlfriend, back from her workout bearing grocery bags filled with antioxidant rich dinner fare. The bags hit the floor with a thud as she advanced on me with arms folded across her shiny stretchy workout wear and reddened cheeks huffing and puffing with angry disbelief. “Were you just throwing MONEY into the GARBAGE?” she asked in a way that made it very clear to both of us that her exasperation with me was both longstanding and near breaking point. “Greg, can you answer me, please? What are you doing over there?”

It’s 1995. I point out the year because it’s among the things that stick in the mind when a catastrophe occurs. My mother is in a rehab facility to recover from a stroke, and her illness triggers an avalanche of uncertainties I suspect will escalate. For one thing, she is secretive; she’s harbored information and concealed documents my sister, my brother, and I now need. I won’t make a point of our family’s peculiar dynamics; aren’t all families’ dynamics peculiar, even to their members? But I will mention that my siblings and I don’t know how we’ll get the money to care for our mother should her condition outlast her Medicare benefits.

When I execute my job with precision, someone always dies.
I survey the entrance to South High School from the edge of a cement sidewalk. No security guards or roaming administrators. The heat of the late morning Arizona sun is a welcome relief from the blistering cold winds of northern Colorado I weathered yesterday. The neatly-trimmed bushes, spring flowers of red and pink under each window, green grass in spite of the dry Phoenix weather, do little to cover the fear and desperation I know oozes behind the walls of this school. Next to me, the school’s red and black sign casts a shadow across the ground. Home of the Falcons. PTA meeting tonight at 7. Senior Cleanup Project: Let’s Keep South HS Beautiful. Teachers, parents, and students can be so naïve. They've convinced themselves they’re safe from the dangers of the world. That’s what makes them vulnerable.

I'm certainly not famous, but the paragraph of mine that won (I believe in the 3rd annual SUFPC)was published by a small, but honest-to-God, royalty paying publisher back in November of 2011. The Feedstore Chronicles has not made me famous but it has sold reasonable well and gotten great reviews and I'm proud to say it is a book I probably never would have finished had I not won your contest.

Nathan, I sent you an email way back when letting you know the book was being published and my offer to send you a copy as a thank you still stands if you are interested. I don't spend much time blogging these days but I'm glad to see the contest back. and that you are still helping we writers every step of the way.

Go Nathan Go and good luck to those who enter this go around.

I’ve been to 179 funerals in three years, and this is what I know: No matter how happy, sad, pretty, plain, corrupt, saintly, or anything else you were in life, at your funeral, you will be a star.

They say my mom started the fire that took everything. Then she split. Subject closed, according to Dad. But dwelling on that now won’t help me nail my approach. I have a plan: get in, get answers, and get out. Fast. Before Dad has a chance to turn the tables on me. I’m way overdue for what he likes to call our “talks.” Air quotes needed. But today, I intend to pull a switcheroo that puts him on the receiving end of the shrink’s couch. Adapt or perish. That’s what Mr. Malone, my Sociology teacher, said about survival of the fittest. And it makes sense, in theory.

A thick, yellowing fingernail strikes the edge of my desk; two succinct taps forcing me to look up from my poetic masterpiece. Mrs. Hickenlooper's eyes bulge as if her three hefty chins are attempting to choke the life out of her. Her labored breathing only supports the effect of strangulation. "Am I boring you Mister Blackwell?"

It takes longer than I thought it would to remember how to breathe on my own. Each breath’s a conscious act as my body comes back under my control. I pull air in, let it out, and swallow around the pain. I can still feel the echoes of the respirator tube where it was wrenched out of me. Like throwing up a hard, thick straw, leaving my throat bruised but intact. But I’m here—breathing—and too soon, I wish I wasn’t.

The necromancer’s bodyguard was a necro himself, wards tattooed on his wrist, the specs for a summoning drawn up his burly arm. But he hadn’t drugged himself yet, which meant that if something went wrong and this came to a fight, Orlando’d have maybe ten, fifteen seconds to take him down while there was still a person occupying that body, rather than a spook that paid only half attention to the laws of nature. Orlando gauged distances again; he could do it if he had to.

“I knew you’d be here!” Mui-Mui’s voice echoed through the building that housed the mechanical rickshaws.

“No TV,” the stone-faced boy blocking the oak double doors said. “No cameras.” To Moran he looked seventeen or eighteen, nearly a man. The boy glared down the granite steps of the church at the television news crews on the old brick sidewalk. Three cameramen, three on-air reporters.

I began to wonder, not for the first time, how I ended up in such ridiculous situations. How did I end up here? I mean, I knew how I ended up in England, I even knew how I ended up in Scotland. What I really wondered was – how did I end up in this dark, cold, drippy and probably off limits hallway in a dress that hung all the way to the floor and yet I was still getting chilled. I’d asked for directions to the bathroom - forgetting to just say ‘toilet’ and was given directions one way. After not finding the toilet I asked a man – also dressed in character – for the toilet and I followed his directions. I finally found myself here, in a dark, cold hall. No toilet in sight. It was much colder in this hall than it had been on the floor where our tour was and I was starting to shiver. I couldn’t even remember the name of this castle at the moment. I could only think of two things: first - how much I needed the toilet and secondly - where the heck was I?

The memory of finding my husband is only mine and for that I will be forever grateful. I woke our eight-year old before the police and ambulance arrived and with her damp hand gripped in mine, pushed through the branches of the overgrown privet hedge.
“Is Daddy okay?” she asked, as we hurried across the street to our neighbor’s house on that warm May morning.
“I don’t know, honey, I don’t know.”
I knew.

Ithaca Cain had not been born a killer. Then again, he’d not been born with the name Ithaca, either. He’d chosen that after waking, naked and aching, in a stainless steel recovery ward with Jericho Biotronics’ genetic modifications running rampant in his body. A rename after rebirth had seemed appropriate at the time. The modifications had heightened his senses, sharpened his mind. For eight years, he used them and his natural skills with a rifle to keep Genetek’s metal-hungry creations out of The Dome. Having the ability to keep those inside safe had been worth the sacrifice of some of his humanity.

I never believed that Adam and I would last. After all our fragile connection was only due to a combination of circumstance, a veneer of attraction and my need for someone to cling to after Mum's death. She had been my compass for so long, that her absence left me stumbling in the fog, until Adam crossed my path. For a while, he seemed to provide a solution, a way out, a Very light to guide me home. But deep down, no matter how much fun we were having, I knew we were unlikely to survive our summer of love

I never believed that Adam and I would last. After all our fragile connection was only due to a combination of circumstance, a veneer of attraction and my need for someone to cling to after Mum's death. She had been my compass for so long, that her absence left me stumbling in the fog, until Adam crossed my path. For a while, he seemed to provide a solution, a way out, a Very light to guide me home. But deep down, no matter how much fun we were having, I knew we were unlikely to survive our summer of love

I was twelve when I chose my name: Shade. Shade, with all that it implies: the sheltering darkness of the forest in the heat of the summer; the shadow cast by a lone tree or a tall tower in the moonlight; the restless spirit of one whose time came too soon.

The story that I speak of is not one of fairy-tales. There is no happily ever after. Beauty does not sweep in to save the Beast from his gruesome nature. We are told that the damned cease to exist and those free from sin are given eternal life. The damned can never be saved and walk the earth in an eternal hell that I can never escape.

I was seventeen. Seventeen-year-olds do stupid things. I'm not justifying it - I should have known better. I knew that even before Queen Diana turned her eyes on me, with a look of disappointment I had hoped would never be directed at me.

I'd be lying if I said I'd never fantasized about Jake Durbin sneaking into my bedroom, but I’d never imagined him with a black eye and blood-stained shirt. And his first words wouldn't have been, "I didn't kill him, Lisa. I swear he was alive when I left."

Today is my sixteenth birthday. It’s also the day of my husband’s funeral.
Two young men, clothed in mourning colors, lower the bundle that contains Xenres’ body into the small grave. I feel like a part of me is being lowered into that dark hole with him, but it’s a part of me I’m glad to lose.

Busting My Balls

3.02pm.
Denver.
How the fuck did I end up here? Doing this?
Waiting for my appointment to call.
Fucker better show. Fucker. Fuckingmuthafucker.
How do you trample on someone’s balls?
I’d better not suck at it…
I’d better look confident.
This milk’s gone off.
This yoghurt smells do-able.
The cheese is fattening. Some “mini bar” this is....
The only thing I can eat, pistachios, are gone. Not to mention they were $8 a fuking tin. Why aren’t the m&m’s and snickers the expensive things?!
Taking any kind of inventory is a fact finding and a fact-facing process.
It is an effort to discover the truth.

My nights are like this: darkened sidewalk, long lines of anxious customers, bronze and onyx and candlelight, music, music, music, and death.
Always death.
Before Death & Co.’s doors even open, a line forms on the sidewalk, sometimes halfway down the street. The customers wait in the dark, illuminated only by the streetlamps and moonlight, talking and shuffling, eagerly awaiting their entrance. They want to see if the rumors are true. “Are there really floating candles?” they ask me while they wait. “Why do you close so often?” or “I hear this place is haunted.”

A cold shower on a Sunday morning started it all. Pretty ironic the way things turned out.
At 8:07 AM I jerked open the utility closet door with one hand while the other grappled against gravity to keep my towel aloft.
My own in-house horror flick unspooled before me. Starring the hot water heater. The metal cylinder twitched twice, vomited about five buckets of rusty water. Then uttered the Sears Kenmore equivalent of a death rattle.
Time to call the heater's next of kin, my landlord Dr. Farooz. Who answered my telephone SOS with a six-word text. @conference. cairo. deduct rent. am sorry. I looked down at my toes pruning up in the rising water. Then straight at the crackling fuse box.
Water and electricity - never a good combo. Staring at execution by electrocution, did I wrestle with
A: existential angst
B: fear of Hell
C: grief at not saying goodbye to people I loved?
None of the above.
Numero Uno thought: The dirty dishes in the sink would horrify Richard when the police called him to haul away my corpse. Second thought: Why - oh why - hadn't I put on a clean bathrobe before dying? Maybe the crisp pink seersucker with the white lace edging I had bought two years ago during one of our marital romance reboot campaigns.

At Willowbrook nudity had never been a cause for shame. Not that it was common. It was not. But in an all-female community occasional nudity – a cool dip in the creek on a hot summer day or lingering on the warm stone benches of the steam hut on a cold winter afternoon – had seemed both natural and comfortable. That was not how it felt now.

richardsfive @ centurytel.net

Why? Why do I do this? Robin wondered as she strained to see movement through the trees and stumbled over a fallen branch. Her nightdress clung to her legs from the damp night air. Robin clenched her jaw, and her cheeks flamed with fury, while she searched for her older brother. How did Raven talk her into playing night games while everyone else slept? The same way Raven always promised Robin he wouldn’t break the rules and fly. Yet he always hid in the canopy of leaves above her head. She should stop being so gullible since she was thirteen-years-old and knew better.

The empty space beneath Everly’s fingertips sent a plume of panic spiraling throughout her senses like thick smoke released into the sky. She scraped her hand along the bottom of the trunk one last time before slamming the lid down in frustration, almost smashing the fingers of her other hand. Her riding boots should have been there. They were always there; she made sure of it. There could only be one answer: she had been sabotaged.

Once, a long time ago, in a memory or perhaps a dream, there was a boy. It seems very real, now, to watch him walk up and down the darkening streets. He calls softly into the mouths of alleys and up at scrappy rooftops. Taxis whoosh past, so that shadows cascade down his throat. This is a night for invisible girls to dance in steam from the subway, not a night for ordinary, unhappy boys to trudge down the sidewalk calling out names. But then I wonder if it’s my name he’s calling. Me he’s looking for. Maybe he's not so ordinary as he looks.

“I DON’T WANT IT IN MY BODY!” That was the battle cry that came over the wall from the little girl in the chemo cubicle next to mine on my first day of treatment. It sounded like the straw that broke the camel’s back. In this case I gleaned that it was the mandate that she take some oral Tylenol, probably pre-medication for a blood transfusion. This was not a petulant child, I could tell. She had simply seen enough and was setting a limit. And in so doing, she had declared to the entire Pediatric Day Hospital and the world at large how we all felt about the disease and the treatment.

What I really hated about being depressed is that I still got horny. I hear it’s the opposite with some guys, but I’m not a guy, I’m a sometimes horny woman. Okay, I’m a very horny woman. But man or woman, when you’re seriously depressed, you usually don’t want to be around people and after awhile, if you’re like me, you get tired of looking at video perverts making stupid noises that most normal people would never make because it’s way too embarrassing. It’s kind of hard to get off when you don’t want to see real people and you don’t want real people to see you so you watch these real people acting fake. You know damn well in real life they aren’t like this. Half of them are probably depressed, too, but they drug out so they can perform. Or something like that. I don’t really know because I’m not a porn star, but I do know all about being drugged out. You do stuff just to get by, and most of that stuff isn’t what you’d do if you weren’t using.

“I don’t want to anymore!” She said out loud. Attending her five-year college reunion may have been amusing had she only been showing some sorority sisters how successful she'd become. Showing up when she'd had no real circle of friends? It was cause for more abuse to the battered self-confidence Alexandra Powell had already acquired in life.

Yuri rubbed a small circle in the frost covering his fourth floor window and looked down on a city buried in snow. Behind him, Misha huddled in blankets on a thin mattress. Ice coated the walls of their small dark room. Snow drifted in around the board nailed over a broken window. And the last mouse in Leningrad was on the stove.

Ferguson Salem parked his bones on a slipshod front porch that was almost ready to meet the stone foundation of what had once been a magnificent house. He stuck a scrap of kindling under the chair to correct the lean of the porch, then grabbed a slice of warm meat and shoved it into a mouth full of missing teeth. After a couple of chews, he spat it out as if it were second-hand pemmican poisoned by Indians who knew better than to trust a white man with gold teeth. For Ferguson, it was a matter of getting back to things he knew, things he didn’t want to forget, things he shouldn’t forget. And now, with heaven beckoning him with more urgency than ever before, all the man wanted was to sit on his porch and listen.

I glance out my dirty bedroom window. The sky promises another beautiful day. If my days were normal, I might hang out at the pool, pretending not to watch the lifeguards. If my life were normal, I might sit under the shade of the trees and daydream. If I were normal, I might gossip with friends late into the night. We would sit on someone’s bed, eating popcorn and talking about everything and nothing. But I left normal behind ages ago--in quiet cemeteries.

I started this as a school essay, but I realized no one at my school would believe any of it, especially my English teacher, Mr. Dorfmeyer, and that’s good because I wouldn’t want them too, anyway. I’d much rather be the weird kid with the Hollywood family than the freak from the freak show. Hollywood -- it sounds so cool, and like my Dad says -- “glamour is a function of distance.” He told me the when we were walking down Hollywood Boulevard at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, two summers ago. There was some bum puking on the Walk of the Stars, right between Ronald Reagan and Lassie. I got the point. Anyway, the kids at Dalton don’t know anything about that kind of stuff. To them it’s all movie stars shopping on Rodeo Drive and American Idol at the Kodak Theater. Going there gives me a little bump up the food chain. No big deal, just -- from kelp to plankton, something like that. I come back from Christmas vacation with a tan. That gets you some points in a New York winter.

For a long time, Violet thought the problem was she hadn't received the proper blessings at birth--or any blessings, for that matter. All her life she'd heard stories about her older sister Lily's christening, and no one would ever forget the fiery near-disaster at the ceremony for the youngest princess, Rose. Violet tried not to mind that she’d been passed over, but sometimes she found herself daydreaming about what fate might have had in store if, instead of Rose, she were the fairest of them all, or was destined to be the greatest ruler Lavonia ever had, which Lily insisted was her fate, even if her fairy blessings hadn't specifically said so. "It adds up to the same thing," Lily repeated, often and with certainty. Violet envied Lily's conviction. She had no idea what her destiny was, today or ever after. Whenever she asked her parents, she got a variation on the "just be yourself" speech, followed by a warm hug and inquiries about whether she'd finished her lessons.

~Elizabeth Passarelli

Historical Romance

Emilia Marley stepped from her new home the evening of her first assignment. The deepening shadows and sweet fragrance of the nearby roses covered her descent into a world of debauchery. Her gut twisted and her chest seemed heavy. That she'd expected, but the breathless anticipation almost shocked her. Traveling into the unknown of this mysterious night brought adventure to her life. Adventure she hadn't realized she wanted until this very moment. After all, what sort of excitement could a chambermaid ever expect?

When you take them one at a time, twenty-five pills feel like nothing at all.

Holly Hart tried to contain her giggles as she peeped around the hallway corner, camera in hand, waiting for Kyle to come out. She knelt down when she heard the whirring noise coming from behind the door. That was her cue to get in position for the shot and be ready to run.

I need your help, reads the email subject line. It's from [email protected], one of those free services anyone can sign up for with a fake name and a made-up address, but adrenaline floods my veins, flushing out the film of exhaustion that has stuck there for the last three months. Dad, I think, even though I know it's impossible.

Clouds scudded across the pitch-black sky fitfully revealing a moon that seemed frightened by the evening chill.

Dead. A jolt ran through Mannok as he looked at the unmoving bulk of his father, Rokkan Kapok, lying stretched out on the floor in front of him. His eyes widened in horror. He could not, he would not believe he was dead. He clamped down on a sob and held his hands stiffly by his side to stop them from shaking. Though he was sixteen, he felt like a four year old again, consumed by a nightmarish terror. His greatest fear which had haunted him for the last twelve years had finally come true. No! No, he refused to believe it.
Jeanette O'Hagan

It's hard, the not knowing. I am a starship astrogator and pilot, but my most important job, even more important than seeing us home again, is to someday destroy our data-base of known human settlements. The holomap is like a strand of pearls glowing in the darkness of the bridge, and from time to time, when we come home, one or two have gone dark. Sometimes there are new ones, and I pull up the entries like childhood sweets, to savor how here, there, are three thousand souls making a living at atmospheric mining on this gas-giant, ten thousand hiding their farms and manufacturing inside this icy little moon, or a few dozen on a powersat spreading black wings under a blue-white sun to manufacture antimatter in milligram lots. Not knowing what has happened to the ones that go dark, and dreading the day when we come home to a dead settlement, that is hard. There is something out there which does not love us. I wonder if they know our kind too well, or see themselves in us, that they can kill without mercy, wipe us out root and branch. But I'd rather not know, if the knowing invariably means my death, and the deaths of those I love.

Life didn’t shine anymore. It bled. Flynn grasped the rooftop ledge of the Cryton House, leaning out far enough to observe the people on the streets four stories below. The humans here walked in patterns—from building to building in routes so engrained in their lives their shoes had etched paths into the cobblestone road. He flared his nostrils, snorting in disgust. This town was no different than any of the other tired English towns—drowning in untruths and morally rigid. Such a waste, he thought. A war waged around them, but they didn’t look far enough outside their town walls or stiff mindset to see it. A breezed flaked off the dried blood coating his stone fingers. The outcome needed to be different than the last town or there would be no more blood to bleed.

One of the hoariest adages in booklore is that a tale should never commence with a description of the weather, but what is to be done if you wish to tell about a wraith found at your doorstep in the midst of an electrical snowstorm? Skip to the good, warm part in the middle? No. You must tell it as it was.

It was a bridge that first lured me to Teradolus.
Teradolus, where myths are harvested, memories are mutated, and lies are braided into the fabric of your mind. It is a land of perpetual darkness where the only light to be found is that of a capricious moon.
That moon… I can see it in my mind’s eye even now as I relate this story to you. I've not seen it in years, but the beaming blue cheese grin remains fresh in my mind, filling me with equal parts excitement and terror.
Just like Carroll’s Cat, that moon would drift in and out of relevance as I crossed the land. Its grin would stretch wider whenever I lingered in the Reeds of Misplaced Recollections, taking great pleasure as I floundered between the real and unreal, enjoying my struggles to reconcile it all in my mind. The grin would settle into a pernicious smirk as I skipped along the banks of Accidia, the unbearable numbness leeching onto my toes and crawling up my legs, causing me to break into a run for the Ponte Veritas as I wondered how I'd found myself on those shores when I’d sworn I’d never return.
And the moon would always, always, dip completely out of sight whenever I ventured into the Redwood of Lies as though it too were fearful of those flaming trunks.

“Hold tight, Shifter, this is going to be bumpy!” The small vehicle plunged through the tangled branches of the slender trees and shuddered to a halt. For a moment, a blur of green and brown, severed leaves and twigs on the screen obscured the view. ‘Kat’ O’Brien gritted her teeth and activated a control. A gust of recycled air blew the offending foliage from the external screen, revealing a bleak, almost featureless landscape.
The silence rent asunder with the unmistakable whine and shriek of blaster fire, as she emerged from her now useless transit vehicle.

(Hywela Lyn)

“That’s the yeti’s bed. Yours is over there.”
I let go of the handle of the weird ice-blue box I was about to open, and spun around. My head whipped back and forth, trying to pinpoint the origin of the voice. I could smell the delicate perfume of flowers, along with a deeper, earthy scent, but there was no-one in sight. A pair of lips appeared in front of me, covered in a blackberry lipstick just like mine. Electric blue eyes followed, then a pale face, framed by ringlets of glossy black hair.

The notes swim on the page, blurring before my eyes. My bow stutters across the bridge and I wince at the piercing noise that squawks out as the E-string breaks.
“Goddamn!” I want to throw the bow across the room, but I know better. I set it down on the table beside me instead. I glance at the clock. Four fifteen. Great. I got an hour in. Maybe a little more. That’s going to get this piece nailed. Not. Stupid Shostakovich. Whoever picked this to be the compulsory piece for the summer school auditions deserves a kick in the ass.

Momma always told her that omitting details was equivalent to lying, but Cassandra knew the information she found needed to disappear fast. A sudden breeze off the South River rustled the tall bay grasses and broke the intense, afternoon heat of the sun broiling Cassandra’s skin, as beads of sweat rolled down her forehead and dripped off the end of her nose like a leaky faucet.

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This could go two ways: live or die.
Right now, I’d take death.
The pain came first. Pain. Such a stupid word, created by ignorant, naïve fools who knew nothing of true agony. I slumped against the wall, swallowing a scream. My skin prickled, a million stabbing needles, the sensation crystallizing into an acute burn. This isn’t happening. Denying the truth—that’s the way. Despite the beauty and avoidance of voluntary delusion, this was happening.
Soon.
So soon. Now. I needed to Change, to fully feel like a dragon again.
But this was just another thing out of my control.

-Emily Watson

When kids have a nightmare, people always say, “Don’t worry. It’s just a dream.” Those people are idiots.

They say it in a voice that sweetly tries to convince you that the dream isn’t real and that the horror you feel is somehow less valid, as though you can just sweep it away like it never happened. But it did happen. The terror is real and there’s only so many times you can be told, “Just think happy thoughts and go back to sleep,” before you realize you’re on your own, truly on your own. That you have to face the demons by yourself and find the courage to go back to sleep, knowing what awaits you when you return. And of course, that was before I knew the truth, before I knew there really ARE things to fear in your sleep.

POUND-POUND-POUND-POUND-POUND!
I bolted up in bed. A streak of yellow light shot under my door then snapped back into darkness. Footsteps creaked past my room. Then a noise that sounded like a monster’s long, loud burp vibrated through the walls. I fell back onto the pillow. Just Mom or Dad using the bathroom. What passed for a bathroom, anyway, in Mom’s hundred-year-old “dream house” with hundred-year-old pipes that made the rudest sounds.

The distance between me and the ground was about five feet I guess. Okay, I’d fallen further than that in the past and survived. Admittedly, on previous tumbles I hadn’t had four stomping hooves to avoid.
‘You nervous?’ I heard Ben call.
I turned to look at him as he sauntered across the yard, his ruffled golden hair flopping into his face over his sky blue eyes. A girl looked over a rustic stable door, admiring his muscles as they bulged through his tight fitting grey top. It was hard to believe he was related to me.
‘No,’ I replied, trying to sound defiant. Why people around here considered this was fun was beyond me? Horses have their own minds, or did people not realise that?
‘I’ll look after you,’ he said, smiling. He squeezed my hand.
‘It’s supposed to be me looking after you. I’m the older one, remember?’
‘Age is just a number,’ he replied.
Despite his reassurances the churning knots in my stomach were getting tighter. Thank God I hadn’t had any breakfast this morning, otherwise it would definitely be making a second appearance.

Karen Taylor

Artists, musicians, and writers try to capture emotion, but they never get it right. Feelings aren’t colors, sounds, or words—they’re much more physical. The emotions that rode in with the latest visitors were especially tangible. Desperation. Like the gouges of fingernails raking across unprotected skin. Fear, molasses-thick and suffocating. And something else. But buried deeper so Lara couldn’t tell what it was unless she went looking, which she wouldn’t.

I didn’t always look like this, you know. I was beautiful once. Before the Emperor. Before the war. Before the fire.

Invisibles might be angels. I don’t know for sure. I don’t exactly see them but I know when they’re around. They showed up right after Dad left when I was seven and a half. Dad’s a jazz pianist and, according to Mom, a rotten jerk. If she quit saying that, maybe he’d come back. Invisibles love music, same as me. Songs help people who need help, the Invisibles told me. Well, they don’t use words. More like feelings way down in my belly. My head’s a tape recorder, too. I can play or sing anything back exactly, even if I only listen once. Because of that I’m an oddball, according to Mom. According to Dad, a Special Ed head.

The rest of the world is asleep. I know some doctors and police and other people work at night, and they’re out there somewhere, but sitting on my bed, holding my flashlight, I feel like no one else is awake. This is my favorite time of day. Night.

The description of the day-long program was cryptic and sparse, quite unlike most announcements made by the master sound-shaman and respected academic from whom this offer arrived. An indigenous Elder carrying medicine that pertains to the times to come would be in our area. No name provided, very little background given. If you want to come, come, was the essential message.

Most fifth graders think recess is one of the best parts of the school day. Second only, perhaps, to the ringing of the final bell, signaling an escape to after-school activities. Mike didn’t agree. Recess meant fear, hiding and avoiding attention until the bell rang and then sprinting to the door. If he could lay low during recess, he had a decent chance of not landing on The List of Those To Be Pounded After School.

The band Closure was gathered in a large, open office in downtown Los Angeles, California. The skies outside the window were dark, and while a storm was brewing outside, there was a bigger one brewing inside. There were details to go over before Closure and their families left in two weeks on their sold out tour and the most important detail was being uncooperative.

Wow. Reading so many first paragraphs makes me dizzy and my eyes blink. My name is Justus and here's my first paragraph:

It frightened me. The wooden stairs to my new apartment moaned and cried underneath my feet. I couldn’t help but imagine in which horrible way I might die when it would finally collapse. Unfortunately the elevator wasn’t any better. Its doors made an even more terrifying rattling noise when they opened and closed. It wasn’t as if my fears came as a surprise, the entire house looked as if it should’ve collapsed at least two decades ago. Still, nothing could explain the origin of the various stains decorating the walls of my apartment. And yet, all the elevators and stairs and stains in the world couldn’t have prevented me from taking the apartment. There were two large windows in my living room. Outside was a wonderful tree.

Elizabeth Hutchinson never realized she was being tracked since birth. It wasn’t until the day an owl rested outside her window that there was evidence to the contrary. The blue of her eyes seemed to reflect off the dawning sky, staring at the perched bird. The owl stood without flinching as the warmth of her fiancé’s body pushed against her. She couldn’t help but gaze upon the crisp earth-toned leaves slowly drifting back and forth in the breeze. The delicate detail of the owl’s feathers drew her focus from the warm hand pushing the cotton of her nightgown up around her waist. Gusts of fall barely swayed the animal from its perch. Elizabeth closed her eyes as the tips of Dominic’s fingers brushed her inner thigh, sliding the lace thong from her moist skin. Inhaling she opened her eyes to the frozen owl still perched beyond the window.

Julie Schewlakow

Astrid leaned into the freezing wind, staggering down the beach hunting for driftwood to feed their meager fire. She kept one eye open for anything edible. The gale felt like needles of ice penetrating even the thick white bear pelt she wore as a cloak. The wind swept up the fjord straight off the icy sea, funneled by the steep hills on either side. Astrid paused to take shelter for a few moments under a rock overhang that blocked the gusts. With nothing to hunt for, she let her mind drift, retelling to herself some of the stories her grandmother used to tell her. It was almost as good as sleep to take her mind off her hunger and keep her company.

Fun...great concept.Here's my entry.

This was not the first time I had come home from work to find three saffron robed monks in our back yard cavorting with our chickens. "Tsering has asked us to call but we were here so we came..." My partner Tsering was a Tibetan national living in exile in Massachusetts. We would often hear of the sightings from our neighbors who were concerned to see strangers in our yard when we weren't at home. We reassured them that a trio of pacifists was in all probability, not going to wreak much havoc. None the less, we asked the guys to call ahead when possible.

At eleven o’clock on the last Saturday morning in May, when my father and the moving team were packing our lives into four-by-six cardboard boxes, my sister Zoe got kicked out of swim lessons. It was her first class of the summer, the fourth instructor in two years, and when Brendan called I sat for a moment, sinking beneath the chatter in the dressing room, wishing I didn't believe that it had really happened again.

Alexis surged through a rusty metal door and quickly swung it closed behind her with as much strength as she could muster, throwing her weight onto it with a desperate grunt just as a violent force rushed her in pursuit. Screaming and tearful with fear and pain she struggled to keep the door secured and tried to hold back the entity that was pounding on it, but each thud and ghastly wail made her feel weak and chilled her to the bone. Each blow was a dreadful warning that death was on the other side of that door.

Lee Sampere
[email protected]

The blade curved from years of sharpening. Marisol gripped the handle and sawed at alfalfa, trying to finish the harvest before her knife became too dull to even cut the tender plants. She arched her back and sucked at the new blisters emerging under callused hands—tokens of a long day of work.

I yell my voice hoarse and pound my fists numb against the thick steel door. Defeated, I stumble backward. The scent of stale urine mixes with the damp, musty air as
I drop onto the soiled mattress: yellowed circles of dried urine and drops of blood from its former occupants. A fluorescent bulb dangles from the ceiling, buzzing and flickering, washing the room in a swampy hue. The doctor will be here soon. I curl my legs to my chest as though layers of flesh can protect the life inside me.

The corpse of the witch had long been claimed by the denizens of the earth but Isbet knew the old woman right away. She knelt in the rich loam and laid her staff Gaemyr beside her, barely noticing that his carved face was in the dirt.

The diner was never busy at one in the morning, but this night was slow even by our standards. Just one half-drunk couple in the corner, the girl giggling and the guy groping as they kissed. The only reason Gus hadn’t thrown them out was because the little perv liked the entertainment. At least he had something else to focus on besides my ass. I’d never make any tips tonight. Great. Another month behind on the rent. Hopefully I could sweet talk my way out of this latest time and get myself off the hook without sex with that barbarian. Getting back to school next semester was out of the question too, dammit. My life was going nowhere. Or worse, to the proverbial hell in a handbasket.

Mare’s backpack clinks as she ducks in and out of the pre-dawn shadows. A cold front moving across the state has dropped temperatures to the low forties. She rearranges the aerosol cans and wraps them with tee shirts to silence them. Pulling up her hoodie, she looks down the street. No one is watching. Storefronts are still dark in this Southern city of a quarter million people. Macon, Georgia, feels big compared to the smaller towns of Mare’s childhood. But not so big that she can’t find her way through the mostly abandoned city streets on her clandestine missions.

Pádraig left the Circle despite his father’s protests when he was 523 years old. He stood at the edge of the Circle, and watched life on the outside as it shifted and changed before his very eyes. The once bare slopes of Connemara were now littered with farmhouses, rocky fields and rangy sheep. Sealed roads had appeared where there had only been rock and hard earth before. Everything changed out there while everything within his home stayed exactly the same. No one really left the Circle any more, but those who did returned with items that they had procured from mortals and with tales of life outside the Sidhe realm. These stories fascinated Pádraig deeply. He wanted to see it for himself. He longed to be part of a world and a life that seemed so full of life and colour, where things were constantly changing.

She took a final photograph, crouching down for a close-up of the exquisite inlaid banding, before tossing the camera—a disposable—into her Italian leather purse. The London dealer wanted something to show his contact at the Victoria & Albert. It sounded promising, he said, especially with the unusual provenance. Providing that would be risky, of course—perhaps impossible. But even without provenance, the small, jewel-like box would fetch a tidy sum at auction. Enough to carry her through till May, which was all she needed. It was a beneficence, sent by the god who watched over her—had done so all her life.

On a quaint, tiny street lined with quaint, tiny shops Kelly’s Books and Toys was the quaintest and the tiniest. It was built of red brick and had a bright green door with a gold handle. And from the outside it looked very much like the stationery shop with the blue door and the silver handle on one side and the spice shop with the black door and the copper handle on the other. That, however, was where the similarities ended.

(Middle Grade Fantasy)

DISCLAIMER

This story is a work of fact. Only some names have been changed to protect the innocent. Characters, places and incidents are absolutely real. All resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely deliberate.

Wasn’t gym class punishment enough for twelve year old Isabelle Tresdon? Coach Rayfield’s coffee breath. Spit flying from his whistle each time he piped it. Being trapped in a stifling gymnasium with ten sweaty kids, playing a crummy game of basketball. She’d rather pluck out each nose hair.

Cool contest! Thanks!

A stair creaks.With the rain pounding down on the creaky roof, a human may not have heard it. But I do. It is too close, just outside the door. My stomach sinks. A stair creaks, and I know I am about to kill again.

So before we get started and get carried away and all that, let’s be clear about something: Cam Hanson has not run away from home. Okay, technically, he has, but really, the more sophisticated and professional explanation (out of respect for your intelligence) is that Cam Hanson has taken a brief sabbatical from home. More specifically, a brief sabbatical from his role as hands-on, day-to-day leader of his family and his parents’ only hope at healing their deep-seated psychic wounds. Not too shabby a résumé for someone who’s only been alive fifteen years ten months. Another important point in need of clarification: This temporary suspension of familial duties and Cam’s subsequent departure to an undisclosed location with his notebooks and pens and his memories to write out what you’re reading now, this chronicle of what really happened to the Hansons in those ten months following the day he turned fifteen, is not Cam’s doing by choice, but rather his best option out of several less attractive ones as a result of the unfortunate, inexcusable actions and belief systems of certain nefarious individuals, all of which will be exposed, and rightfully so, in said chronicle.

The angry red lights on my nightstand read 7:00 am. For close to an hour, I’ve been trying to keep myself asleep while ignoring the loud-pitched female voice coming from the television in the living room. Defeated, I remove the pillow from over my head, and finally storm out of bed—Across the hallway, dad’s hand hangs from the side of the couch. He’s passed out. Lying on the floor below him is an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a quarter way full bottle of vodka. The ashtray on the end table is overflowing with cigarette butts, while a dark cloud of smoke hovers over him. As I walk closer, the acidic smell invades my nostrils, and I rub my nose to stop the burning sensation. Every fucking morning, I have to deal with this shit!

He hated hurting dogs; it gave him indigestion. But a promise made is a debt unpaid. Was a dog the size of a furball really a dog? A small voice in his head said yes. He ignored it and popped another Tums, watched and waited.

Pia Sabel sat still, listening to the limo tick as it cooled. She needed a minute to think. The heat outside began to penetrate the icy interior. Her driver picked up his book, thumbed to his place and read. Agent Marty stood outside the door scanning the street while Agent Tania sat next to her, staring straight ahead. No one spoke. Could the Department of State really press charges?

Gerund. Apostolic. Vehicular manslaughter. I have this thing for words. Usually big, complicated, fat words, but not always. Sometimes they are thin and clipped. Flit. Plotted. Clapped. It doesn’t matter what the words mean, really, just the way they sound. How the syllables feel in my mouth, if they roll around the fat part of my tongue, leap off the narrow tip, or pitch out of my mouth with a throaty, guttural thrust. Colonoscopy. Fragrance. Pituitary. I draw out each syllable as if it is its own word, and I think about the way my breath hisses over my teeth. My mother hates it when I do this. “Calliope,” she says in her teacher voice, “stop muttering.”

It was a forgotten town, close enough to the City of Compton to get the spillage of criminals, and far enough from Los Angeles that suburbanites weren't bothered by the crime. The cops had long ago turned a blind eye, and when they did, no one was watching over Adelanto. Well, Mary, mother of Jesus, is speculated to have appeared over the water tower, but it was suspect since it came from the mother of Ricky, the leader of the Mexican gang. He allegedly killed someone, and ever since that day, his religious mother was seeing holy figures everywhere. But the town needed a positive stir, and clung to whatever it could. Catholics, evangelicals, mystics and cynics alike camped out at the base of the tower. Two television stations reported live from the scene pressuring the county to get involved. The Department of Water and Sanitation arrived the following day to test the sample from the marking where Mary supposedly wept tears, leaving stains of blood. It was rust.

Cara Medlen felt the growl before she heard it, rumbling through her leg from the dog tensed at her side. She nudged his shoulder to break his concentration. "Easy, Casper. You may not realize it yet, but today's your lucky day."

1856 – enDondakusuka, Zululand

A soft breeze rippled over the tall grass as morning’s first light warmed hundreds of crouching bodies in the golden brush. But it wasn’t the sun rousing the new day. It was the smell of blood. And by day’s end, not just the wind would carry the ominous tale of death across the African continent. The Tugela River would flow red with it.

The pen lying on the cashier’s desk gave a sudden jerk, and then rolled a few times across the wooden surface. It was happening again. Adira squeezed the golden pyramid box in her fist, harnessing its power. A few days earlier a chair skidded over the floor with a single thought, and before that, she shook the hell out of the crystal chandeliers. Sure, her foster dad might have collapsed from fright at the sight of his antique store in earthquake mode, but this was bigger than him—it was a moment in time when everything she knew burst into a trillion pieces. Not to mention the minuscule possibility that she might now share a common trait with Jean Grey from X-Men.

"Why did you make me do that?" I moaned, watching Deuce wipe the sweat from his chest and slip on a clean t-shirt.

Jodi Webb

so i've just arrived after a shakey ride. seeing the mars mt. olympus mons in the sunset is very gorgeous. glad i have my moon glasses on.
the inflight movie was great, but i'm sure those of you on earth were watching the superbowl, or the puppy bowl.

as you know, i am here to install some cooling stations on mars. but right now i am just enjoying the stunning scenary.

Schreya Picard racketed onto Highway 54 astride a one-hundred-percent illegal copy of Sticker Tulane's motorbike. Behind her she left the fourteen squabbling neighborhoods of Testament, Oklahoma and one nasty sunrise. If Sticker's scooter could out-run that storm building in from the east, a new life would be hers in Amarillo, just eighty minutes away.

Kyle was waiting for Alexa by the entrance to the north wing. The lights had been dimmed to save electricity, and halfway down a side corridor the mall's only claw machine glowed golden and inviting.

And Magic surfaced in Shelton.
Forsaking all social graces it arrived unannounced; it did not knock gently nor wipe its feet. It climbed out of the earth and up through the air swinging a mantle of heat that smothered the town, leaving the citizens hostage indoors and the eldest of those scratching their heads. It settled on its haunches and waited away the descending suns.

Diana Rico said...

Between 5:29:26 and 5:31:17 on the morning of September eighth, 1985, a police emergency operator in New York City took the following call. The caller did not identify himself. His voice was high pitched for a male, and he mumbled, stammered, and cried through the conversation.

The man who would kill Marcia Weathers sat in the dark and cold, watching, waiting. It hadn’t been long enough, but the pressure was too much, the need too great. He shifted in the driver’s seat; the car smelled of burnt dust and overheated rubber and discarded taco wrappers. Tonight was for reconnaissance, not action, not fulfillment. Knowing every nuance of the neighborhood, the rhythms of comings and goings, lights on and lights off, who had dogs—these were crucial.

Kelly
marwhitpinky12(at)yahoo(dot)com

There was endless darkness. Then, a pulse of compressed energy tore across it, unleashing an outbreak of chaos. Rows of wildly swirling lights suddenly appeared, bright enough to capture glimpses of distorted shapes rushing in and out of sight, chased down by more than their own shadows. The air pressed in, smothering and toxic with fear.

"I'm gonna shove that guy off the stage," said Townes. There was the small question of getting the lead singer's guitar away from him, and it was a sweet old Gibson -- not something he'd want to knock around. Plus he couldn't expect the guy to be happy about a takedown from a random fan. Still, Townes thought, doable.

Bark had no idea how the ship got in the middle of the desert. He only knew that he would have to steal it.

My mom would leave him here to die. My dad would try to save him. But neither of them found him. I did. I have to make the choice between walking away from someone I know can never be saved, or taking him back to the village and casting my lot in with his. Seconds ago I was wishing I had a Geiger counter, wishing Luther didn’t let his hatred of me leave me unprotected as usual. Just because he suspects I have feelings for his son, Zen, he goes out of his way to punish and hurt me. In the middle of my thoughts, I had seen the movement that drew me to the boulder.

“Nasty business, is it not?" he asked, shifting uncomfortably in the straight-backed chair.

"Miss Moordun? --her disappearing and all, so suddenly, like the others?"

The man cleared his throat, nervously awaiting her reply. He started to twitch when she remained silent. He fidgeted uncomfortably and corrected the angle of the black felt hat propped on his knee. He tried again.

“Without a trace it was, --a couple of days ago, without a trace.”

“I say, a nasty bit of business, it was." he started. She remained silent.

“I heard them talking about it at the hotel, one never knows what shall transpire in this day and age, does one?”

“Nasty business…” He repeated, and then continued to talk, hesitantly, at first, then more to himself than to her. He nervously brushed a hair off of the crown of his black felted hat. Probably from that damned ancient cat sitting there, he thought to himself with much disdain. He disliked cats.

Nick downed another Corona; he couldn’t relax. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way: a four-hour flight that took six, a ground hold in Ypsilanti due to fog on the runway. An unconscious young woman on the floor of the cargo hold, cast aside like nobody’s luggage.

"You're too fat," the one-eyed blacksmith grunted, trying to squeeze the armor around Pratt's bulging stomach. The enemy was charging and and so far the only thing Pratt could squeeze into was an old potato sack.

The thing about music in the morning is that it always distracts from the smell of breakfast. The musicians outside the restaurant turned down their synthetic amps, relieving me of the overpowering colors. The blues of the song, mostly cobalt and periwinkle, had been mingling with the violet breakfast smells, making it hard to taste anything at all. And I loved breakfast. It was my favorite. Just one of the problems of having synesthesia, my senses were always jumbled.

One of the worst feelings in the world is having a story to tell but not knowing how to start it so people will believe it’s worth hearing. I guess that’s why I’m here. On paper I’m a pretty average 23 year old. Until recently, my family consisted of a mom, dad, and two younger brothers. We lived in a small town on Long Island in New York until I was 12. I went to the same elementary school and started off at the same middle school that my dad attended 30 years prior. All of my friends were the sons and daughters of his childhood clique. We were a pretty close-knit community. Until then my life was pretty average for a prepubescent boy. We moved to Florida when I started the seventh grade and being that young I never really thought about why. Most people asked if it was because of my dad’s job but I honestly couldn’t answer them. Growing up we were always told that when friends asked what my dad did that we should say he was in the business of “sporting goods”. No one ever questioned what my mom did because she had three sons to take care of and being a stay at home mom on Long Island wasn’t exactly breaking news. For years I told friends about my dads exciting job in “sporting goods” but couldn't actually tell anyone what that meant. If I thought about it I could tell them about the papers riddled with numbers and ratios all over the office, or the mystery lock boxes under his bed, or even the six-month stints in Costa Rica and Las Vegas. But at 12 years old “sporting goods” seem to suffice for my classmates. Thankfully.

Waking up this morning was hard. Harder than usual. Another unwelcome visit by reality, self-doubt, self-hatred and pain. There was always pain. Pain was my life. Was it any wonder a man would struggle to wake up – and abandon his dreams – when reality was so hard?

Head swimming and vision blurring, the teenager collapsed on the cold, hard ground in the middle of the night…or maybe early morning, he didn’t know. A few minutes later, he groggily opened his eyes to an unfamiliar place. "Must’ve had way too much to drink," he thought, wondering why he was lying down in the middle of an alleyway and how he’d even gotten there in the first place. Literally just a few seconds ago, he’d been in the bar ordering another drink with his fake I.D. He noticed unconscious figures near him and wondered if that was his fault.

Juan Paul Rodriguez. I remember his brown almond-shaped eyes, the ones filled with hatred and longing. I remember the stink of his venomous breath on my face and the way his blue tear tattoo underneath his left eye crinkled when he smiled at me. The feel of the menacing smile he gave me as he slit my throat.

Shortly after I vowed to replace Matt with a drum machine, and to replace Jared with the first person I made eye contact with at Guitar Center, I needed a smoke break. I communicated that need to the rest of Snowblower--my band--but I phrased it as, “Let’s run the song without vocals.”

I realised the world wasn't as I'd imagined it to be when I found myself leaning against the side of an army jeep in Africa with a short American woman screaming abuse at me.

She isn't the first fare to get blood all over my cab, and she probably won't be the last. It's dripping from the long strings of her matted hair, slicking the shabby fabric of the seat beneath her. The smell is so powerful I have to hold my breath and roll down the windows until it fades enough that I can think properly again.

Patrick hated it when Nicole sat on the table, so she sat on the table that night, feeling brave, like an impetuous teen acting out while her parents were away. Everyone knew, everyone really knew that she was a nearly, almost completely, thirty-six-year-old woman drunk off white zinfandel doing nothing more, nothing more daring than sitting on the one hundred-year-old table that had passed down through Patrick’s family for ages and ages and ages. She was sick of hearing about that table and the ages it had been through. Really, who the hell cared?

“She’s a girl; she doesn’t need an education,” Mom sneered, swatting a hand through the air. “She’ll get married and have kids.”
Dad didn’t agree. In his opinion I should go to high school. He was about to come up with yet another argument when Mom cut him off.
“She’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Albert. She won’t be able to cope. She hates school. Why put her through another six years?”
“Well, then maybe an art academy,” Dad reasoned. “She’s pretty good at drawing. Let her develop by doing something creative.”
“I don’t know, Albert,” Mom shook her head in doubt. “If we were talking about a boy, I’d say fine, let him go to an academy instead of a high school, but we’re talking about a girl -- a girl who will meet a boy, fall in love, get married, and start a family. She’ll be a housewife like me. So why does she need a fancy education? I say, let her stay in the school she’s been in for the past six years; let her enter the special program where she’ll learn to cook and sew. That will be all the education she’ll ever need.”

A tall broken man sits under a large stone bridge in a leaky green boat. He wears glasses, but they contain no glass. He smells of fish, but he is not fishing. He is reading, yet he has no book.

As Adriana looked up at the crumbling villa, her asymmetrically cut Christian Dior dress flapped against her bare leg in the breeze. Except for the steady stream of passing headlights pulling up to the estate, the only light came from a lantern next to the front door. The cream-colored building glowed against the black sky. Dark ivy crawled down the exterior wall like an army of ants.

Suicide is selfish. It tells the world that you are weak. It tells the world your family and friends have failed. It leaves them with the guilt that they should have done more but didn’t. I am weak, but I am not selfish. My suicide will not leave my loved ones with guilt and pain. It will leave them thankful that they knew me for the short time I was here. And when I reach my final goal, to meet my brother in heaven, and we’re looking down at my victims in Hell, he will say to me ‘Well done, Cosette’.

I opened the cupboard to look for cereal and found nymphs and naiads instead. If my life were some kind of fantasy, it might have been cool. Unfortunately, I live in the real world and the nymphs and naiads were just a bunch of immature insects floating in alcohol. Disgusting. I closed the cupboard.

The dreams started when I was sixteen. That first one is etched in my mind, like it was yesterday, even though it was over three thousand years ago. The hair on the back of my neck still tingles when I think of it: how the gods manipulated me, how the snakes reached out to me, how I learned about the curses that plagued my family, and how I came to realize my true power. The dreams signaled a turning point in my life, both thrilling and horrifying.

Life in the New Mexico high desert was not for everyone. Isolated ranches and farms were sometimes visited by wild weather, wild animals and wild humans. Lisa Bancroft stopped hating it there and had come to appreciate the luxurious, sprawling ranch house. As long as her husband gave her the money for frequent trips to other places, she would be fine. But lately, poorly defined events made her uneasy. Strange things were happening at the surrounding ranches and the gossip was jittery and cruel.

As Meira Goldwater awoke one morning from unsettling dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a furry fat raccoon.

A cold win blew through Ana on a warm summer day, blowing her long brown hair free from it's braid, and taking her memories as it passed. She had been kneeling in a meadow, picking the small, wild strawberries that grew there. She tensed as the wind went past, and when she relaxed, she knew something was missing. Try as she might, she could not think of what felt wrong.

The Exquisiteness of Seeing was given to me a very long time ago by a woman who, bless her soul, died with her glasses on, a children’s book in her hands and a pirate’s hat on her head. And by a little girl who fed her garden fairies passion fruit and never gave up hope that one day I would love her.
Emmeline was fond of saying two things: I am one hundred and three my dear. And have you found the little girl?
The day I met her she said both things, and at the time, I confess, I hated her.

Whatever made that noise had to show itself soon. There was no tree or shrub tall enough to hide behind on this hill, so David watched from the biggest rock outcrop, feet planted, knees bent, his sling loaded and swinging. He couldn't hear much above the rowdy goats, but there it was again. That wasn’t an animal. It was a voice. He used his staff to push himself high on his toes, but he couldn’t see around the bend.

Every now and then, somebody on campus gets taken out by a bicyclist. I don’t mean “taken out” like a date. I mean hit. Hit hard. It’s an accident, of course. Or so most people think, and I too thought, before I became the target. Before life as I now know it ever was.

It came from beneath, the way a shark checks out its prey, a firm, purposeful nudge that didn’t hurt as much as surprise me, jarring me from my sun-soaked reverie, and prompting me to suck my expansiveness in from the atmosphere like a vacuum. I was tight then, tense, and uncomfortably physical, on guard in a spread of sky that is my domain, where I am inviolate, pre-eminent, and most important, myself – no pretenses, no obfuscations, no watchfulness, no armor. The bump was a trespass and a battery, offensive and intentional. I rolled over to identify the spirit beneath me, like a seal bobbing in the waves, unsuspecting shark bait, pretending at languor. As if my entire being weren’t fully prepared to attack. Knowing all the while that the interloper wouldn’t be fooled, and was probably scoffing. I’d given away my surprise and alarm when I sucked my spirit in close.

The basement of my new house stinks but for the moment it is my retreat from the seemingly perfect living space upstairs. If you look beyond the well-executed design of the main floor there is little to be envious of. Below the surface there is a dim yet still organized warehouse of items that cannot be parted with. They're a collection of memory prompts that keep a thin tightrope connection to all that I was before. I habituate to the stench after two or three deep breaths. I superficially attend to the sound of the river running through the French drain. Somewhere within the one hundred neatly stacked plastic boxes, there's a dance journal I kept from a college technique class. It reflects a time of creative birth, introspection, and few true responsibilities. More importantly, it reminds me of a time when life went as planned. Hard work naturally led to desired and expected outcomes. I wish life were still that predictable.

Joanne De Simone

The dark clouds swirled amongst themselves as if plotting to unleash hell. Gideon stared out the airplane window at them. Music blasted through his earbuds, drowning out his thoughts. Every couple minutes, he strained to look up the aisle and to the right where a girl his exact age sat. He could just see the edge of her sleeve and the very top of her head, covered in a blue baseball cap. He muted the rock thrumming in his ears. He couldn’t mess up, not again.

It took just one of the plastic rings, thrown haphazardly with impressive force, plus a little luck, and the fate of the goldfish swimming in it's plastic bag was sealed.

Oaks couldn’t walk through those doors without remembering the first time she grabbed the handle, her hands slick with sweat and her heart full of nervous hope. She leaned all of her weight back away from the door, her body sketching an arc, to heave the door open. She walked through the door, up the three pale gray, stone steps to the foyer and stood momentarily before seeing the common room full of girls. The door, a wood framed glass panel, allowed her to see everyone who was inside and for her mind to imagine that they could not see her standing there like a lost puppy.

I hear dead people. Believe me, I know. It sounds rather like the movie trailer for a joke film. Coming to a theatre near you, Ray Charles starring in The Sixth Sense II! You don’t have to explain the joke to me; I get it. There are days when it seems that my entire life is some hilarious trailer for a fake film on YouTube. Days like today.

First, there is the smell, even on a frosty morning: it is like a whiff of piglet that has waded a stream and run itself warm and oily. Sometimes they know they are not alone; they throw off the unappetizing stench of urine and sour milk, and that is their fear. Whether they make fire at nightfall or walk the bare dirt paths with big sticks, if they are afraid they don't know which way to watch, even when you are very close.

Katie huddled on the stained vinyl floor in the corner of the room. The smell of Mommy’s blood on her clothing made her sick; the shrieks from her mother in the next room froze her mind in terror. Sobs shook her body, tears flooded her eyes, ran down her face. Why would anyone hurt Mommy? A scream swelled inside her throat.

Maman said there’s magic in these hills, and there’s evil here too. That’s what she told Claudine. Maman got down on her knees and took that little face into her hands and she looked straight into Claudine’s eyes, like she’s never looked into mine, and she told Claudine that there’s plenty of evil in these hills, and when evil comes, she has to run and hide and make sure she survives, no matter what she sees. Even if it meant leaving all of us behind.

Nothing extraordinary ever happens in the country.
I’m surrounded by miles of corn fields and forgotten farms. By people who have lived here their entire lives. Some have never ventured out of the state, let alone the surrounding area. It’s a place for normalcy. A place where people are forgotten and lost.
And I don’t belong here.

Good and evil are so basic. So intrinsic. So essential. To humanity. It’s why we reincarnate into humans. To get a glimpse of the best of ourselves. And the worst. But my family. We’re different. We’re the relics the rest of the world forgot. We’re still here. 
Pompeii? Yeah, that was me. Bodie, CA. Guilty again. Atlantis was all Gramps. Grams swears the Aztecs were an accident. But I think Mom meant to do it.
We have a long list of lost cities, forgotten civilizations, and decimated places to our credit.

It’s funny what you notice when you’re dying. It’s not your breath or your heartbeat, or the ripple of your mind slowly coming undone. It’s what you love. For me, it’s the color of the water. First, it’s green like bottle glass. Then it’s deep, dark blue-black, like a midnight sky. The water seeps into my ears blocking everything else out. It creeps into my clothes, through the strands of my hair. It invades my nose, my mouth, and slides into my lungs, into my stomach. It envelopes me, claims me as its own. I’m going with it.

I woke up Sunday morning with a hangover that could have legally qualified me as dead. My mouth was sore and cracked. My ears had a constant ringing inside them, similar to a Bee pollinating a flower. Dan, my twin brother, had not even bothered to get to his bed. I found him passed out on the bathroom floor, next to the toilet. Blood and vomit covered his jeans along with something wet— perhaps urine.

The older man's eyes were blue, almost as blue as Cobalt's own, and he couldn't stop the trembling wracking his body as he looked up at the man's request. Master Conrad never asked Cobalt to look directly at him, saying the brightness of Cobalt's eyes bothered him tremendously, so Cobalt had always kept his focus on the ground in his presence.

Oh, how I wish this man were like my master in that regard, Cobalt thought.

I don’t usually think much when making out with my girlfriend, but right now I think I might be dying.

The first thing I see when I open my eyes, is Grandma Tully staring back at me. Her round wrinkled face hovers over me. Her crescent shaped eyes, pitch-black at the center, open wide as if surprised by the appearance of my blue orbs. “Ah ha!” she sputters, as my eyes snap shut.

Inside the Peach Orchard Inn, Lord Liu Jie counted around two hundred recruits. He sighed. To bring peace, we must attack our brothers. Beside him on the narrow stair’s landing, Jie’s general drained a tankard and slammed the metal cup against the stair's supporting pillar. General Tong’s armor emphasized his girth and the single eyebrow, bristling mustache and beard completed an intimidating picture, reminding everyone why they’d come.

Two men-at-arms threw Leah, trembling, at Duke Ruben's feet.

Tyler Goode didn’t know the man’s real name until he read the obituary three days later. Everyone called the guy Brute. It fit him well. He’d become a legend in northwest Montana for taking whatever he wanted – whether someone else’s woman or a warm bottle of beer – and leaving the victim a bloody, broken mess. He wore his nickname like a medal, as if it were a compliment to his strength and combat skills instead of a summary of his personality. Smart people steered clear of Brute, all three hundred-plus pounds of him. Of course Ty had never been accused of genius.

Ambar Chauhan stood back from the canvas, arms crossed, one hand still holding a paintbrush that dripped small points of ochre onto her smock. She felt no connection to the painting. No pressure from her deadline. No joy for pursuing her life’s passion as her life’s work. Suraj’s death gripped her shoulder tightly; it extracted all of her emotions from her.

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I didn’t like Duncan Jimenez the first time I met him. I didn’t like how he flung himself into the empty chair at our lab table. I didn't like the way his fingers felt -- warm like dough -- when he reached his hand out so I’d shake it. And I didn't like all of his bouncing. His knees sprung up and hit our table, shaking it. My pencil cup tipped over, sending my favorite Albert Einstein pencil into his lap. I glanced down between his legs -- and quickly looked away.
“What are you, ADD?”

It is barely daylight on a chilly fall morning. A light misty rain is falling and heavy fog blankets the mountains where Matt Hampton and Leo Cramer and the other members of the logging crew are working. There is a thick, and very wet, carpet of leaves underfoot which makes it difficult to maintain their footing. Although the day has hardly begun, they have already felled, stripped and nearly finished loading, a truck load of giant logs. This crew has worked together for some time. The men get along well and each man knows his job and can be counted on to do it. Once the final log is placed, the load will be anchored for transport. As this truck begins its long slow crawl down the mountain, work will already have begun on the next load. The men are a good-natured lot and they are joking and wise cracking among themselves as they work. Seconds later many of them will be dead or critically injured.

Four years she tailed him. Lost him twice, once in a mall in Tucson, how stupid is that? Picked up his scent again—the smell of his Social Security number—when he made the fatal error of getting employed on a ferryboat. But she left him on purpose at the Tahlula County Fair. Who wouldn’t? The dope missed what anyone could do: get the stinking the ping pong ball in the fish bowl. A blind monkey could do that, given that fat sack of quarters and the right ambition. That’s why she finally gave up on her daddy: he was flat out of ambition.

L.K. McNeilly

I’m positive Mom wanted me to find her body. I’d been taking care of us both for so many years that she trusted I’d know how to handle things. She’d say, “Arlie, if something ever happens to me, don’t let the police or ambulance boys find me in a compromising position.” Translation: flush any remaining drugs down the toilet, make sure she had on clean panties and tidy up the motel room. These instructions were rote by the time I needed to carry them out two weeks ago.

They found her lying face-down in the dog's water bowl. Just floating there, motionless, tan skin baking under a relentless July sun.
At least, that's what Ebbson's Marshal, Jesse Clacher, managed to gather from the frantic, bickering twins standing in front of him.

I’m sure there was a time when I didn’t love Jessica Sterling. It would have to have been before we got married though, and that was when we were five. It was a simple ceremony: just the two of us in a tree. My backyard, not hers, of course. Afterward, we shared a box of animal crackers. The giraffes were always her favorites, and I let her eat them all. She saved all of the gorillas for me. We bit off the heads of the lions and threw them into the bushes from our perch in the tree. Like all good things, it happened during the summer.

Cayo sat drinking two-penny rum in an overheated wharfside tavern in a town he couldn’t name, and he thought, unexpectedly, of his father. He took another sip of rum and grimaced as it burned his throat. His scalp prickled as if his brain were trying to float and carry it aloft; the room continued its slow orbit around him. A greasy cloud of woodsmoke and tobacco clung to the rafters. The tavern boys pranced about in mysterious patterns, ferrying steins to men clustered in hap-chance groups to dice, play at cockroach races, or swap stories and jokes in four languages. Other men sat alone at the bar or the long tables, brooding or sleeping or waiting their turn with the whores upstairs.

Marli dropped the knife and fled her market stall. She pushed past small children who jumped puddles in loose summer sandals as if enjoying the strange upheaval until they were tugged away by parents who cast terrified glimpses in Marli’s direction. A long streak of blood followed her. It snaked its way through cascades of dirt and debris. It burrowed beneath centuries worth of grime that was being purged from the town. It pursued her relentlessly. As confused shoppers scattered from the market, Elders rushed to tell of impending doom and the town whispered that Marli was to blame for the unprecedented torrent that streamed down unprepared roofs. And for the first time Marli wondered if, just perhaps, they were right to be accusing her.

I do not belong here, but everyone probably thinks so. County Corrections Orange looks particularly right on me. I have that “damaged goods” look. Perhaps once I had potential but now that I’m wearing this jumper that works nights as a traffic cone, I’m just another poor miscreant on her way to a life of crime. Here is the secret though: I never had potential. At least I never had potential to do any good. Just bad, always bad.

Luke was pining for a woman he had never even met. Even in this quiet moment between battles as he lay savoring the precious and, oh, so rare, solitude, his mind persisted in its nagging obsession with Anna Pickett. Yesterday, he sat on a hill that overlooked an Arkansas farm field and watched hundreds of brave young men fall in death, and yet–there she was, still occupying the better part of his conscious thoughts—her, and that mystifying clock tower through which Julia Pickett had entered their lives.

“Do you know what it’s like to die?” Sitting on a bed in the busy Emergency Room of the university hospital, Elizabeth willed herself to concentrate as she held her breath and waited for the answer.

The setting sun bathes the deck in an unnatural light. The men are restless. They have been too long from land, too long from home and it weighs heavily upon their spirits. This night will be a rough one with choppy seas and razor sharp tongues. My hand is firm upon the railing and my body sways in rhythm to the waves. My eyes peer into the fading light as if to see land just beyond the portal. I will get no rest this night.

Oh. My. God. Someone had taken a baseball bat to Albert, and there he was, splattered all over the driveway. His compressed-foam innards were now outards, grinning whitely in the June sun. “And I didn’t even go to UF,” I grumbled, bending over to pick up the pieces of the once-proud University of Florida alligator mascot who had held my mailbox aloft.

The first thing you need to know about me is that my middle name is the letter B. It doesn’t stand for anything. Just B, no period, no full stop. My first and last names don’t matter much in this world. The second thing you need to know is that I have a gift. While the only genetic inheritance at work here is a decent IQ, I have developed a talent. I’ve learned a way of wringing the drops out of the physical universe like a wet towel. I’m no wizard. I’m not psychic. Maybe I’m just the next step on the evolutionary chain. It boils down to this: I have the heightened sensory, auditory and mental skills of a blind man.

Mama called it a castle, but I didn't believe her. Castles were painted in shades of fairy tales. Turrets don’t make castles. Tapestries and ballrooms, mosaics and lounges, French doors and French cooking—these things don’t make castles. Princesses and stories make castles. Our old home was a castle.

Standing ahead of me was the monstrosity that had killed my boyfriend: The Third Gate of Hell. The graffitied concrete walls glared at me with their blood red words, as if warning me not to do this. Ignoring their caveat, I got out of the car and grudgingly inched my body closer to the site. There was very little evidence the accident occurred, just a small, missing chunk of cement in the old railroad trestle straddling the road.

Reading these has been so much fun! Such a great contest.

**

The boat bearing Queen Angharad and her retinue swayed above the bay, each heave of the sailors lowering it inches at a time. She held her chin high, but her knotty fingers clutched the planks until her knuckles were as white as her powdered wig. If a rope slipped or the boat pitched, it would be a race to see if the Queen or Arzhon’s naval career would drown first.

I discovered the picture between the pages of an old book. His face was unexpected. At first, it took my breath away. Oh! Where have you been? For a moment, I imagined him sitting on the steps of an unpainted ramshackle porch, a guitar on his knee, a good floppy-eared dog at his feet. He was surrounded by old black, blues-singing men, and he was teaching them Tupelo Honey.

Novak inhaled the smell of musty Kevlar, gun grease and clean sweat. Body armor creaked. One of the younger SWAT agents was breathing out in short, percussive bursts, like he was about to give birth. Novak could smell the chorizo the guy had for breakfast. Behind Novak, someone was whispering a prayer. If Novak had been the type to pray, he might have thanked somebody up there. In more than four years he hadn’t felt this alive.

The market-day crowd should make stealing it easy. I huddle in the wisp of alley between the barber’s tent and the pieman’s wooden stall. At the smell of those pies—fowl, sausage, goat cheese, berry, curd—saliva gushes into my mouth. My throat convulses. How long’s it been? One day? Two? Better not think about my growling belly. Better just watch and bide my time.

Six faces carved out in moonlight watch me, every one of them motionless, all seemingly waiting for an answer to a very important question. I almost break the silence to challenge the logic of what I’m about to do when Thomas clears his throat and smiles at me. A chill threads down my spine when I glimpse that cracked tooth peeking out from the side of his mouth. It reminds me of the first time we met…though now I realize it wasn’t the first time at all. Not even close.

Being Normal in Commonville was a hard thing for Norm. Norm was not the norm.

A cold win blew through Ana on a warm summer day, blowing her long brown hair free from it's braid, and taking her memories as it passed. She had been kneeling in a meadow, picking the small, wild strawberries that grew there. She tensed as the wind went past, and when she relaxed, she knew something was missing. Try as she might, she could not think of what felt wrong.

Bebe Kante waddled into African Hair Braiding Associates as if she were Queen Pokou herself, come to be praised by her people. Her two year old, a lump on Bebe’s back, dozed in the sling of a colorful pagne, while in front a future member of the Kante family floated in the swell of his or her mother’s round belly. In full body profile Bebe was shaped like a backwards letter S resting atop a pair of ebony legs.
“Bonjour,” Bebe sang out as she closed the door behind her, spread feet balancing her double load.
“Look who’s here,” said Adjour.
Pairs of nimble braiding fingers halted at the sight, some secured combs in loose sections of thick African hair and others left hair sticking out every which way on their clients’ heads. Bebe’s visit was a welcome break from the braiders' duties, and their regulars who knew Bebe were equally delighted. Bending over, Bebe carefully untied the knot of the pagne supporting her son and a young braider lifted the still sleeping child from his mother’s back, passing him around to the admiring women while his mother looked on with pride. Aiella had remained at her station, braiding with intent and trying to appear unimpressed by the two and a half visitors. Bebe spotted her, taking in Aiella's flat stomach.
“Still nothing, Aiella Nebie? I have had two pregnancies in the short time I have known you. When will you give Ibrahaim a fine, fat son like my own?”
Several snickers echoed around the room. Aiella bit her tongue, not wanting to cause an unnecessary scene at work to dampen the others' excitement, but still she resented being singled out so, having been on her feet for five hours straight and in no mood for nice/nasty insults. With nary a glance in the pregnant mother's direction she responded, “You are doing my share in the meantime, Bebe. You look good.”

Daniel Gold was late for his deportation. Again. My parents are going to kill me, he thought as he sprinted towards the train station. He regretted letting his girlfriend stay in bed instead of asking her to drive him to the Portal, but he pushed away the feeling. There was no going back now. Plus, he was too busy debating if he regretted what had happened in Gretchen’s room earlier that morning, or if he even knew exactly what they had done. The sleepless night was blur of breath mints and sweat and hair and possibly a chipped tooth. It already felt like a memory, a puzzle of moments to piece together upon arrival in 2094. That is, if he made it to his deportation on time.

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I’ve come up with a hundred different ways to end my life. But in truth, every one of them scares me. I really don’t want to die, but I can’t imagine any one of those ways hurting more than the existence I have now. At least there’d be no more. I go back to screaming for him to stop. Not out loud. Never out loud. Only in my head. I beg God for the millionth time to send me a way out, even if it’s death. I’m dead already. My soul passed long ago. The continued pain frightens me and the thought that it could get worse has my lips moving on their own volition. “I’m sorry, Dirk.”

When I begin to fantasize about obtaining a life-threatening injury so that I don’t have to go to the office, when a coma sounds more attractive than a meeting with the boss, I consider quitting my job. Never mind that I worked my whole adult life to get there. It happens one black Wednesday in the cave of a Northwest winter. As usual, I start the day by pleading with someone in my head. I haven’t figured out why I continue to beseech since I already know there’s no such thing as God. My parents taught me, from a tender age, about the nonexistence of forces beyond our mortal vision.

Although I didn’t know it, this was the night they killed him. I didn't know who they were then, didn't know the devastation they would bring us. Didn't realise the delicate balance of our marriage was such a fragile thing.

Lesandro d’Orsino decided the poet Dante should have named the onerous search for a bride as one of the seven levels of the Inferno. If he included three days within a cramped carriage, the experience would qualify as the Devil’s own punishment. It hadn’t been too difficult at first, trotting on horseback from manor to castle throughout the spring and summer. The girls themselves were pretty enough, if one ignored the fact that they barely possessed two digits representing their age. The pale things even tried to flirt, coaxed by hard-eyed parents.

The disintegration of my mother’s boyfriend—former Julliard prodigy, current schizophrenic madman—was a slow boil, but his final demise was swift. In the beginning we thought he was eccentric. His savant-like talent allowed him to hear a song once and then play it on the piano and sing the lyrics with perfect pitch. The first time he showcased this talent to me was with “Borderline” by Madonna, which I played for him from the kitchen clock radio.

First I smell the burning rubber... Then I hear the screaming. Dark. My head hits something stiff... something––someone’s––arm. Leather cuts into my shoulder and stomach... fabric... a... seatbelt. In a car. A deep voice shouts over the screaming, “Get her covered!”

A girl emerged from the woods and stood at the edge of the dusk-gray clearing. She wore jeans, a man's jacket, and a knitted cap pulled low over her forehead. She almost could have passed for a boy, but her long hair and hips gave her away. She trudged through the weeds next to his garden, her eyes fixed on the shack. She carried no weapons. When she was about fifteen feet from the front door, Zeke swung the shutter wide open with the rifle and aimed at the center of her chest.

The tip of a knife pushes into my back and I smile. I’m not sure who it is whispering threats in my ear and to be honest it doesn’t matter. He’s either a fool or he’s hoping I am. No one’s dumb enough to kill me. Not today at least. Not here.

Max Brunner

The last thing I saw was the warm, red slick of my own blood, pooling on the stone floor around me. I tried to speak. I tried calling out for the guards or for my lady but failed, choking on my tongue. Nor, do I think, could I have found the words. My mind swam thick with pain, for the man hadn't cut my neck deeply enough. As I lay bleeding, every nerve screamed out in anguish. Shadows seeped into the edges of my eyes, the strange blackness clouding my vision. The ceiling was spinning, circling and fading with every passing moment until suddenly, the man stepped into my line of sight and the world fixed in place once more.

All it took was a second. Perhaps if the stars hadn’t shined quite as brightly that night or perhaps if that damned boy hadn’t truly believed he could fly, none of this would’ve happened. But that’s not the point. Sometimes wishing on stars doesn’t get you anywhere because the stars have far better things to do with their time than listen to us whine. After a few millennia passed, it only makes sense they’ve stopped caring.

“Hey, Shara! The Gorgon is about to lift off!”
It was Granddad Dennis calling me, I’d been under my VR Hood scrolling through all the specs of the launch, but he wanted me with him when the ship actually took off.
“I know Granddad, I’m coming!”
I ripped the hood off and ran through from my room, Granddad was there on the couch with a space reserved for me next to him. I sat down just in time for the final countdown.
“10” I held Granddad’s hand and looked over at him, his eyes were fixed on the screen, shining with, what I thought were tears.
“9” On the screen billows of exhaust fumes were rising around the base of the gigantic lifting body.
“8” Granddad squeezed my hand “I can’t believe it,” he whispered, “I’ve actually lived long enough.”
“7” My heart was pounding, I’d seen plenty of launches before, but this was different, this was taking the main drive of the Hermes up to Earth Station to begin construction of the starship.
“6” Everything around me disappeared, all I could see was the screen and the ship. I wondered what it felt like to be lying in a g-couch on board a rocket as the power builds up below.
“5” The gantry fell away and the view shifted to a distant camera, showing the stretch of Spaceport One with the massive ship poised to go.
“4 … 3 … All systems nominal … 1 … We have lift off on the initial stage of Earth’s first mission to another star.”
The camera panned upwards as the Gorgon roared its way into the sky, it seemed to be rising impossibly slowly, but that was just a function of distance and the incredible size of the ship.
“Well that’s it,” said Granddad, “I saw the first moon landing and now I’ve lived to see the start of the next Giant Leap.”

The sweet taste of blood lingered on my tongue when I woke on my stomach in a padded, white room. Chains rattled as I sat up, making me aware of the weight on my wrists. I eyed the chains. Great. They were bolted to the wall. Escaping another mental institute was not high on my list.

Early this morning I found a black and white photograph of my father at the back of the bureau drawer. He didn’t look like a liar. My mother, Ute had removed all the other pictures of him from the albums kept on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and shuffled around all the remaining family snapshots and baby pictures to fill in the gaps. Their wedding photograph, which used to sit on the mantelpiece, had gone too.

My last day began without any kind of warning or premonition. I know that’s normal, and I wasn’t expecting a flashing neon sign above my bed saying, “Lucas, this is your last day.” Still, I would’ve liked a subtle hint.

Fray
Wait, Dog. Stay.
She too close. Watch. She not one of them. Not a skweeler. She alone. Good at hiding.
Not good like us, eh Dog?
Want her to go. Want all to go. Valley mine. They ruin. Pigs everywhere. Skweelers hunt me but not find.
Might find her.
Should tell her. Warn.
She has bow. No game left. She hungry like us. Take risks. Stupid.
We hide. She walk on track. I want … but shouldn’t. Should stay here.
Trees sing with leaves. Pig smell. Whistle down valley. Skweeler.
She stop. Listen hard. They come. Get off track, girl. Dog, stay.
Dog’s heart beat hard like mine. What you hear, Dog?
Hide, girl. Now.

Wychwood was positively creepy, Aaron decided, slurping his pop, trying hard to look cool as he walked around the summer festival. Everything was so perfectly normal, so completely all-American that there just had to be some kind of dark secrets lurking under the surface. He smirked, imagining himself in the middle of a horror movie. Newcomer to the small town gets sacrificed. Fireworks to follow.

"To never the reach the age of twenty-five is unjust, but this is the fate I face. I awoke this morning with my life ahead of me, but now, as I sit on this cold, damp, wooden bench, I see my demise clinging to the horizon. I’m a dying man, a man with a ticking clock. We all are, of course, but most don’t consider it or foresee it or give it a second thought. A few hours ago I was one of these free-spirited minds, but life has a way of changing your course in a rather quick and frank fashion."

I’m writing to tell you about the museum gallery and that particular exhibit – the Exhibit of Held Breaths. What it will mean to you I’m not sure; and that in itself is strange when it should mean everything, but I need you to believe me, believe in me. I see The Reeves Institute - to give it it's proper title - on one of the last days, my last days that is. It was a day of all seasons, valiant sunshine, flurries of rain, bracing breezes, sudden bursts of heat. A day I decided to return and see. It had long since closed but I had kept a key. I hardly needed it; the side door crumbled, rotten, into flakes and shards. Inside it was a grim place; dust shored up in the corners, spiders spinning improbable threads, descending not from old beams but from torn polystyrene ceiling tiles interspersed with chunky fluorescent lights. How quickly, I wondered, an abandoned building succumbs to decay, this building that once rose out of its stupor and shone its light far beyond the mean spirited town in which it found itself. Perhaps we never escape the mud of our roots. Even in its heyday the museum-gallery was too colloquial for the city folk, too esoteric for the men in brogues. But that wasn’t the reason it closed, it was more complicated than that.

Michael blinked at the menu in front of him. It was hard to concentrate on the written words with the spoken ones in the back of his mind. He kept having to read them over again when he got distracted. The man behind him was really annoying, thinking thoughts of time and rushing.

In the recesses of Mythenrock’s largest temple, a young woman knelt painfully on the stone floor before her instructor. None of the artistry of the temple’s façade had encroached upon the stark and cloistered prayer room where High Intercessor Rickford, head of the kingdom’s religious order, was lecturing the only child of the king. In the unadorned, octagonal room, the paltry light of a single candle was just enough for Minteir Rickford to recite from the book of the Scholars, but it cast only shadows upon the defiant princess he was trying to reach.

I think I see a foot sticking out from under the guardrail. I'm riding in the car, counting horse-trailers, looking for body dumps on the side of the 5. Out from under, I think drowsily, that's three prepositions right there, although in English that's no great feat. Great feat. Huh. Feat. Foot. "Hey!"

I sip espresso from a Japanese tea cup with no handle. Unlike my adventurous sister, this is the way I travel the world, cup by cup. Over fifty countries grow coffee and I’ve visited them all without ever leaving The Cracked Bean. I’ve sampled Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam from this small cup. My thumb traces the porcelain’s gold-filled crack, a Japanese tradition that honors past wounds. Imagine people repaired the same way; foreheads etched with brass hairline fractures, chips of silver embedded along fingers, bolts of gold shot through hearts. I lift the cup to eye level and stare. At this angle there’s no telling how deep the crack. I can even pretend it’s only decorative.

My cheerleading uniform hung from the top of the closet door like a corpse. I took another brief look at it before slipping into a pair of grey sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt emblazoned with the word Alaska. I shoved each foot into a worn sneaker not bothering to unlace them. My bedroom was still enveloped in darkness. Pulling back one of the red curtain sheers, I watched as the only hint of dawn was still fastened to the horizon line and I was glad to see that the morning dew had already settled onto the ground and no longer littered the air. I reset the alarm on my cellphone, left it on my night table and walked out the front door.

There had always been people who mistrusted the doctors, avoided them, feared them. Men who had convinced themselves that taking care of oneself was a greater sign of weakness than a stubborn march into the advanced stages of disease. Women who kept the latest crops of shamans and snake oil salesmen fattened and well fertilized. Skepticism was healthy. But the prevailing attitudes were not skepticism and even now--after everything--Kallie would not join them. Her rationality would not allow it.

It is when I am a front seat passenger, window open, arm resting on the edge of the door; I see my mother’s hands, angular, mapped with a highway of raised purple veins and freckled with a lifetime of too much sun. When I look at them I see her, pinching a smoldering Winston between her index and middle finger, or grasping a sweating glass of vodka on the rocks. I used to watch her paint her nails hot pink, when hot pink was the new red. Each little stroke of the tiny brush painted on femininity, if she was anything my mother was feminine. In the side mirror I catch a glimpse of her, but it’s me. My memories of her are like the objects in the mirror, ‘closer than they appear’.

This time, Brandon would kiss me. I’d left the college campus at 2 A.M. after celebrating with all the other high school graduates who were eating free food on the quad, visiting booths set up with games, or just chilling to great music. Now I was back, and this time I’d make him kiss me.

Belinda threw down her mother's leg, splashing the room with blood, and burst into tears. "That's so unfair," she sobbed. "Why can't I have a pony, just because I'm a zombie?"
- @sinabhfuil

I watch the girl while she sits on a bench that is tucked away in a corner of the park. Trees and bushes screen her off from prying eyes. But not from us. We stand behind the rhododendrons, Jimmy and I, half-hidden by an abundance of crimson flowers and the trunk of an old oak. With my index finger I trace the choppy curled letters of one of the hundreds of names that are carved in its bark. A heart dots the ‘I’ in the name. I force my eyes away from the carved-out heart and back to the girl on the bench. She smoothes her hair with her hand, tilts her face to the sun that peeks through the thick foliage. She tossed her bike in the grass not far from where we are hiding. The front wheel gyrates in a slowly dying motion. The golden rim catches the light of the sun and bounces off into the park like laser beams at a rave. The girl scratches her boney knee that sticks out from under her flowered Bermuda, absent-mindedly she stares into the thicket that surrounds her. Under her armpit, sweat colours her red tee darker. I slide the goggles down, button up my jacket and look at Jimmy. The goggle’s scratched lenses blur my vision, but not as much that they won’t let me see the foul smile that is plastered across his face. “Let’s not, Jimmy.” I try to will the tension out of my neck muscles.

It wasn’t the feeling of impact reverberating up my arms that reached through the rage roaring in my ears, but the sickening crack that sounded out beyond the skin and muscle tissue that wrapped around his torso. When he fell heavily to the floor at my feet there was another snap behind the thump and before I could take my next ragged breath my sneakered foot was embedded in his ribs. He wasn’t crying, but rather growling at me through the pain, and that was when I realized I was the one standing above him this time, his bat hanging by my side like an extra limb. I watched him curling in on himself, cursing me between gasps from what I hoped was a punctured lung.

It was late in the day in the city of Ducane. Early November, the kind of day where you wake up in the morning to a light frost that melts at dawn. Despite the cloudless sky a persistent rumble of thunder echoed through the soulless building. The lights gave a brief flicker and, with a pop, bathed the room in darkness. The machinery that ran the world came to a sudden stop.

The grave was small but deep. It had to be so scavengers wouldn’t find it. Rosa hunched her shoulders against the chill of the early morning. The shovel bit into the dry earth. Its regular grating gave a macabre rhythm to her task. Wind caught the dust and blew the grit into her mouth and eyes.Fingers of fog touched her skin like a promise, but she knew better. The moisture would burn away once the sun rose, before any of it could soak into the parched ground. It had been so for three changes of the season, and the land was dying.

Of all the women who want to kill me, there's only one I'm truly afraid of. The chick with the knife isn't her. On any other day, even a petite brunette with a nine-inch blade might be enough to make me nervous, but this day all I have to do is open my jacket. She probably doesn't even see my SR9, but is smart enough to guess the purpose of the shoulder holster. That stops her dead in her tracks.

Dying was different this time around. More purposeful and focused. Camille’s decision to do something great and good for the sake of the entire world overshadowed the frantic cries and look of horror on Derek’s face as she mouthed the words, I’m sorry. She lifted her foot out over the well’s seductive darkness and leaned in, relinquishing her entire body to Satan’s persistent beckoning.

Noise filled the giant factory as machines hummed, metal scraped and humans and aliens alike grunted under the weight of the work and the watchful eyes of the supervisors. The sounds blurred together into the usual orchestra of unpleasant music. The workers didn't seem to mind though. They knew there were worse sounds, like the buzz of an electric baton and the sound it made when it contacted the flesh of a worker who wasn’t working hard or fast enough. No such sound could be heard in today's symphony, though that could change at any moment. An unusual and equally unwelcome noise was present today, however. The metallic click of military officers' shoes on the concrete floor of the factory. They walked amongst the workers, all slaves, all under the age of 18, debating between themselves of who to choose.

I wasn't a mother, but I knew the look of a child whose parents were MIA. And the slight blond at the end of the table had all the signs. Even if I didn't know the story Jen had whispered to us, I'd have picked her out as a child in need.

It's like the guy in the joke. You know, the joke? About the guy? Of course you know it. The guy's on his way to work. And his wife calls. It's like that. Everyone knows the joke. His wife calls because she's heard there's a lunatic driving the wrong way on the highway her husband always takes. So she calls his cell. You know, to warn him. She calls to warn him about the lunatic. But the guy says, "one lunatic? They're ALL driving the wrong way." It's like that. But that doesn't mean I'm crazy.

-J.M. Hoffman

A double was levered halfway to my mouth when I got the call from Gwousz. But I had no intention of vectoring a bovey right then. Especially after having already waded well into a binge begun hours earlier to commemorate the loss of my manhood at my ex-wife’s hands. Needless to say it was an ongoing observation. And by ongoing I mean nightly.

John Bowman would have gladly handed over his life’s savings to avoid looking at the face under the white sheet. Already knowing what he would see there made it a thousand times worse. He summoned every last iota of willpower and forced his legs to carry him across the cold, tiled floor. He took in the stainless steel storage units set into the green walls. It was strange that the Cook County Morgue followed the same color scheme as the rest of the hospital: green, the color of healing, with stainless steel trim. Ironic that there was no healing to be found in this room, only death. I don’t want to do this, he thought.

Peter had seen strangers in the road before, but there was something different about this man...something sinister. Most people passed on their way without a thought for what might lie on the opposite bank of the river that ran beside the road, but this man, in his tattered cloak that fluttered restlessly around him, stood bent and still. He seemed to be staring at a spot on the edge of the road, as if he knew that was where a bridge should begin.

It was hot everywhere. The air was thick with waves of summer heat and the unwavering shudder of cicadas singing from the peeling bark of choked trees. It was like this one of the last times I saw my sister awake. She had fallen into the Dream the second she went unconscious. I know—I was there.

From the back seat, I could see the muscle in my father’s jaw bulge as he clenched his teeth. “Go on,” he said, without looking back. “Go knock on the door and see if this is the place.”

When I was born, all of the demons in Hell cashed in their chips to vie for me. Not for want of me, precisely, but for what I represent. I am cursed – or blessed – with the ability to sniff them out. Kind of like a psychic bloodhound. And unearth them. Literally. But in a crazy twist of irony, I am also the conduit for them to buy their way back into heaven. For one month out of the year, it is my duty to help the truly repentant on their journey back onto a nobler path. Unfortunately, during this time, my senses are somewhat blighted, so I can’t smell them coming. Or send them packing, back into the fiery pit from which they arose. Who makes up these rules? Well, at least they can’t harm me during this time, either. That’s the condition of the truce, anyway. Welcome to Hell –

From my perch inside I watch as Mike separates the drapery, creating a pocket of space above the sill just wide enough to press his forehead up against the cold glass of the windowpane. I’ve lost count of the number of times he has repeated these same tired motions. Wrapped in the gossamer curtains the smell of dust and old sunlight draws up memories of a distant childhood - his or perhaps mine, it’s hard to discern. At times it feels as though I’ve lived more than one life and I suppose that in many ways I have. The line that separates us is often blurred.

Hate; despise; abhor; detest; abomination; intense aversion. I doodle black bats around my synonyms. My dad gave me a thesaurus on my 8th birthday and it’s still on my bedside table. I don’t know why I am getting myself worked up into such a tizz. I should ace it. Anyhow, no one expects great scores from the first SAT exam. I pull out my SAT crammer for one last look through. It’s an hour and a half until the test, so still time before jumping on the bus. Ouch! I look down at the fingernail I have must been chewing on the past few minutes and see I have bitten all the way down to the quick again. WTF. At least my self-abuse ends there, well physically anyway. I look at the two bottles on my desk and hesitate between the purple varnish or that foul bitter stuff. I opt for the latter knowing neither will stop me biting for long. Charlene says my nail biting is a sign I’m OCD. Anna just says it’s part of my tomboy phase I never grew out of. That’s the difference between my US and French friends. Even at 17 so many of my high school friends are seeing therapists and psychoanalyzing stuff. My mother doesn’t like me. What’s there to analyze?

I have seen Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. I have ridden red buses and traveled the Tube more times than I can count. I have sipped too many wines in Southern France. I am having a terrible time. It pains me that I’m going to look back on this trip and think what a big mistake it all was. It should have been awesome. I am young, free, and curious. I was going to have a magnificent adventure. I was going to have amazing experiences and learn stuff about myself. I was going to eat delicious French pastries and meet cute Belgian boys and get legally high in Amsterdam. Instead I’ve been trailing along with whom I now believe are the two worst people on earth: my sister and my childhood friend, both named Megan. And now we are trapped in some French city I’ve never heard of and I’m crying in the train terminal because the Megans are mean and they are bossy and because I never cared that much about seeing Big Ben. There is a train to Hanover and I’m staring at it. Well, mostly I’m staring at the cute boy with the purple scarf getting on that train to Hanover. I know a little German and I hate the Megans. Hanover is looking pretty excellent right now. ----Alison Coffey

The cardboard coffin lay in the furnace like a giant box of take-out. The residual odour of smoky charcoal clogged my nose and filled my head with images of barbecued steak – well done – and Herring cooked over a brazier. My stomach rumbled. I would have to make sure I had a big breakfast next time, either that or clean the furnace more often.

Two little girls sprawl half asleep on the sandy bank of a stream beneath a clear blue autumn sky. Midday sun warms their skin, glittering on the fine downy hairs that are not quite fur, but a brisk little breeze stirs the granite dust and crackles the dry leaves under the bushes. Change is in the air.

Nineteen more agonizing steps up the hill and it would finally be over. Her chest felt as if massive stones were pressing down upon her, squeezing every last breath of life from her frail body. But that was not the chosen fate for her today. Her large, blue eyes peered out from her delicate face, which looked pale and gaunt after so much time in isolation. Her long blond hair, now hacked short, lay loose under a thin cap. She gazed up at the tall oak tree stretched before her on Gallows Hill, its branches spread wide open, inviting and comforting against the backdrop of the raging crowd. The tree stood before her, strong and resolute.

If there was one thing Miss Penelope Farnsworthy disliked, it was when people attempted to discombobulate her. Just because she looked like a porcelain doll, did not mean her head was as empty as one. Her pink-bow lips pursed into a knot and she stared at the small boy, who scuffed her doorstep with his shuffling feet, waiting for her response.

The small tangle in Lily's dye blonde skunk striped red hair moved and growled when she brought her index finger to touch it. She stopped in her tracks, her left eyelid twitching and shoulders sagging. She shook her head like a wet dog, trying to throw the thing chewing on her scalp out of her hair.

My name is Samantha Watson, I'm fifteen and I'm an apprentice navigator aboard the airship Spirit of Edinburgh. Or at least this would have been the line I'd have fed you a handful of weeks ago. Right now I could tell you I'm the killer of demons, traveller of worlds, rider of gryphons and mistress of machines the pub songs are about, but probably you wouldn't believe me if I said it out of the blue like this, so I guess I'll have to stick to the old way of telling stories and start from the beginning, back when I was still just an ill-tempered brat getting into people's way as everybody sweated blood to save the airship from the pack of dragons infesting the skies over Tokyo. And may Lord Google and Lady Wikipedia, gods of truth and knowledge, strike me dead if I’m lying.

Rodney rang my doorbell at two o’clock in the morning–proof positive, if there was ever any doubt, that bad luck comes in groups of three. I hadn’t seen my brother, had barely even spoken to him, in more than five years, but I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find him on my doorstep. History had taught me that when phones rang or doors were pounded on at ungodly hours, chances were good that Rodney was involved.

Johnny Brisco woke to a tangle of sheets that were damp with misbehavior, a throbbing headache and half a boner. At his age he thought, two out of three wasn’t bad.

Amiee Gibbs said...

The wind blew from the east the night the ship was first sighted on the Thames.

The hare had only one half-functioning eye and in the death black of the tunnel he saw nothing. The wetness and cold deep in his fur. Against his neck the wild breathing of the fighters stacked behind. The constant tremors through their frames and the hot pulsing of blood. The hare knew this fear and he did not envy it. He ran his fingers lightly down the dragonleather hilt at his hip, closed his working eye and pictured the blade in the sun. His meditation broken by a wretching in the darkness and the splatter of vomit on the stone. He heard curses and then a voice: "Lead us, son of Hoentas."

Less than five minutes inside Speculator Falls village limits and the whirl of police lights invade my rearview mirror. Great. Just how I wanted to start my new life—with law enforcement tapping on my driver window. I push the button and form a strategy as the glass partition disappears.
“Officer, it’s not my fault.” My stubby index finger points to the GPS on the dashboard. “The GPS made me do it.”

The body lay face-down in the grass. Dozens of stab wounds covered the woman’s back and legs, some shallow, others deep.

They shoved us brightly out the door. We walked, always walked, in rows of four by four by four. To my left was C, and to my right was V. I was B. We had always been this way. Headmistress strode ahead of the twelve of us while he breathed too close behind. We wore pale blue silk pinafores with white boatneck collars. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see the golden glimmer of a dozen blonde heads, hair cropped even with our chins. I saw the gold of rounded building tops, each one with dark speck windows that no face would peek through. The sharp-glimmer pebbles pushed against the soles of my feet, but I had no need to look down at them. I walked this road every day of my life. I felt the large golden-waved sun on my skin each of those same days. I trodded to the tower. We trodded to the tower.

It was a good day until fire started falling out of the sky. The sun was just up, and the leading edge of the spring burn was behaving exactly as the kindlers had predicted, which was a relief, because this was Thus’s first year as an outrunner. Ahead, he could hear the high whistles of his herd of capas, and see their broad silver backs parting the grasses, leaving gleaming, vee-shaped wakes behind them. They moved toward the firebreak restively, but without panic. He supposed they must have grazed their way back across it in the night. It didn’t matter. This was the one day that Thus and the other stewards didn’t need to be responsible for their small allotments of the People’s larger herd. A capa could keep out of the way of fire more easily than the People, because capas weren’t responsible for putting it out. He still felt a wash of protectiveness, though. He’d delivered some of the young for the first time this year, turning their tapering heads and soft, wrinkled paws to lie correctly along the birth canal before drawing them, dark and shining, into the world, where the rhythm of their mothers’ hearts gave way to the susurration of the grasses.

Puked-up orange soda. That was it, for sure. I’d spent the whole first week at my new school trying to figure out what the color of the lockers reminded me of. Now, with my arm twisted behind my back and my face pressed right up against them, it finally hit me –the lockers looked like they were covered in puked-up orange soda.

The first time I saw Emmy, she looked lost. Her dishwater blonde hair was waving around her ears, so much shorter than all the other girls in our class, which is what made me notice her right away. Until she entered the school, I was the only one with hair shorter than my shoulders. Long hair was cool then. Even though we were fourteen and in the ninth grade, she looked about ten. Her tiny frame was almost emaciated and her plain t-shirt and jeans hung off her body. The look in her eyes, as I spied her across the courtyard, was pure fear, like a squirrel deciding if it should cross the busy road or not. I watched her watch everyone else, trying to decide where to sit. She’d obviously eliminated the cafeteria as a viable place to eat lunch that day. I knew how she felt. It was easier to hide and not look so alone out in the courtyard where you could sit under a tree or on a bench with a book and pretend to be studying. As she passed by me, tiptoed almost, I called out to her.

In the inkiest, most hair-tingling hour of the night, Jasmin Punk crept towards the house and whipped her knife from its sheath on her calf. She settled her feet in the flowerbeds beneath a low sash window and see-sawed her blade between the sill and the frame. Her nose twitched in satisfaction as the lock shifted with only the faintest of clicks.

"The summer was really great. But it ended fast. Well, I really wanted it to end faster. Probably that I am the only girl in the world to want summer to end. I think that everyone wants to... What do they want? I don't know. I can't read mind. What I know is that I want my birthday to come faster. Not for presents, money and much love, I want that because I want to become 18 faster. My mother thinks that I am still a child and maybe at 18 years old she will change her opinions.

“Holy shit! That would be so cool if it weren’t about to kill us,” Adam exclaimed as he and his fellow firefighters gawked in awe at the sight unfolding before them. The full magnitude became clear as the fire truck made the last turn as it raced toward the scene.

There are many kinds of maps. Maps that mark the paths of rivers through dark forests. Maps that line by line trace the height of mountains, hills and valleys in between. Maps of stars and maps of the moon, and maps which contain folded secrets, if you only knew the trick. Even maps of the imagination. (How many times did I have to check that map at the front of the book while reading The Hobbit?) This was not one of those maps. This was a hand drawn map of human hopelessness. Twenty-two, twenty-four and thirty-five Beasley Crescent. My little brother's paper route, and I was tucking folded wads of newsprint into mailboxes, one by one while he was at home, and sick in bed.

Cape Mare, the sandy spit of land I call home, has a secret. Over one hundred years ago, the Settlers, its first inhabitants, vanished. They left behind traces of their lives, lost treasures that no one but us locals can find. Mac and I especially. And this summer, we're making money off what we know.
The mystery of our island will be available for tourists to buy.
For a dollar a piece.

The clouds choking the sky spoke of snow as Jacob Patterson walked bare foot along the grimy sidewalk, in search of a certain number. He checked the tarnished metal numerals on the tall and ominous buildings he passed, comparing them with the torn, soiled scrap of paper he held in his hand. The ad printed upon it bore a picture of a woman with a serene smile – she promised food and a place to live in exchange for a year. He wasn’t keen on being a “test subject,” but he was starving to death and he knew it. If he didn’t volunteer, he would be giving up on himself and his life. The ad was his last hope in a dying world, a world that was taking him and everyone else with it to the grave.

"Follow me."

The words are whispered as he walks by my desk in music theory class. They aren't a command; they're an invitation. But with Conor, commands and invitations are one and the same. He walks right out of theory, bag slung over one shoulder, and aside from our teacher tripping over her words about Bach and counterpoint, his sudden exit goes unacknowledged. That's Conor's way. If he wants to disappear, he vanishes. If he wants to be seen, you can't see anything but him.

I haven't been able to see anything but him for a year.

There were fish swimming all over the Shopping Precinct, brightly coloured shoals of them swirling past me as I waded against the tide. The colours became a rainbow blur so I took refuge in a doorway. From there watching the stream as it flowed past, made me feel dizzy. I knew I would have to wait, before launching out again. I should have known better than to venture into the shops on a Saturday, but had to go out. I had promised David Collins. I closed my eyes to steady myself. I knew the doorway was safe. A man like me, if he stands very still, becomes invisible. If you hold out your hand, as if begging, they ignore you even more. It can be very useful, at times. But you could also die in that place and no one would notice. When I ventured a peep, of course there were no fish, just people rushing about, hurrying by, going about their business, shopping for things they thought they needed. I wondered how big their houses were to be able to have so many things inside them. I wouldn't want to be living like that. When you own very little, you have room to breathe.

Fontaine.

I order eggs benedict with smoked salmon and champagne hollandaise sauce. It was days after Hurricane Sandy and Babette’s in East Hampton was doing brisk business. Hampton’s Booksellers and even the town’s Starbuck’s had reopened. Charlie Rose and Amanda Burden were dining in one of the outside tables and halfway through their meal Alex Baldwin stopped by to say hello. Virgil was facing the street and could barely hold back his distain as he drained his bloody mary. After a few minutes, he couldn’t help himself and went over to say hello. I stayed in my seat and sipped warm tea. He came back smiling but as soon as they left he was full of sighs and complaints. He had been in a foul mood since the day the storm hit. Ginger from the New York Times had called to politely cancel and Samantha from ARTNews emailed to reschedule.

“They’re acting like they’ve never been in a god damn rain storm before,” he said.


~Stephanie Smith, NY

Whispers hiss through the room, slipping through cupped hands and coiling on eager shoulders as secrets are spilled. None of the shared murmurs reaches my ears, but I’m not surprised. My classmates are more likely to talk about me than to me.

It was a horrible thing to say, but the best thing that ever happened to Briana Leybold was her Great-Aunt Eliza Sheffield dying and subsequently leaving all her worldly possessions to her estranged niece. This was an aunt Briana barely knew and only just remembered her when prompted by the lawyer who had been searching tirelessly to find this poor old lady her last remaining relation.

I didn’t know what was more nauseating, the cab driver’s overuse of the brake pedal or my head spinning to crane at the buildings. Back home, we had one stop light, and that usually just flashed yellow. But, this is what I wanted, a fresh start, an opportunity to move away from the daily hazards of my old school, where bumping into one of the burly football players would usually end with me in search of dry clothes and a taste aversion to toilet water. Years of torment because everyone thought I was different. I’m sorry; I wasn’t into sports, and I didn’t get the girls who fought over whatever new teen pin up boy was popular. The only identity I could forge was behind the safety of a computer screen. There, I was confident. I was someone whom others respected. In short, I was the opposite of who I presented myself to be. But now, I get a new start, a second chance at high school with others who were more like me. That is what Professor Drillings preached, a group of likeminded teens on the precipice of greatness.

Slipping through the midday crowds, she searched the oncoming faces for any indication that she still existed. There were more tourists than New Yorkers pushing their way through the doors of the Fifth Avenue stores, and she could identify at least four languages among the snippets of conversation. The Italians among them would once have looked her up and down in swift, approving appraisal. Compelled by the feeling that she had somehow become transparent, Allegra tried to make eye contact with at least one of the strangers she brushed against. When that failed, she glanced sideways to make sure she could still create a reflection in Bendel's window.

Through his nose Hapi took a deep breath and thought to himself, ‘I’m fucked up.’ He leaned against the bar and began the effort of focusing on the girl in the white tank top who was throwing darts again. She and the dart machine seemed to sway left and right, and a bit sideways too which reminded him of why he hated boats. Or was it that that boats reminded him of when he was fucked up, he wasn’t sure

She closed her eyes against the bright overhead lights and tried to remember her yoga breathing; tried to be someplace else; tried not to wish too hard that this time things would work; tried not to curse her barren, wretched, traitor body for the millionth time for not being able to do the most natural thing in the world.

Kim Jorgensen Gane

I hear them before I see them. I always do. Something gives them away like a thought too loud to conceal. This time it’s two pairs of footsteps, wheels on a tile floor, and angry whispers. Keys jingle in a singsong rhythm with my increasing heartbeat. “Please, keep walking. Keep walking,” I chant to the girl in the mirror as if she has any power to keep the quarreling couple from entering my temporary living quarters. Deep in the apartment I wait, motionless, straining to follow the sounds emanating from the hall. The soft glow of the night-light casts dark shadows over the room. Cracks in the tile stand out like potholes. The gourmet coffee in the pantry tugs at my insides. Images—thoughts—that aren’t mine skip through my mind. It’s happening again. All it takes is a little adrenaline. I close my eyes and let my exceptional hearing do its work.

It was so quiet, you could hear a mouse fart. The mice always broke wind just before daybreak. I took hearing them loud and clear as a sign that my debut crow would run like clockwork. After all, the rodent’s biological proclamation was the first rule of three in the Top-Rooster-In-All-The-Land-Wingbook. It specifically stated: Once the mice pass gas, it is time to prepare for the morning crow.

Four months. One hundred twenty days. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty hours. I refused to do my time in minutes. My old clothes stretch tight across my chest. My pants are too short. I rip off the black canvas slip-on shoes we inmates have to wear, no laces, because God forbid we should try to strangle someone, even ourselves. Suicide is frowned on; the media makes a big deal out of death in juvie. My real shoes, size eleven high-top sneakers, smell a little ancient after sitting in a locker for months. At least my feet didn’t grow and they still fit. For a few seconds my fingers can’t remember how to tie the laces. Then I step out of my cell for the last time, and face my cousin.

The second act nearly always involves fire, that's what Biscuit told me this morning as he adjusted my shoulder plate. THEY'LL TRY TO BURN YOU, he said. He began brushing soot across my cheek bones, his fingertips tracing the patterns of our ancestors, before he continued with fingers that puffed up soot as they spoke, BUT YOU MUST REMEMBER WE WERE BORN IN FIRE, AND SO IT CANNOT TOUCH YOU.

Carrie.L.Roth

My mother holds my face in her hands for a brief moment before returning to the morning dishes. I wish she could hold me like she did when I was a boy. Maybe then some of her goodness would rub off on me and make me a better person.

Zane slouched in the shade of a stall, casually eating a fig, while he watched his prey move with purpose through the market. The man seemed anxious to keep out of the sunlight that was drenching the market in heat and light, but whether it was to keep cool or to protect his shadow, Zane didn't know. Either way, he'd have to be careful.

There were many things that fourteen-year-old Jacqueline Puddle knew. She knew that the name of her town, Slalomville, suited its residents and every-day pace perfectly, because it reminded her of a sloth. Or the word "slow." Or something equally sluggish and sl-ish.

The first man my mother brought home was broken by life. The second, third and fourth were destroyed by it.

They say my father was a hero.

The three year old girl peered down at the old man lying in the bed. He was dying and only the two of them understood what was going to happen. She so new to the world and he so old – they had the knowledge of what was before and what was after.

Four thousand long nights had snaked by, yet I immediately recognized the voice calling to me from the hallway. I begged him to be quiet but he repeated: "Amalia, Amalia... let me in!" Over and over again. I worried that my neighbor would hear the noise and see him there. Just how would I explain the presence of this man in front of my door? My fingers slipped as I fumbled with the lock, but finally the tumblers clicked into place. I pulled hard, the heavy mahogany panel swung inward, and I watched helplessly as Alejandro Mendez fell into the room, and back into my life

My mother had planned a tag sale for that day, Saturday, not expecting my father to die on the Thursday before. At five minutes to midnight, the nineteenth of August, so many Augusts too soon. Linens and sneakers and cassette tapes were piled on tables in the garage, and Mom thought we should just have the sale because we were prepared. We had written prices on stickers, determined whether someone would want a typewriter or a vase that comes to the door when you get a bouquet. We had categorized items by type and made it look like a store and we had nothing else to do that day, that Saturday, as the oxygen tank had been picked up and the dishes rinsed and beds made after leaving in a hurry, a horrible hurry three days before. The arrangements were set for Sunday, so we should have the sale, she thought. We should welcome strangers into our garage and take their dollars in exchange for board games and costume jewelry that we did not like anymore. It would give us something to do. It would be good for us. While the people made new life of our old belongings, my brother stood on the driveway and communicated the plan.

Alice grabbed the knife from the counter and began swinging wildly. It was a good thing Lila and the boys weren’t home or heads would have literally rolled. Ooh, her sister could make her so mad! How dare she suggest Alice move out? The house had been in their family for generations. Who did she think she was to lay claim to it? If only Mama and Papa were still around. They’d set things straight. Chills ran down her spine as she whisked the pesky memory from her mind. What was done was done. In the meantime, Alice knew it was not only time to make dinner, it was time to make a few choice decisions. The loud noise from the knife smacking hard on the granite countertop made her smirk. At least the horsefly wouldn’t be bothering her again anytime soon.

The hieroglyphics sealed Teine's fate. They were chipped into the cave wall and filled with vibrant oil paints. Three suns, each identical apart from the rays, which grew stronger and more pronounced from left to right. Below the suns, a lone mermaid with a fire-red tail swam ahead of her blue-tailed tribe, leading them to a new home.

Kate Lansing

Even the grass grew taller that summer, and it wasn't because Franklin Mattingly was dead. Strange things happened to all of us, the kinds of things that make your eyebrows wrinkle and your bare feet itch. “In time, Sugar Sue,” June Mattingly was always telling me. She was right. Triple's champion turtle won at the Heritage Inn Fair On The Fourth Of July. The Raphine Rockskippers won more games than they lost. Betsy and Lollie Plogger finally stopped ignoring me. And I, Derby Christmas Clark, knocked it out of the park.

I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but I couldn’t help it when my father smiled up at me. It was the same look my two year old gave me when I came home from work. He reached out with his bony hand and pulled me closer. "Don’t cry,” he said, his voice slow and weak from the morphine drip. “I remember it all.”

The forest lay thick with canopies of trees. The humming of birds and buzzing of busy bees could be heard all around. While the sun shone bright and the world stood happy, eight best friends spent their time playing in the wide forest glade. This was a place they had known all their life. This was a place they called home. This was a place where they grew up and lived the free life.

Everything darkened as a head appeared in the gap above me. All I could see was wisps of curls and the outline of Will's jaw but I knew he was angry. He reached down towards me and I grasped his hand, letting him lift me to the top of the rocks in one motion. The waves were much closer now and a shudder jerked my shoulders as I realised the crevice would be flooded in under an hour.
'Jesus Ari, you're freezing.'
Will's voice dropped to a sigh as he spread his fingers and began to rub heat into my skin, pausing for a moment on the ridges of my spine.
‘How long did you last today?’ he asked.
A lie formed on my lips but I swallowed it, knowing there was no point.
‘Until lunch.’
‘They’re going to call your dad soon Ari, you know that right?’

I used to like observing people at traffic lights, but since everything in the world had imploded, it had just become depressing. I caught fewer lip-synchers and nose-pickers and more people crying or just staring into space wondering how to pay off their credit card debt. It was downright sad. Not that anything in my life had ever been particularly uplifting, but the nose-pickers had been a comfort, somehow. They meant that even if my life was its own little tragedy, even if I lived alone and had only enough money to pay for groceries (not electricity, heat, clothes, or cable), other people’s lives were okay. It used to be enough.

(Yikes! I think my comment was eaten.)

I wasn't a mother, but I knew the look of a child whose parents were MIA. And the slight blond at the end of the table had all the signs. Even if Jen hadn't whispered her story to us, I'd have known that this girl had lost it all.

I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew where I was: 8th Avenue, the vein that runs from Greenwich Village to the rest of Manhattan. My tan flats pounded the pavement and my long brown hair flew out behind me. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but I knew I wasn’t going to turn around, un-slam the door of the brownstone, climb the narrow steps to my apartment, and take back what I’d screamed at my boyfriend of five years: How could you? I didn’t know that I would end up running farther than I thought possible, to the foothills of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, to a town called Hecate that you will have difficulty finding on a map, to a farmhouse you would get lost trying to find, to a room whose ghost you will never see.
I only knew that I, Suzie Monarch, was heartbroken.

My father never had much to say. He wasn’t interested in the sit down have a beer how’s life oh that’s too bad it’ll get better kind of thing. No way. Instead, he communicated through grimaces, smirks, and an occasional arm yank. He’s been dead twenty years and my right bicep’s still bruised. My brother had it a little better. Lighter bruises.
The old man never fit in New Mexico, land of a thousand Catholics. He was an only child. Maybe he was alone too much. It made him mean.

Jenny hated the bus ride home. Nothing matched it for sheer misery, not even gym class or spreading chicken manure on Gran’s garden. Today she was late, the last one on the bus. It wasn’t her fault; Mr. Haynes had kept her after school to talk about her history mark. It was one of those oh-so-serious chats about consequences and lost opportunities. She had dutifully nodded and said “yessir” in the right places. Then she had run for all she was worth to the front of the school to catch the farm kids’ bus.

“/.../”

And so it was. The sky grew dark and lightening tickled the rolling clouds over the small island. In the center of a large ring of people stood a dark-cloaked figure folded down onto his knees by the pressure of the vacuous air around him. Oh, how he hated them and their close-minded values! He managed to reach up and cling to the onyx obelisk in front of him for support and fought not only for life, but to defeat these insufferable maij. For centuries this pathetic Council had been no match for him—but this was majick that even he, in his wildest dreams, never expected the Council to have the gall to attempt with all their rules, regulations, and taboos for harmful magic. His thoughts were interrupted by the sudden sensation of prickling hairs on the back of his neck, and the full force of his situation began to hit him: Oh, shit.

I want to know the reason why I was named after Olivia de Havilland, but what if that means asking about my parents’ sex life?

(daniellevillano.blogspot.com)

Magda Hochová and Emil Sirotek sat across from each other in the tavern, mother and son, prostitute and orphan, two strangers. Fourteen years had passed since Magda had last seen her child.

If John and Barbara were his closest friends instead of his parents, he would have told them that he was going back to Nepal because he had fallen in love with a Goddess when he was there before, and he was returning to find her now even though he worried that she may be dead. It was more than just a remote possibility and he needed to know for certain. But since he never even hinted about this before, it was too late to tell them now.

Rosaleen hesitated in the gloom outside the rehearsal room. Her breath came in a shudder, as if she had just stopped crying. She pushed her violin case against the door and slipped inside. A painful double helix of oranges and reds exploded across her vision. She stumbled against a black music stand, setting it rocking. A boy thumped a melodramatic chord on his bass. Laughter rippled through the aisles.

Whenever the teachers at Sunnyside Elementary school got a Paxton child, they expected amazing things. Over a period of ten years, the first three Paxton children graced the halls of Sunnyside. They were athletic, intelligent, and extremely talented. Jeffrey was the family athlete. Emily was a musical prodigy. And Kevin was a technological wizard. So when the youngest Paxton child started at Sunnyside, there was no question that she would be extraordinary. Until they met her.

When someone commits suicide, people naturally think of the big three: pill overdose, gunshot to the temple, carbon-monoxide poisoning. No one considers the several thousand other ways it could happen: impaling yourself on a fence post, cutting your body in half with a commercial saw or laying your head down on a lit stick of dynamite. Vincent’s dad - Paul Rutherford - shot himself through the neck with a mini-crossbow that was strapped to his wrist. The cop that found him said, “You could see straight through the hole to the other side, no problem.”

On June 3, 1965, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Higgins White, the pilot of spacecraft Gemini 4, became the first American to perform a spacewalk. He simultaneously became the only person to release human DNA in outer space, albeit unintentionally, when his spare thermal glove accidentally floated away and became a piece of space debris.

Anika stood in darkness, in silence. Eyes blindfolded, ears muffled, mouth gagged, wrists and ankles bound tight. She was standing. That much she knew. Cool air drifted across her shoulders, arms, the tops of her thighs. But not her torso, lower legs, or feet. So she wasn’t completely naked. A promising sign.

“Hey freak - get off the field!”

Do NOT throw up! This was the single thought running through Diane’s brain as she stepped out of the dugout. She ran to left field, her long brown pigtails bouncing off her back, beating in unison with the chant running through her thoughts.

I don’t know what I was expecting on my first day of school in South Africa. But it wasn’t neat rows of Prep School Barbie. Where were the Africans? And more importantly, where were the boys? Not that I let any of this get in the way of my new-girl-first-day-routine. I waited to be invited to introduce myself and then, deadpan, laid it out. “I’m a University brat. That means my parents move around a lot. This is my seventh school. I never stay anywhere long enough to steal anyone’s boyfriend or best friend. Also, all the jocks can relax. I won’t take your place on any teams, and although I’m smart, I’m kind of lazy; so all the teacher’s pets can relax too. I recommend you all just ignore me, and I’ll be gone soon.”

Daphne wished that her parents hadn’t kept so many secrets.

- Becky Donahue

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It could have been the earth itself humming the low, firm melody. The notes defied the morning chill and the grove of squat, delicate trees stretched mightier at the sound. And though William’s boots plodded to the song’s rhythm, his whole soul pulsed against it, cursing the cresting sorrow. “Grandfather Ulliam?”

The sound of the downpour drowns out all other noise as Raine tucks the squirming newborn under his cloak and sprints through the streets. He'd chosen this city, this desert, to be safe. Why would it rain tonight of all nights? As Raine pushes past pedestrians seeking shelter from the rain, electricity snaps in the air, a minion gathering power from the moisture. Instinctively, Raine looks back. He finds it in the light streaming from an inn window, yet the minion somehow remains in shadow and barely discernible. Raine can only make it out because the raindrops do not touch it.

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When the men carried Ben in from the woods, I was making bread. My fists deep in the warm dough, my knuckles rolling in a rhythm that lent itself to singing. A naked candle in a dish sat on the table near my elbow, adding its light to the purpling evening glow. A tune came to me that I had long forgotten, a favorite song of my childhood nurse, Mercedes. I hummed it, remembering. There was a line, I was sure, about a river that curled like a ribbon to the sea … I puzzled out the words, the play between mar and serpentear. My voice faltered when I heard shouting from the edge of our land.

Kat Carrasco

After eleven years and twenty-one days of living on a floathome, Feenie Bailey should have been able to sleep through a dark and stormy night on the river. But the day had been white-hot, and the evening prickly purple, and for night it blew up in thunder and lightning. A loud, echoing crack woke her, and she thought about Mom, still in Helsinki, on the other side of the world.

Meteor showers—I lived for them. Not to mention stars and planets and the million mysteries of the world. Something about gazing up at the vast night sky and knowing how small and insignificant life was calmed me. Not to mention, it reminded me how unimportant Amblethorn, the school of bitchcraft and snubbery, actually was. People always said the social aspects of school didn’t matter, that things changed once you graduated, but in the moment, the whole BFF and socialization thing felt like the entire world. Granted, the snobby prep school was my stepping stone to greater things. Berkeley. Still, it would have been nice to have a confidant, a friend, someone to say 'Hey' to in the halls. At least I had the stars to keep me grounded.

She was a striking girl, all shadow and stillness. Judith watched her carefully. Twenty years teaching middle school had taught her the subtler ways to approach them, the ones who wore solitude like a shell. If you look away, they disappear. But if you look too close, they withdraw. You have to learn to look sideways.

After we all made love, Greta and I were lying on the bed, twirled up in the sheets, which were still damp with all our sweat, and we were watching Clarence put his clothes back on. I noticed how one of his suspenders looked as if it had been chewed on by a rodent. The same suspender slipped of his shaking shoulders as he died a few minutes later. It hangs over the side of his chair now. I stare at the tiny nibble marks blankly, wishing I were as infinitesimal and insignificant as whatever made them.

The Buford Ulysses Randolph Private School was famous for two things, initials that gave it the most awesome nickname ever…and the Pinching Wars.
Lots of people think they know how the Wars started. I’ve heard it was a secret government project to test us for early recruitment into the military. Stupid. Or that the school staff was behind it in an effort to teach students teamwork. Stupider. It was even rumored that it started with a crazy sixth grader who tried to burn down the entire school. Not true either. I was trying to save it not burn it.

I dreamt of a field of white.
Silver flowers stretched to an electric night sky as lightning flickered over purple clouds silently. Shivering violently, the flowers melted down to stems and pooled across the ground, reflecting what stood above. Like a ghost, I was unnoticed, and four young boys wildly ran past. They were the wind, and they circled, tackling and fighting, biting and clawing each other. Golden hair fell to their petite waists, and the elements of the world burned inside their opaque bodies.
Fire and water thrived in the tallest two, while earth and air consumed the others, swallowing them whole. The dreamland melted, and the boy with water at his fingertips met my eyes. He cried, and I woke up, unable to breathe any longer.


Shannon Thompson
[email protected]
ShannonAThompson.com

Joni Margulis fiddled with her camera, attaching it to a railing on the overlook. Below her was the Schuylkil River winding its way past Boathouse Row to center city Philadelphia. Behind her was the art museum, rose-colored in the light of the setting spring sun. At her feet was her dog, Grendel, big and brown, slobbering over a tennis ball she had been chasing for the last ten minutes. And hastily taped to a nearby bench, unnoticed by Joni or Grendel or the tourists wandering about, was an envelope containing a photo of Joni, dead.

Erika Beebe said...

It would have been easier on me if she just screamed my name.

I sat in Senior English so long I blocked out the world, scribbling flowers on the edges of my notes, and all around Mitch’s name, the boy of my dreams, which I wrote so light anyone else would have missed it.

"They don't call it Butchertown for nothing," the bartender said.

I hated Istanbul, with all that damn yelling and oppressive nationalistic Turkishness and construction everywhere and all that new money and boats roaring around and insufferable whirling dervishness twirling and the worst wine you can imagine (and it cost a lot, too, with the morality tax) so when I finally moved to Beirut, where life was supposedly much better, with better wine and good friends and the charms of a small town on the edge, it seemed like everything would finally be OK. But fuck if I could make heads or tales of the fact we'd been shot at and then that big bomb detonated.

Did he, Phil Schoenthal, a thoroughbred horse trainer, say what I think he said? I looked out the window to my right. The trees smeared, the rumble strips a conveyer belt, an ashen stripe. My right ear felt pressed against the headrest. “I’m OK if I flip this car over and we die because we were supposed to die,” Phil said.

Almost to the cliffs, the fat, leafless stalks crowded the freshly-beaten path till he couldn't see squat. It wasn't that, though, not lurking alien predators, or rumors, or dropping everything to fly up here, or even the explosion in the dead of night. No, it was the note—scribbled charcoal on a folded paper napkin, tucked safe inside his boot. There were always predators wherever people went, and human-nature too, and that could kill you quick as anything.

Two young women laughed and chatted as they exited Macy’s pushing their baby strollers toward The Children’s Place, unaware that they and their children were about to die. They paid no attention to the man dressed in maintenance coveralls wearing a Royals hat pulled low to hide his face and carrying a small blue backpack over one shoulder. They took no notice of the fact that although the late April temperature was in the seventies, the man wore cotton gloves. They were so engrossed in their conversation, they didn’t see him squat and take off his hat, momentarily exposing a shaved head before he pulled a black nylon balaclava over his face.

I don’t dream anymore. Not since I was five. Not since the night my mother tried to kill me. The last dream I recall may not even be real, just wishful thinking or a faded memory before things changed, before she went crazy. Mom and I were in a lush field under an ancient tree. We danced and sang until we collapsed on top of a red and white checkered cloth, out of breath and laughing. We were happy. But that was a long time ago. Ten years to be exact. I don’t dream anymore. There are only nightmares. The same one, every Tuesday, about the night I lived and my mother died instead.

When Nathan came to, the dead girl was crying. He was relatively sure she wasn’t supposed to do that. Come to think of it, he was relatively sure he was supposed to be dead, though he obviously wasn’t. There was not much else he was sure about, but he did seem to have most of his parts, and his head hurt too much for him to be dead.

Walking by the old opium den covered with stones each morning on her way to sixth grade gave Lovely a lot to think about. Lovely knew opium was linked to heroin somehow. And Lovely knew more than she ever wanted to know about heroin.

At the end of Pumpernickel court there sat a dispirited stone cottage. It had a pointed roof of green shingles, covered in a carpet of yellow moss. Years of autumn leaves had long ago filled the gutters, and they were home to a variety of plants and rodents. Ivy grew clumsily up one side of the home, along its chimney and right to the very top. Long ago, a path of paver stones lead to the front door. Now the yard was full of overgrown trees and thorny bushes, with weeds as tall as the mailbox which no one had seen in over three years. Parcels were simply left on the curb under a large brick. The curtains were always pulled shut and daylight rarely reached the interior. From the street it smelled of mildew and rot and within the crumbling walls lay a catacomb of small rooms, hidden closets and numerous cupboards that could hide all sorts of terrible and frightening things from the world. That is if one wished to do so.

Comes a time when going to hell is not a bad option. That time came for me on a cool November night in the autumn of 1968, but I went to California first.

Regina Sokas

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At the Royal Wedding of His Royal Highness Nathaniel Albemarle, heir apparent to the throne of Carminia, I was the bride. I was also the only survivor.

St. Stephen's nave resembled the belly of a great whale, showing ribs of bare wood and allowing flashes of daylight only when doors opened to let mourners in like schools of minnow, to slip about until they found somewhere to settle. The organ boomed, moaned, sobbed and sighed. Rustles, coughs and whispers caused wavelets of movement, and flowers massed around the large casket gave off a scent close to decay. Andrea's gaze rested on where her husband's nose protruded like a grotesque stamen from behind the petals of a purple tulip. She had said goodbye to him that morning at the mortuary, in a small room like a Motel Six and soon she would be free to fulfill his last request which would break her heart.

Bosnia, 1994- Two Years into the War
Each shot had to count. Alaga sighted carefully along the barrel of a rusty rifle. Bullets were scarce, more valuable than money, and he had allotted only three for today. Still more important was the meat he hoped to bring home. His vision blurred. He rubbed a grimy hand across his eyes, forcing them to focus. Hunger, fatigue or hatred caused the head of a large, brown rat to morph into the face of the soldier who had changed his life forever. He steadied himself, sighted again, then squeezed the trigger.

"It all happened so fast," I said to the EMT, police officer, firefighter, and my insurance agent, all crowded around my bed in the ER. The doctor didn't seem happy to have his space invaded with extra people, but no one asked his opinion. Why the insurance guy and the firefighter were there, I don't know. I think they wanted to be able to tell the full story to all their respective cronies. Everyone crowded around my bed, waiting to hear why I decided to run through a picture window. I tried to think of a plausible explanation, something,... anything, but the truth.

I stared at the meat and the meat stared back. It lay in the rabbit hutch, its succulent flesh glistening, wheezing as though every breath were its last. It didn’t have ears, or a nose, or a mouth, but when that blue eye appeared, as bright as a marble in an abattoir drain, it turned towards me, blinked, and held me in its gaze.

"I can't believe I ever trusted him, Star!" Frannie spit out between sobs. She winced as she leaned her head against the mare's warm, wet, sweetly pungent skin, stroking along her neckline with one hand. The mare looked to be in pretty good shape. As she pulled the rope out of her bag and cut it into cords to make the pieces she would need to tie the herd together, blood ran down over her eyes, obscuring her vision and lengthening the amount of time to finish the task. She let out a laugh as she watched her stolen floatplane bobbing wildly in the waves of the Cat 3 Hurricane bearing down on them. She had not been near a plane since the violent wreckage years ago that had stolen all life but her own.

Jimmy sat still, barely able to breathe. His eyes began to water, a reaction to the acrid and sulphur smell. He had been a policeman for, for. Jimmy swore out loud to the stillness in the vehicle. “How fucking long, how many years have I been a cop?” He couldn’t remember. "Okay, I’ve been a cop for a long time and I’ve never smelled a gun that was shot."

Justine Kroft sat cross-legged on the floor, fingers tapping impatiently on the sword laying across her lap, her eyes intent on the naked man bound and gagged on a straight back chair in the middle of his living room. At sixty-three Bill Service kept in good shape, rode a bicycle to work in good weather, ran a couple miles once a week, though he didn't like running much. He played a mean game of tennis with his wife or friends twice a month. Mean being the operative word as he was known to be a gracious winner, but a bad loser. Service was losing big time at the moment, and he was not happy about it.

The wild man, with his only arm, dragged the inert man’s body by the ankle. Nearing the edge of the promontory he became aware of something like a memory spilling out from him like sands from a broken hourglass.

I look, I listen, I learn. I came, I saw, and I conquered. Much good it
does me; they tied me up again today, because they said I am in a
self-destructive mood. But it’s not true. I am not necessarily me.

Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, Charlotte. Yeah - none of them are mixed in this mess. You heard of Sex in the City? Well this, this is Celibacy in the Suburbs. And this is my story. A story about how I wanted a love like Cory and Topanga, Ross and Rachel, Sabrina and Harvey. But no, I get one like Carrie and Big. A dysfunctionaly sane on again off again love triangle stretched over many months. My name is Sebastian Campbell, Seb for short, and this hot mess I call a wonderful life starts my senior year at East Northumberland High. Well, actually, it starts in Cleveland, Ohio a few weeks before hand.

That day, in the kitchen, I didn't know it would be the last peaceful time we'd all have there. I didn't know that in a few days' time, she'd be gone, her face covered in one of the white linen napkins we were all pressing and folding.

The Beast stirred from his long sleep. Hunger and thirst ruled his waking, and he snuffled around the rocks surrounding his bed. A leftover bone from last night's sheep poked out from the matted grass and hay. He crunched it with his back teeth, and clambered up on all fours. A shivering stretch of each back leg, and then all trace of sleep was gone. He bounded up through the cave, snout lifted, scenting for movement, for news. He slid to a halt in the last passage. Far down, framed by the entrance, stood a man and a woman, arm in arm, the man's head resting on her shoulder. A deep sniff, and her full scent hit the Beast's senses. Roses, sea salt, and something else, a smell he had no name for, but which the Man part of him recognised as maple. He inched closer. He had not been near other humans for five years. Not since the night of the curse.

March 1959:

It was the fifth time in the two weeks since my mother’s suicide that I’d come home from school to find my stepfather in my bed.
This time, however, Rob wasn’t passed out and drooling the last of that day’s whiskey into my pillow. This time, he was sitting on my clean sheets in his filthy Southern Railway overalls, polishing the steel of his revolver with a rag and stroking the barrell like it was a wounded tabby cat.

Redallek Castonar fled through the driving rain, heart pounding as the night-police tracked him. The high walls on either side of the path left him no choice but to keep on running. From experience, he knew he would find no grip there, and the thought of the trackers overpowering him once more was too much to endure. Not now, not when he’d come so far, this time. He had to find safety. They were closing in on him. He kept on running, the scars on his feet opening to bleed again on the rain-soaked cobbles. Please the lower gods he wouldn’t slip. That would be fatal. A piercing whine and something flew past his shoulder. They were firing at him, the bastards, truly they intended to finish him off for good. No live-man reward for them, although after three failed escapes his death-price wouldn’t be that much different. How he hated them.

There once was a man who sat, every day, with his little scruffy brown dog, next to a little copper bucket of blue paint, a pile of old newspapers and a cardboard sign that said, in blue paint,

1 diMe i rite suMthin


There once was a man who sat, every day, with his little scruffy brown dog, next to a little copper bucket of blue paint, a pile of old newspapers, and a cardboard sign that said, in blue paint,

1 diMe i rite suMthin


For weeks now, I have had the same dream right before I wake up -- every time I wake up. It starts with a vaguely terrifying Something chasing me. It ends with me aiming a sword rather dramatically at the heart of Someone else, Someone specifically awesome and nonterrifying and, furthermore, distinctively unworthy of being run through with my (or Anyone's) sword. I assume there is a reversal in the middle -- there must be -- but that part of the dream is always fuzzy and unmemorable. On the whole, I have not looked forward to waking up. Or, rather, I have not looked forward to the penultimate event before waking up, but have wished I could just skip it and get right down to business. Tonight, however, I expect all that to change. Tonight I intend to dream about Sebastian.

Schreya Picard racketed onto Highway 54 astride a one-hundred-percent illegal copy of Sticker Tulane's motorbike. Behind her she left the fourteen squabbling neighborhoods of Testament, Oklahoma and one nasty sunrise. If Sticker's scooter could out-run that storm building in from the east, a new life would be hers in Amarillo, just eighty minutes away.

Seven was a coarse year for George Snap. It was when he started to think about death, attraction to girls and how long it takes for a giraffe to throw up. It was this year that father Eugene Snap told George Snap the problem with his birth. They were on a trip to Florida. Eugene Snap took his son to a shack tavern, hunkering down in a corner booth for dinner. The bar was full of red cheeks, stiff collars and hair tied back. Cocktailers threw mugs into outstretched hands with side plates of hard cheese and moldy, beautiful salami. A badly drawn illustration of a mermaid hung above their booth. Young George rolled his eyes. He'd given up merpeople at age six.

“Damn.” Frickin’ holidays were hard enough. All his buddies were in lock down with their families. His relatives weren’t worth hanging up on. Alcohol just gave him a headache. Not a damn thing to do until it was over. And now this. Cody looked down. Red with white fur trim. Who’d have thought.

When the door opened, Katie just stepped inside. Dee tried to pull her back, but her fingers only raked Katie’s hair. She followed her in, and the door slid shut behind them, and they were left in the musty dark, alone. They could hear the voices of their classmates, faintly, through the walls, but were left with no idea, exactly, how to get back out. Dee did what she did best, which was panic.

From the day I emerged at 2:48 and seventeen seconds PM on January 19, 1992 – caul glossy, eyes sealed tight and limbs akimbo, silky lanugo from ankle to neck, a head of black hair so thick the doula commented, ‘Your baby, your boy, he already looks like a star’ – I was an epidermal, biological, respiring and (already) recalcitrant human art project.

masutz at gmail dot com

Fifty years. More than that. Fifty-two. It hit me the other day when I was looking for the car online. Three marriages ago. I thought about those smug people who say, "I wouldn't change a thing." Lying sonsabitches in my opinion. But that's me. Maybe they actually wouldn't. Perhaps they were perfect. Could be they always sidestepped life's steaming cow-pies and made the right choices and decisions, never drank too much, or hurt anyone, or...well, I don't believe it. I'll find the car, I'll have it. I'll die in it if I find it, I'll guarantee you that. It's a metalphor for my life, this blue evanescense of art nouveau's last days, shipped over from Italy. This graceful wraith.

Rose City was made of mud. Glorious red mud that had been baked hard into bricks and moulded into domes and arches, narrow towers and twisting spires; but still mud, all the same. The city surged up from the toppling cliffs of Rose Island like a demented wedding cake; an anarchic pile of buildings crowding around and on top of each other in crumbling red tiers. Stairways, paths and ricketey wooden ladders snaked through this ramshackle maze and tangled around the whole structure in a bewildering, twisting muddle. It was said that only a Roser born and bred could navigate these tumbling streets, but that was all right, because only Rosers were welcome here. There were no signs that said ‘Keep Out’, but mainland folk from across the sea knew better than to walk the noonday causeway to the big gate at the foot of the island. So when Gateman Amos Pedd spotted two black specks moving slowly along the path towards him, he guessed right enough who it would be.

Li Nezha, the Chinese demigod of lotteries and protection, was hammered. And I don’t mean ‘Chinese Mafia’ protection, I mean the guy who saves the asses of the alpha-male insane badasses-after-kung-fu-stars taxi drivers of Hong Kong, Beijing and Taipei (and Vancouver, and Seattle and San Francisco.) To his credit, he drank like the guys he protected. He also fought like them. And tonight he wanted another Hot Rita. Unfortunately, it was the same one that the dragon just ordered.

Sleep had become Lauren’s nemesis. It taunted her with promises of rest yet danced beyond her reach. But then, when she least expected or wanted it, sleep pounced, using the endless rows of pine trees and the roar of the bus’s tires on the asphalt to lull her into a stupor. Her head drooped toward the window. Her eyelids slid shut. And the recurring nightmare started: metal shrieking as it twisted. Screams for help. The sickening stench of coffee.

He smells like fish. It is all I can think so I shift my chair a little to the left, edging away from my stepfather, and pop another piece of cinnamon gum. I inhale deeply taking in the heady scent. Sadly it only takes a few chews before fish replaces the spicy smell again. How can mom sleep with him? I can't fathom getting naked beside someone who always smells like dead trout.

On Sunday mornings in Crabapple, Georgia, most people were in church, but Tyrone Lincoln didn't care to hear what a sinner he was. His only regret about sin was his lack of opportunity to practice it.

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He flung the paper. His banging fist rattled the cup in its saucer, sloshing coffee over the brim."Damn. Now? After seventy-two years?" The cigarette case in the newspaper article had belonged to his father. If the evidence was locked away somewhere by the key hidden inside the case, then he must regain possession of it

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Stella Bella Belusi has lots of shoes. She has pink and orange flowery flip flops. Yellow and white checked sneakers. And sparkly red dress up shoes with tiny heels that click clack on the tiled kitchen floor. She puts on dirty white Velcro shoes when she digs in the sandbox. Lacy blue princess shoes for playing make-believe. And plush pink piggy slippers at bedtime. She wears strappy tan sandals on Sunday. Brown leather loafers with buckles to kindergarten. And zebra-striped high tops on weekends when Grandma takes her to the zoo. Stella Bella wears furry warm snow boots in winter. Slick yellow rubber galoshes on rainy days. And aquamarine water shoes for swimming in the summer. Stella Bella loves shoes.

The great sycamore among the even greater stand of like trees sways in the wind and I am driven pell-mell among these woods and am flung into a creek bed and deposited so in New York’s wild brooding land and it is dry and I lie unmoving and staring at the flat sky that disguises itself in its broad ever spreading conspiratorial way and I am absent at the present moment to add further adjectives to the firmament but am sure the words will come soon and quite rapidly and so I lie and think of how I came into the very many fortunes of having traveled this full week and now I am at the very end of my collected days the very last of the seven.

Please, God. Don’t let me puke on the University of Arizona stage. Or pass out like Ravi Pathik did a few rounds ago. After three hours of spelling word after word after word, I couldn’t think straight. All I could do was pray silently. It was just about over, down to me and Ali McPherson—a girl I’d had a crush on in third grade. If I didn’t puke, if I didn’t pass out, maybe I could beat her.

What I desire, and what I expect, are horrible opposites. But my desires still exist, which makes me a fool.
The reading in Munich two weeks ago was a disaster. But we learn from disaster. My work was called "repulsive" - which, of course, it is. Am I to learn from that? And then the meeting with Felice. The fight in the pastry shop. Am I also to learn from that? I'll continue to write letters. I'll continue to hunt for our apartment. I'll continue to have my hopes. For a while longer - hope. But still, my eyes wince at every mirror.

I’d have to say it began with a combination of my name and my looks. I didn’t have anything to do with either, so I felt a bit disconnected. My parents chose the name ‘Joahna’ – pronounced, of course, Joe-ah-nuh. That alone probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference, but when you combined it with my looks (which I find rather average, truth be told – after all, tons of people have reddish hair, and despite my pale skin and green eyes, it’s still not that exotic), it somehow produced a whole new entity. When I turned five, my parents were approached by a child-talent agent who’d seen me playing in the local playground. “She’d make an incredible child model,” the woman said.

The letter was from Toronto, that much was undoubtedly confirmed by the thin, carefully crafted cursive I was so familiar with. It was cold out as the first tinge of autumn skated through the air, the sky was a soporific gray. Sirius looked on curiously from across the yard whining as I stalled at the mailbox inadvertently holding his mauled tennis ball hostage. Autumn can be particularly grim along the east-coast. The leaves turn and bring all their beautybut one day they are gone, just like that sometimes overnight; then begins the dry platitudes of the gradual decay of the surrounding environment--Autumn is nothing but nature's slow death, nature the root of all love. The letter was from Toronto which meant enclosed was nothing but a piece of paper, that much I was certain of. With this envelope from Toronto I could draw only one conclusion the deed was to be fulfilled and I was going to carry it out with the only person I knew from Toronto, Terry, which meant that George had become terminal why else would Terry send this sign. I opened the envelope to confirm my suspicions, two objects fell: one blank piece of paper and a faded image of our sly faces. Terry always was too cool to let anything get him don meanwhile nausea began to stir inside of me. The envelope and the blank piece of paper meant that Terry was on his way, chaos would ensue. Terry had always been a piece of work and being a family-man myself, with two kids, I had all the excitement I could take. All this unexpected tumult while waiting for the results from Dr. Sinclair, god damn cancer--I was exhausted. Another crisp wind brought me back to reality where Autumn was in its infancy and some leaves had just donned their hues of yellow and red. Although my thoughts were still racing I remembered what Winny always said: breathe. Regardless of her at times annoying persistence like any woman she was always right. Before I could crest the apex of complete relaxation Sirius gave an assertive bark demanding the return of his fraying tennis-ball. "That's right, we came out here to play" I reminded myself hurling the ball and gathering the rest of the mail. An unpleasant uncertainty loomed on the horizon as I made my way inside I couldnt complain yet not until the deafening roar of his 1978 Virago.

It began with the fireflies, as magic often does. Jenny was out in the field behind her grandparents’ house with her brother, chasing fireflies. Billy had caught three already, and she wanted to get another, she’d only caught one. She spied a good one, low-flying and lackadaisical, and followed it to the far edge of the field, past the shed and into the woods.

Amelia stared at her closet door, feet frozen to the ground, eyes darting back and forth, waiting for it to make the first move, but nothing happened. It stood there, taunting her, and it was only a matter of time before she gave in. She moved forward and grabbed the doorknob, the handle cold to the touch, as if she had wrapped her fingers around a pile of ice cubes and squeezed.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said, practicing the exercises her therapist told her to do each time she felt afraid. “There’s nothing in the dark. They're not real. They can’t hurt me.”

ALEX
This is it: the assignment that almost ruined my life.
You will blog online with a student from a public, if you attend this school, or private, if you attend a public school.
Purpose: Interact with your partner through writing and grow as individuals.
Only your English teacher and you both will read this.

Rules:
Blog a minimum of 2x a week
Minimum: 5 lines
Keep the language clean.
Both of us will be reading weekly and grading periodically.

Good luck,
Mr. Goss, Collegiate Academy
Ms. Hershfeld, Lincoln High School

CHIKA
Is a fallen angel-food-cake automatically a devil's-food cake?

ALEX (that’s me)
16.5
White
Jewish humanist/look it up
Privileged private school partier
Sex: on agenda
Those who go are happier than those they leave behind.
Aspiration: class slut

CHIKA (that’s me)
16.4
Self-loathing Japanese female
Sex: See above. Also see HAHAHAHAHA as if!
Aspirations, hopes and dreams: To make enough food for two people and have two people eat it instead of just me.
Do I need a clever aphorism as well? Can I make something up?
Um...spaghetti is ready when it sticks to the wall. Spaghetti is ready when it doesn't fall.

ALEX
What if we woke up one day and discovered that our parents weren't who we thought they were? Would we love them less? What if they were the most loving people in the world? Why would it matter if they were on the most wanted list for twenty-five years and had been drug smugglers and pirates and or murderers? Why would that change all the feelings you had ever known for them? If you only knew them as the good guys, there for you, why would it matter?

I could be the child of some really badass people and not know it. I could be self loathing like Chika, or I could just stay me, criminal parentage and all.

The zombies invade overnight.
The transition isn’t gradual, so much as immediate and shocking. Eyes take on a glazed, foreign quality and skin flakes off in large patches, leaving behind raw and bloody gashes.
The disease starts off like any other: coughing, a slight throbbing behind the eyes and muscle aches. The fever kicks in some time after that, followed by a loss of feeling in the body, sometimes progressing to partial or total paralysis. Cognitive functions and brain activity deteriorate almost as soon as the disease enters the body, a slow growth that accelerates as the heart slows down. Death usually occurs within hours after the patient is incapable of speech.

At precisely 10:41 PM on Saturday, the sixth of August, Selene Doherty sat straight up in her bed. She quickly checked her almanac one last time, pulled on her sneakers and tiptoed across the room. Holding her breath, she opened the door slowly and listened for the usual chorus of nocturnal grunts, snorts and wheezes before slipping into the hallway. Just as she crept by her parents’ bedroom, she saw a flash of light out of the corner of her eye. She stopped, heart pounding. But before she could convince herself that she had imagined it, the light was back. Only now it appeared as a tiny ball with a faint pink glow. And it was suspended, pulsating, in midair. As she stood transfixed, it darted straight at her and stopped right at the tip of her nose. She gasped and pressed both hands over her mouth as she watched it zip up to the ceiling and down to the floor before it whizzed away.

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I was still drunk the morning they sent me to kill Anchorage Lyons. We rolled down the winding highway – the road snaked across the desert like a dammed river driving its way home. Everything felt overbright and hurried as Klein drove me to the place we were supposed to start from. At that point I didn’t know what kind of person Anchorage was. I didn’t know about the trail of broken arms and teeth the man had left in his wake – the welts he’d grown on other men's faces – the subdural hematoma – the jaws wired shut and the bruised hearts and crippled egos. Klein shoved the piece roughly into my hand as we exited the highway. Exit 291, Sunrise Road, Nevada. The sleek sedan curled to the right and around a bend. A bum wailed on a streetcorner something about the end being very, very nigh.

A studded, black glove reached for Jaden’s elbow. She flicked her wrist and the warm handle of her last knife dropped into her palm. Gripping it tight, she swung toward the gloved man. Surprise widened his eyes as she dragged the blade across his neck. His fingers grasped only air before he fell next to her horse.
Stickiness coated the reins, covered Jaden’s hands. Blood. She’d just killed her fourth man. Four … a lump rose in her throat. Killed. As in gone. Like her family.

There are ninety-six ways our patented, non-profit system can kill any number of your detractors. From a torrent of fire arcing from the sky to a massive block of solid screaming bone--and including our perennially popular Backhand of Our Lord and Savior--our system has perfected the art of retribution. The pamphlet you hold contains the Good News of our finest refinement yet, and we'll bet our eternal souls you'll be signing your name to the line by the time you're done.

She awoke with her hand resting on a soft hillock of wavy brown hair. Feeling a collision of concern and fear for the child whose head was on her lap, she pressed his head closer to her belly. He was perhaps one or two years old. She left her hand where it was, inhaling the brackish air, not unaware of her pounding heart, but more focused on the rapid intake of details. The boat (a ferry?) was chugging steadily, no land in sight. There was a wooden bench beneath her. From the ache in her back she imagined she had been sitting for a considerable time, maybe several hours and wondered how long the child had been sleeping. She moved her hand to lift the child’s hair from his face and cried out, a sort of mewl. She hurriedly readjusted the coat so as to completely cover the boy. A few benches in front of her, a man was playing a set of drums and singing a language she didn’t understand. Many of his words were lost in the moan of engine and the crash of surf but she sensed loss in the rhythm. There weren’t many people on deck, even though it was a sunny day. Apart from the musician, most were sleeping and had luggage gathered around their feet, like sleeping animals, sandbags against a possible storm she thought. Suddenly she got up and walked to the edge of the boat, knocking the sleeping child to the ground. He woke and began to cry and then to scream. She watched him, holding her hands to her ears and then turned to grip the boat’s railing. She was without bearing, without memory, without language.

It’d be so easy to blame this entire mess on The Divorce. Everyone saw it coming. I’d known it my entire seventeen-years of existence, and the tabloids had been speculating about it for the last few years. They took the affair angle, filling their glossy pages with snapshots of Dad and his twenty-something co-stars on set, but what they never seemed to understand was that my parents just didn’t get along. I often wondered if they ever had. But The Divorce wasn’t to blame for my current situation. No, I owed that muffin basket of gratitude to the sender of the letter addressed to my mother and postmarked Pilgrim, Alaska.

For the one hundred and fifty-second time in her short career (she’d kept count) Cheyenne Jackson stood to address the court.

Doug Welch

The morning of the storm, Emmett Lefevre stood facing the hickory-paneled wall, staring into the photograph of the man on the horse. He lifted his hand to straighten the slim black frame, then pressed an index finger to the glass, on the spot in the grandstand where he’d sat with Jordi the night the picture was taken.

Work Brain! Work! Closing my eyes for a brief second, I willed the appearance of spontaneous inspiration for the final writing prompt listed on an electronic post-it note located in the upper right hand corner of my desktop. When my eyelids flicked open a moment later, my mind remained as blank as the page on my laptop screen. The blinking curser taunted me and my writer’s block. Look, I know it’s the last day of a three day weekend and all you want to do is veg out; I do too. But Brain, I need you to focus for one more hour. Scratch that; focus for 56 minutes and 37 seconds. You can do it, right?

This was my least favorite part of what we did. I had so many least favorite parts, but visits to the abortion clinic took that cake. This was my third. Claudia said if we were stupid enough to get pregnant, we had to take care of the consequences. She refused to come with me this time. Delyla came with me. Last time I couldn’t walk out on my own but had to be wheeled to our motel. This time it’d be a two mile hike to our campsite. At least it didn’t hurt as bad this time. The anesthetics worked this time. If only they worked on my heart.

When the boy saw the mule, he took off his glasses. Angela, his mother, happened to be watching when he did so, and her eyes opened wide. Children today did not often take off their glasses readily, especially at night, when their parents insisted that it was time to take them off and go to sleep. She was more successful than some because she did not allow Manuel to go anywhere near his room at bedtime with the glasses on his head.

I’ve spent my whole life learning how to be invisible. You’d be surprised at how often people will overlook you if you sit quietly and never speak up, never move. That part’s easy, especially with a name like Zachary Zane Ziegler. That kind of thing assures you will never be chosen first for anything. Even with roll call in class, the teachers always kind of lose their strength by the time they get to my name. I’m not even sure if they really check to see if I’m there.

The breaking point comes with a difficult question. “What parts of the body experience growth at different rates, called anagen, catagen, and telogen?” The color is green, Science and Nature. The stakes are high. This is for the wedge, to tie the game, and it’s clear they don’t know the answer. It’s our big secret, and through unspoken contract we never tell. Indeed, my family, in Leave-It-To-Beaver style, plays Trivial Pursuit. At dinner, between bites of spaghetti and meatballs, someone raises the infamous question, “Anyone up for a game tonight?” It’s addictive, the opportunity to use the random pieces of knowledge we’ve amassed over our brief and uninteresting lives to prove our superiority. The game can take hours. Occasionally the phone interrupts us, and we’re forced to keep the conversation short, gracefully exiting with a vague, “I’m busy right now, I’ll call you back later.” After all, playing games with your family just isn’t cool. Nevertheless, we play. It’s our thing.

The house sat on the cusp of Gutter’s End, a foul little village that marked the edge of the great city Delwyn in the kingdom of Siris Banor. The once purple paint had darkened over the years from dirt and grime. It had also begun to peel, giving it the resemblance of a shedding crow, and parts of the house jutted out at severe angles. The walls that surrounded the city were visible in the distance, so high that the buildings inside were completely hidden. Tall enough to keep the riff-raff out. To keep them where they belonged, in Gutter’s End. Most travelers took the main roads and avoided Gutter’s End altogether, except for those who came looking for this house in particular.

Trinket Parsnips was just a baby. She was two, but still more baby than girl. She had a head full of ferociously red ringlets, fat cheeks, wide green eyes under lashes that curled like a sea wave. She was beloved by her parents, the only child of Gerty and Fred Parnsips. That baby had never lived a bad day in her life. In fact, her life was so good, so filled with hugs, and cookies, and belly laughs, that she could not even imagine there might be things nearby that should scare her deeply. She did not know, nor could her parents ever have imagined, that she was being watched. That she had already been chosen. That these were the last few hours of her life.

[email protected]

THE SADNESS WAS ALL OVER THE NEWS, painted across the television. Even the teachers were affected by the sadness, suddenly our whole schedule shifted and every day we would talk and play games. Charlie Watts left school early, his mom was crying in the office; Cindy Lane said Carol Watkins told her something had happened: police were seen circling the parking lot. No one knew what happened but when I came home I was greeted by sadness as I looked into my mother’s eyes and she was crying—“come give mom a hug,” and she squeezed me so hard my back cracked along with all my bones. She told me to go upstairs to her room and put on Monster’s Inc. so I went, she stood outside with Mrs. Smith our neighbor and there the two of them talked, both of them with their tears. I ran inside but took one last look before I reached the door; Aunt Susan was in the Kitchen, hiding her tears she waved. I ran up the stairs skipping every other stair thinking about the hug and how Aunt Susan had just been standing there. I turned on the television and that is when I saw the sadness—children and parents, all of them crying, firemen and policemen crying too. Twenty-six people dead, what was death; I knew people like Grandma could no longer be with us but what was death? Did it mean to die, or did we just die, was death something else like big and small carrots? I heard the door close and turned on the DVD player. I didn't want to be sad like mother, I wanted to bring happiness. I didn’t know anything about death but I did know how to smile and laugh which made mommy smile and laugh. No more frowns, no more tears and silence.

It was a late summer evening the day James Francis rolled into East Hazel. Although nearly September the frail lingering of summer ebbed and flowed as rumor spread about an Indian summer. Far off was the looming mass of the city and as he searched along the horizon there it lay reduced to a cluster of carnival lights across the corrugated waves. As wind came in from the shore for a while he sat upon the sand and imagined the fanning flames flicker and flash.

my name is andre

The phone rang one morning just as the sun began its arch across the sky. Daylight ran through the tattered shades, from my window the world appeared to be engulfed in sky blue. Littered next to the phone was a half-eaten scone and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. It didn’t occur to me then to answer the phone, as most important things tend to evaporate after a series of restless nights. Another day, another journey through time, Trotsky pawed at the tassels of my pillow, and what would today yield, what mysteries would I be confronted with—what joy? What grief—the myriad of possibilities blinded me and so once more I fell asleep.

R.R

My son, I was born for war. Let me tell you what that means.

Please note: My first paragraph is only two sentences. In case that is considered irredeemably skimpy and/or leaves one panting for more, I have inlcuded enough additional sentences (four) to hopefully satisfy any weight considerations. Here is the first paragraph:
"I believe my siblings killed my mother. What I can’t decide is whether it was murder."

And here are four more lines in case heft counts:
"Certainly they did what they did with intent, which rules out manslaughter.
She didn’t ask to be helped to die, which rules out assisted suicide.
They knew death would be the result of their actions, which rules out questions of degree.
What’s left, I suppose, is euthanasia."

Everyone waited.
They had all come to hear how they would die.
The citizens of Delphi, Greece stood gathered around an ornate golden altar. The fire in the hanging braziers cast flickering shadows on their grave faces, and upon the walls and columns around them. No one spoke. No one moved. A heavy silence hung over the crowd, broken only by an occasional cough, or the cry of a child. Instinct had brought them here, a fearful stirring inside, a stirring that had been with mankind since he sheltered the night in caves, and never strayed far from the firelight – when he was not the hunter, but the hunted.

The way the honeycomb window dividers angled the afternoon sunlight into the room reminded Joseph of a jail cell. Not that he had ever been to jail in which to truly reference from, but such separation of light and dark, from the bright outside bustling city streets and into the gloomy dust filled cave like room where he sat now, made him think of sitting in a small concrete cell where a dismal ray of light entered cautiously, casting it’s shine through a shoebox sized barred window on the roof. He sat on an uneven wooden chair and placed himself onto a rickety prison cot in his mind. His black and gray striped tie itched the hairs on his neck, and he immediately imagined the noose around his throat tightening as the executioner made the final preparations on the knot. The executioner, also known as the general manager, was sitting across from Joseph in the jail cell and paging through his lackluster resume. Joseph knew it would only be a short time now until the executioner pulled the rope and ended it for good, committing Joseph and his entire afternoon of repetitive applications and discouraging interviews to an abrupt finish. Joseph wiped the sweat from his palms discreetly on his pant leg as the executioner, for some unbeknownst reasoning to Joseph, continued to scan the several sheets of paper in front of him, delaying the terminal moment as he asked Joseph questions about his prior work experience and past responsibilities. But when the call from the governor rang through and the executioner released his grip by offering Joseph the position, the lynching scenario morphed into something even more frightening - the realization to Joseph that he was in way over his head.

There were two things a boy could always count on growing up in the village of Briardale. First, to become a man, a boy must always follow in his father’s footsteps. But of course, not every boy in the village dreamed he would become a member of the village dung patrol. Lucky for Dagmar Thorston, there was one other thing he’d learned to count on, and that was his axe.

So..if I said to you...Look...over there is a flower dying and the bucket has a hole...the floor creaks,the fridge hums,the former things now gone.

by melinda

Ten minutes ago I was the smartest man on earth, right now I was struggling to remember my name. I am nothing without my mind.
It was surprisingly warm on this night, the stars were shining brightly through the cracks of the buildings above. I was wearing my uniform stamped with the Kingdom's logo. A dart in my shoulder was quickly draining what little sanity I had left as my best friend pulled me limping along through a back alley. We were running from the government.

The morning Mother said she’d be proud to have me die, my life blew apart like dirt clods kicked against the school yard wall. I woke with her hand hard over my mouth, her beetle black eyes staring into mine. Her long finger at her lips signaled me to be quiet. I glanced toward the bedroom door for Dad. I couldn’t help myself. He’d been dead for over a year, and I still expected to see him.

It’s not getting any easier to tell my mother what’s happened, what she’s missed, what’s been going on in my life. It’s not getting any easier to survive each day without her. It’s not getting any easier to think of her and not cry. Elbow on my writing desk and chin cupped in my hand, I stare at the yellow notepaper. The lines across it as empty as my pounding head. The spot where the tip of my favourite pen touches is marked by a growing dot, evidence that there are no right words.
It’s not getting any easier.

It was the guest of times. It was the hearse of times. Vlonken van Bluder descended from the glossy black vehicle. A few tiny scarlet droplets on his otherwise immaculate white shirt revealed the quick snack he had caught before his arrival. No one cared to bring it to his attention. Respectfully, the perspiring crowd parted— bowing, stepping backwards, dribbling obsequious platitudes into their ruffles. The midnight gala could begin!

Today was Abel Boone’s census interview and there was no way he was passing. He hadn’t killed anyone yet.
“Maybe it will be quick,” he said out loud.
Abel lay on the cold sheet of metal that was his bed and kept sketching. He put the finishing touches of his brain being blown out the back of his head. He flipped through his notebook at the hundreds of death self-portraits he made the night before. Slit throat. Strangulation. A staff to the head. He looked back at his last rendering and added a few more bits of skull fragment.

The Rantart Theatre, once the Grand Rantart, the epitome of savoir-faire and luxury, now abandoned and long closed, was a place of quiet. Its thick, richly detailed wallpaper now curled away from its walls in plumes that repelled the surfaces they had once adorned. Its only remaining music came from a water tap that echoed inside the men’s restroom, a steady tiny dripping beat you had to enter to even hear, a sound that had etched itself with rust and mineral deposits into a previously white porcelain sink, providing proof of the power of little things.

Kara woke up to the 7:45am alarm bell. Her section of the sleeping porch was right under the blessed thing and every morning it would screech into her consciousness and startle her awake. It was not unlike the expected yet always shocking noise made by a teapot signaling its contents scalding and ready for use. Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, Kara momentarily contemplated throwing the covers back over her head and refusing to move. She had been up all night again, listening to the racket upstairs. When would it stop, she wondered? How long could they possibly keep it up before they got bored? Or before they wore the floor down so much that they’d fall right on top of her? Every night it was the same show, the footsteps pacing back and forth across the attic floor. Then she wondered why she bothered wondering; the dead don’t get bored, nor do their steps carry enough weight to wear anything down.

He was born in an abandoned bank vault in the middle of the Great Depression. The people of Oklahoma took this to be a most positive sign. And his father boasted to anyone who would listen, “Now that James Otis is in the world, things can only get better.” And he was right. Things quickly took a turn for the best.

The first time I held hands with Victor Santana, it wasn’t romantic, not at all. We were twelve years old, shooting hoops at his house, when the ring finger on my left hand banged tip first into the basketball. Victor’s father, Will, was there instantly. He probed my finger, and proclaimed it to be jammed. He instructed Victor to hold my other hand while he reset my finger. Victor looked uncomfortable, and unsure as he folded his hands around mine. He gently stroked the back of my hand, and I was surprised by the warmth of his touch. This distracted me, until a sharp tug dislodged my finger, causing me to cry out. In that moment, my eyes found Victor’s. I’ll never forget how scared he looked, or the worry in his eyes.

When I was twelve my cousin Ian went on a walk and came back to us in a coffin. He was seventeen, real, solid and full of life one moment and the next a still, cold thing in a wooden box. It was an accident. The driver simply did not see him, one shadow on the road among many. This was the worst truth of his death: that he could disappear so easily it was if he had not mattered at all.

My life was a whirling cyclone of busyness. I was cramming commitments like cats in a sack. Coincidently one of the tasks literally involved me having to cram actual cats into a sack. Cats do not like being crammed in a sack and I had the arm decorations to prove it, but a few scratches were worth it to be with her. Visions of her shimmered and danced in front of me like a ghost…oh wait…that is her…she was a ghost. She wasn’t the kind who died a tragic death and refused to leave this earth because she was bitter or sullen. She wanted to be a ghost. She chose to be a ghost because she yearned to terrorize others and watch them give birth to fright and what she desired most of all was for me to join her.

Bullshit, Will Ratcliff thought as he readjusted himself on the hot metal chair under the unyielding sun. The dean, hunched over the podium and draped in a shapeless black robe, perspired under his mortarboard while his final sermon loitered just inside Will’s ears. Will remembered being told at orientation of the benefits of the degree he’d earn today, how getting ahead would be that much easier because he’d put in the effort for a higher education. And here he sat, four years later, wondering if the whole thing was a scam. Well, not just him, but the three hundred soon-to-be-minted graduates sitting and squinting along with him.

Amanda Mitchell’s daydreaming was interrupted when her taxi stopped at the Bridgeport Amtrak station. Her forty five minute trip has been miserable and the rain delayed her arrival, but nothing would ruin her day. Her train to Union station was scheduled to leave at 7:58 AM and she was ready to win the battle against the morning commuters, and the families going on vacations to board on time. She was glad that all her medical prototypes were mailed to the conference site given her more room to carry all her new outfits. Amanda just wished her husband was there to carry her suitcase, even if he was not the one to enjoy its content.

Wednesday was the best day to set my boyfriend on fire. That was what his father said, anyway—so he could get it done before anyone else turned seventeen. And I got to watch. Lucky me.

"Carpet-bombed again!" I fumed to myself, and the pile of fresh dog poop fumed back at me.

The corporal’s name was Larry Conrad and he was 23 years old. He sat and smoked on a folding stool in the building. Outside the second-floor window, the nighttime wind swept across the desert. The starlight reflected on the paved highway cutting through the sand and scrub grass. When headlights from a sedan shone in the distance, he cupped his cigarette and held it between his knees, waiting for the car to pass. The sedan pulled over and stopped on the highway in front of the building. The headlights turned off. He crushed the cigarette under the heel of his boot as three men got out and stretched in the heat.

That billboard by the highway made him blench every time he passed it: a life size photo of Misty wearing a sequined ball gown, leaning on her married boyfriend's Jaguar and clutching what Mooney knew to be a double vodka martini in her white-gloved hand. And in faded red, peeling letters as big as she was: "PARTY TOO HARDY? Hardin & Mooneyham is Your 1 Phone Call Away!"
L.J.Nye

The city lay against the far horizon, dark as a lump of coal in the morning light.
I wanted nothing more than to turn around, right there in the middle of the road, with frost-twisted fields stretching away in every direction. If I had my way, I would have left Father and the merchant caravan taking us to Reggen. I would have walked the full month back to Danivir. Back to my friend Elise who laughed even more than I did. I’d be there when she married the boy with the serious eyes, the one her father had picked. I’d go back to Mama’s grave and sit beside it like I used to. I’d tell her Father had found a city without a Tailor’s Guild and that he could sew any way he wished– and that I’d never sew for him again.

Tonight Lydia would speak with her mother, who was dead.
No one had seen her slip away from the celebration. Illuminated by firelight, girls danced in long skirts with bright colors. The boys of the camp watched with eager eyes. Guitars played and women sang. The smell of roasting pig tempted her to turn around. But no, she had to do this tonight. If Sara knew she had left the safety of the camp again, she’d rope her to the carriage. Luckily Sara was distracted by another gullible man. His money would feed them for a month.

Fate is the coincidental act of one’s lifestyle colliding with time and circumstance. A grieving widower, a heroic Civil War general, and a great president struck down in the prime of his life are on the same coincidental collision course headed towards their own separate fates. The universe stands still for a brief moment; just long enough to listen to the widower’s life story designed by fate and written by the hands of destiny.

The lingering effects of the poison clouded Sara Robert's mind but not her resolve to rescue her mother. However, Sara's impending execution would certainly make finding her kidnapped mother a bit more difficult not impossible.

I set out with a simple goal: convince Tony to finally see me as a girl. Not another buddy he chest bumped on the basketball court, but a perfume scented, cleavage showing girly-girl. Instead, my eyes were the ones pried open.

Miss Kelly has one piece of pink paper on top of her homeroom folder, and I know that it is meant for me. Every Friday our teachers distribute the disciplinary demerits, and today she'll hand me a slip that’s worth at least five. Mr. Warbley usually only sends me one when I don't complete his homework, but after class this time, I told him and his horsey nostrils that vocabulary is meant to be learned from reading books and not studying lists. We both know that words have flavor to them that can't be gleaned from the units in that dumb, orange workbook he assigns every week. I could tell, though, from the immediate plague of exasperated wrinkles on his forehead that he wasn’t really listening to my point. For a second I thought that he had finally given up on me, but he made the effort to say that I was only cheating myself. And by the look in his eyes, he really believed it too. His sincerity always depresses me, especially when I’m trying to talk my way out of one problem with him, and I find myself reminded that insubordination at Peyton Prep warrants an extra four demerits.

My name is Wolfgang Weisz. Before i begin the naration of my story there are four things that you need to know about me. First of all, my name is Stefan Schroeder and i know what I I said before but I do have an explanation. Second, I am a ranking member of the SS; a member of one of five elite Special Action Groups. Thirdly, for the past three years I have served directly under SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhardt Heydrich both before his posting to Prague as well as now following his death. As far as anyone could ever be, I suppose I was Heydrichs one and only friend. And finally the fourth fact, the one that may astonish you and likely need a fair amount of explanation; I am a Jew!

To place your body at the water’s edge beneath the moon was to hand it to death. And still, there stood a man. He was hunched, and he whimpered, and he knew how he would die, but there he stood.

The old library doors of wood and glass rumbled apart, and a youngish woman garbed in a colourful array appeared in the opening. With her free hand she fiddled with the key in the lock until both doors were bound together. Beneath another arm she clutched two coffee-table sized books, covers a-sparkle with metallic letters and otherworldly denizens. One book slipped to the ground, and she gathered it up nearly losing her grip on the second as well. The first was a heavy tome wrapped in a glossy dust jacket illustrated in a rich pre-Raphaelite style. A golden nymph of a girl, with a cloud of titan hair adorned in flowering ivy, accompanied by a gentle unicorn graced the front cover. Her exquisite face gazed coolly at some vista beyond the autumn-toned glen she inhabited. The slimmer book had a soft cover illustrated in comic book style of an eldritch folk with hair and eyes as dark as the night enveloping them. One ageless, cheeky face occupied one third of the cover as he peered out at the reader from a ninety-degree angle. The background showed other little men frisking and cavorting on impossibly thin limbs around trees made silvery and shadowy from the castings of the moon. Their joyous and mischievous demeanour evoked the contradictory impression of being child-like and playful yet ancient and powerful.

(N.B.: Australian spelling used)

This wasn’t my first glimpse at post-skirmish carnage. I’ve sifted through the scattered appendages of women and children many times just hoping to come across something formidable enough to justify tossing a frag into the room without proper investigation beforehand. It was however, the first time in a long time that I felt anything resembling pity for the fallen. Perhaps it was because she remained beautiful even after breaking her neck. Maybe it was the look of peace on her face despite her body being contorted in such a way that even the dead would find it uncomfortable. Either way, I felt something akin to empathy for the woman, which brought me back to the days when I was still human.

When the minx walked through my office door I knew there would be trouble. It was late, way past office hours, but there she stood, statuesque in the frame, backlit by the light in the hall. Her thin white dress glowed translucent and revealed familiar curves. I could tell that she didn’t recognize me. Yet. Maybe it was my white hair.

He ran. Terror purged all sense of course or bearing. Speed became the gospel as soft earth clutched at his faith. The dogs’ silence seduced his wit and tightened the jelly of his sphincter with cautious perception. Was Ortega’s confidence such that he would send only his men? A vision of chance dissolved as mongrel wails licked at his rasping labor for air. Briefly stilled lungs confirmed their coming. Quelled horror bounced to frontal lobes on a tsunami and devoured coherence with probing surgery. Impacted verdure disguised distance as powerful legs and hungry bellies pulled closer. The deity of survival bestowed unknown strength. He ran.

Dante had it wrong: there were ten levels of hell. The most severely punished were confined in a tomb of marble and mahogany and tortured by irrational human beings. Kate surveyed her surroundings, felt the pulse throb at the side of her head, and considered martyrdom. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. If there was any mercy in heaven she wouldn't be stuck here forever.

Turning, I stood up and looked over the low dividing wall confirming he was still standing there. He was, but he wasn’t moving much. I knew it was the warm water on the back of his neck that kept him in place—warm and enveloping as it cascaded over his shoulders. He was leaning forward using his hands to prop up the rest of his body, no doubt feeling the coolness of the tile against his blistered palms. I watched as he let the pressure from the shower head push the heat down the valley created by the smooth muscles of his back. Facing front, I sat back down and my eyes found a dirty sock at the base of the moldy tiled wall. I took a deep breath and listened to the hot water’s music echo through the steam as it swirled in the dim light.

“Are you okay?” Cara asked me, as we walked down the ramp from the swings. I couldn’t answer. I was afraid my breakfast of a whole elephant ear and breaded sausage on a stick would accompany my response. I just shook my head and stepped off the shuddering planks—obviously of the highest, most durable design and construction that the Longs & Oakwood Amusement Park could offer. I was concentrating on a prayer that I would not expel the contents of my stomach right there in public. It was a horrifying few seconds. I was on the brink of utter mortification for the rest of my life. You see, it doesn’t matter if you’re almost going to throw up. It’s if you do that decides things. If you can hold it down, you’re like a hero; but it’s that moment when you really have no control over whether ‘conqueror’ or ‘conquered’ will be your lasting legacy that you realize the insanity of having eaten anything for the past two years—much less fried, mystery ingredients twenty minutes beforehand—before getting on a ride where the intention is to go against park rules by twisting and swaying, solely trusting in four rather rusty chains and a cracked kiddie chair. It seemed cool at the time, suspended high above the park grounds, but not so much in retrospect.

Thanks, Nathan!

“Do you know why you’re here, Sam?” Nick Kirchein said through dazzling teeth. Just seeing them made Sam want to scoot his chair back, all the way to the office door and maybe out into the hallway just to be safe. Looking directly into his enamel-y maw was looking into the sun on a hung over morning, and for once he wasn’t even hung over. He was, as it happened, a stone's throw away from drunk, but he hardly saw how that was relevant.

The girl screamed, though it was mostly muffled by his hand. She couldn’t figure out what to think, and wasn’t having much success trying to do anything. Aaron sat beside her - almost on top of her, actually - and held her down firmly.

If that boy had stared at me any harder from the photocopy on my desk, I swear he would have jumped right off the page. In the photo, he's sitting with a bunch of other kids behind a long table. If you don't look at their hands, they could be the same student government/4-H/science fair types that fill up our whole frigging newspaper most weeks. But if you look at their hands, you'll see that they've chained themselves to the table, and if you read the caption, you'll see where the table is in a school board meeting and the kids are mad because the school tried to take away their special Mexican-American studies class and make them learn American-American studies like everyone else.

Sometimes, I think there should be a support group for kids with perfect brothers and sisters. Something like AlaTeen, but without the drugs and stuff. We could all sit around in a big circle in the dingy basement of some church or community center or something and talk about how our perfect family members are systematically destroying our lives.

He ran. Terror purged all sense of course or bearing. Speed became the gospel as soft earth clutched at his faith. The dogs’ silence seduced his wit and tightened the jelly of his sphincter with cautious perception. Was Ortega’s confidence such that he would send only his men? A vision of chance dissolved as mongrel wails licked at his rasping labor for air. Briefly stilled lungs confirmed their coming. Quelled horror bounced to frontal lobes and devoured coherence with probing surgery. Impacted verdure disguised distance as powerful legs and hungry bellies pulled closer. The deity of survival bestowed unknown strength. He ran.

My name is Euphoria Ophelia Barzerkly. I know, right? I’m 13 years old, and a supergenius. I’m not supposed to say that out loud, but it’s true. It’s genetic. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been inventing things. I have this massively cool lab, filled with equipment I’ve mostly invented myself. I share the lab with my dad. You’ve probably heard of him; Dr. Cornelius Augustus Barzerkly, inventor of the anti-gravity ray. Yes, the anti-gravity ray that accidentally sent a church filled with people towards the heavens. That’s why we’re way out here now, in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it’s pretty and all; there’s a forest surrounding us, and a river not more than a five minutes walk, but there are no other people around for miles. And the nearest “civilization”? A teeny crossroads village with a store, a gas station, and a restaurant, if one is willing to loosely define restaurant as a “counter with suspicious meat in a gas station”.

“Boring!” Samantha’s singsong whisper carried to her team over the hidden microphone as she casually strolled down the rain-damp sidewalks of the dark city park. “I don’t think this guy is going to show tonight. It’s too bloody cold.”

Kathy Matzen

What could be sweeter than that singular moment of freedom, when the school bell rings, and the day is finally over? When ties are unfurled and tossed over carefree shoulders, when arms are locked around the waist of only the best friend in the world, when scruffy brown socks give up the good fight and relax around the ankles, when school bags eat dust as they hang off slouchy little bodies, their owners having tossed off all heavy burdens for the day? A few golden moments, that’s all it is, of stolen freedom and sunshine and glory, as a football soars into the air and sun-kissed dust particles rise up to applaud, and an ice-lolly tasting of summer and strawberries is demolished over a couple of shared-licks; and the day is over, and the day has just begun.

Mayben's first, and as it turns out his only, shot of the day was an accidental discharge from his shotgun into the hind quarters of his and Laurel Jane's beloved retriever, Piper. Kaboom. Piper, their dog, tumbled ass over teakettle and fell in a heap.

Lucy stared out her bedroom window toward the cemetery. It was February, and it was cold. Unconsciously, she rubbed her hands together to warm them. In the tiny churchyard, a patch of frozen ground had been cleared of snow, and she reminded herself that an hour ago, she had been one of the people standing on it.

Trish didn’t want to go home. Instead of turning into her driveway, she circled the block. She did this often. By driving slowly through the neighborhood, she caught glimpses into other people’s lives and imagined how they lived. Sometimes her furtive glances were rewarded with an open drape or a shade not pulled all the way down. Gathered around dinner tables, blowing out candles on birthday cakes, or hanging stockings from fireplace mantles, these other people seemed to live happier, more normal lives than hers. She wished she could go home to such a life.

"Mr. Andrews, you are being followed by that girl over there, the one dressed like the angel of death." "Yes, I know." Christopher Andrews had been aware of that girl for the past two hours. She was hard to miss. She wore a long black robe and held a huge plastic scythe. It was a costume party tonight. There were lots of other guests wearing weird costumes. But even at this costume party, she stood out. Chris thought, Maybe she's nuts. She could be dangerous. Will she try to kill me? I hope she does.

HH Johnson is my pen name. My real name is Sergio Valdes

I wake up slow. Feel the gentle rocking of the boat. Hear the sound of her breathing. Hear the slap, slap of water against the hull. Gulls cry while decking creaks with the swell. The air feels wet in my throat and tastes of salt. She is sound asleep, though when she moves I think that perhaps I am mistaken about the soundness. As I watch her face in the dim light of the open hatch she stiffens and flings an arm up over her head as if to protect herself; a low groan escapes her dreaming as if threatened by something only she can see.

Allah-o-Akbar, Allah-o-Akbar
The call woke me up. The mosque was just two streets away and its loud speaker was intentionally set to such a volume, I felt as if the call was meant just for me. I was lying on the charpai my wife had placed on the roof for drying spices and other kitchen stuff. She didn't like it to be used as a bed, believing it a disrespect toward an eatable. Since it was Azan-e-Maghrib , I must had been here for more than 3 hours and there was no way, my wife hadn't noticed my absence. "Ah! No more romance today, as well." I reminded myself with a smile. My wife's only way of showing anger was to stop talking to me and coming late to bed, when I got fast asleep.

“When you’re about to do something bad, like this,” said Lee, “It’s important to take a slug of whiskey first.”
Stu nodded. He ran his hands through his long, curly hair and fixed it in a shaggy ponytail with a black hair tie. Bruce was sprawled in the corner, his big frame twitching, his right shoulder a corona of blackish red, with a brighter red starburst of blood radiating outwards. The lighter red stain had spread to the edges of his collar, sleeve and top pocket. In Bruce’s left hand was a bottle of Jack Daniels. Bruce took a swig and handed it to Stu.

The two hour drive from Westover to Virginia Beach could be peaceful and beautiful. There were roads that lazily wound themselves through centuries-old plantations with a canopy of massive oak trees shading the way. But today, Tim raced us down the more industrial interstate, screaming past the line of cars in the right lane and banging his hand on the steering wheel in frustration at the slow drivers in front of us in the left.

They say loving a child the way one would love an adult is either a sign or mental illness or just plain depravity, but I beg to differ. There could possibly be nothing sick or depraving with the love I had for Milkeyes. One thing about my love for her is that it is real, which is more than I can say about the ones many adults have for themselves.

Atilola Moronfolu

I wear me heart on my arm, just above the wrist, like a cuff of ever-changing colored jewelry. Everyone does; we get along by politely ignoring them.

So they gave me papyrus. Some reward! A few scraps, ragged around the edges, already filled up with writing. Old accounts, old contracts. So I write on the back, smoothing it first as much as I can with a flat rock. On this uneven surface, my symbols are ugly and smudged.

Don't judge me for what I am about to tell you. We all do things we are not proud of to survive. I am not ashamed to say, I would do it all again...only better.

Killing animals is surprisingly easy. It's bringing them back that requires a little more effort. After four weeks of driving I'd become the West Countries leading bunny killer - in a 1995 red Peugeot 306, class and stealth weren't two words that sprung to mind.

The question was,how did the journal get in the bag?
Tristan picked up the book,flipped throught the pages and Abilene's thought streamed out like vivid motion pictures. He snapped the book shut and placed it on his desk, conscience said not to read it.

A woman dances in lingerie hinting at more than it reveals. She pouts and poses, tossing dark tresses. At a nearby table a man and woman watch. ‘Nice boobs,’ the lady says.
‘Not as nice as yours.’ Her partner leans in. ‘Not even close.’
‘Aww, baby.’ She nuzzles him and squeezes his leg. Fingers wander up his thigh.

As he trudged to his corner store in the Queens pre-dawn quiet, Ram Patel pulled at his sleeves and brushed his fingers on the rough tweed of his coat.No, he felt just as frozen. Back home with cold as severe as this, all of them would have huddled around a bonfire, mama, kaka, fua, everyone, attired in monkey caps and British-era overcoats and shawls, squeezing out words between chattering teeth, the same lines they’d repeat every year over and over again, drawing warmth from the familiar --how cold it is this year, so cold this early! Sometimes he thought this chill had percolated into his weary bones and from that store it leached into his flesh, little by little. Just as the all pervasive summer heat had seeped in back home. Or perhaps it was just Arusha.

The smell of sewage filled him with superhuman strength and he spraddled himself across the bottom of the boat, blinked to clear his vision, a “I don’t want to die smelling like urine.” Casey Cumber kicked his legs to stay afloat in the sedimentation tank and managed to get a firmer grip on the overturned rowboat. A condom floated past him followed by something round—a baseball? As he cursed the day he started working at the Decatur Sewage Treatment Plant, Casey tried, yet again, to throw his heavy leg onto the bottom of the boat. What the heck am I doing out here, anyway? My job, of course. My shitty, shitty job. But how did I manage to fall in?

Hell hath no fury like a hurricane scorned, so Betty must have been freaking livid. What was supposed to be a category one storm, spun into a strong two before blasting Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. I stepped onto the front porch of the house my sister and I shared to survey the damage, and holy mother of god was she not going to be happy. I counted at least six pine trees down, half of them laying across our gravel driveway. But what concerned me most was the now missing siding from the front of our house and the roofing shingles in the yard.

It’s impossible to un-know a secret. Once you know it, you own it. It can’t be returned like a ten dollar bill. Or burned like a once-true love letter. The click of a mouse won’t delete it from the conscious mind. It will stick to the walls of your memory like dried oatmeal to a dish. The secrets you wish you never knew become a burden to lug. A bowling ball without holes.

Josie sat in the dark corner as always. Graffiti riddled walls and empty chairs were her only company. A journal lay open in her lap while her charcoal stained fingers clutched the pencil hovering above the page. Hundreds of words flashed through her mind, yet she did not possess the will to choose one and write it down. The first word of a sentence, the precipice of an idea, usually held all the power as far as she was concerned. This is why, most nights, she kept to sketching–the curved lines and shading smudges were easier to commit to.

My sixteenth birthday was less about candles and more about death. Not my death, of course, that would have been much too macabre for my seemingly delicate mother. No, this birthday was about the death I would be responsible for. The death that has clouded my mind since I was nine and walked into the mudroom looking for my polka dot boots. Instead, I found my parents spraying their hands and forearms clean, spattering the porcelain wash bin a diluted crimson.

I drive the car, a prehistoric lump of gray metal, through the woods. Addie grips her seat belt. Our old bodies buck, our bones jar and grate, as the car lurches over the uneven terrain. It would hurt if we were still human. I head to our usual place and pull the car up onto the road's shoulder, on the edge of the primeval green quiet of the woods. The car shudders as if in fear then goes still. Addie picks at a hole in the bench seat's vinyl. She frowns out the window, absently rolling the blood soaked stuffing between her fingers.

The first time MaryAnn died she was twelve years old. Polio was at its peak, claiming or paralyzing over a million lives that year. MaryAnn, however, did not stay dead as every other Polio victim did. If she had stayed dead, many people would later have suffered through one more day of hunger, of suffering, of discouragement, of loneliness, and of ignorance. Had she gone to a permanent grave, the world would have missed her boisterous laughter, the twinkle in her eye, and the smile that only half rose as her grip with Polio still weighed the other side down. The second time MaryAnn died, though, she stayed dead. This is the story of her second and final death.

Decimus Tarquitius Aculeo gazed bleakly about his stylish multi-level villa. It looked so desolate now with the crates and chests filled with every last stitch and stick of the family’s fine belongings, now stacked up in the vestibulum and along the main hallway like vegetables heading off to market. Most of the furniture was already gone while that which remained was covered in sheets of canvas, ready to be taken. The moneylender’s slaves walked back into the house, marching right through the front gate bold as could be, their sandals caked with dust from the street, ready to heft the next load into the wagon. Aculeo clenched his jaw as he watched them, wanting for all the world to kick them out into the street, but holding his tongue. Gnaeus, the toad-like little freedman, strutted about the villa, chest puffed out, touching everything with his grubby hands, barking out orders on what should be taken next.

My mother never came down the stairs in calm or civilized fashion. She bounced, she bounded, and she was usually shouting my name before she was halfway down. Considering that I spent most of my nights trolling the internet for the more interesting subspecies of porn when I wasn’t playing video games, her early-morning cheeriness was about twelve degrees below bearable. Especially when—as it had, lately—it seemed forced.

For a man who was 8,000 years old, give or take a few hundred, Henry Kaufman moved remarkably well, but today he knelt with some difficulty by the deep but narrow hole he had dug at the base of a levee wall by the Industrial Canal. As he lowered the tube of C-4 into the ground, his right pants leg shifted, revealing a calf muscle which conformed to the jagged shape of the bones in his right leg, the muscle as gnarled as the branches of bristlecone pines. The misshapen leg was from his first severe injury, from the first time someone tried to kill him.

School was the one thing I was better at than my best friend, Andy. He kicked my butt in football, his favorite sport and one I had quit playing last year. He spanked me in gym soccer, even though I played on a competitive team and he didn’t. Baseball at the park, pick-up street hockey, backyard badminton. Name your sport, he was better. It wasn’t just sports either. Andy always won when we played video games, card games, and most board games—except Scrabble, but he never wanted to play that. I would’ve really hated the guy if he hadn’t been my best friend since…well, since Andy’s family moved to the neighborhood when we were babies.

I crouched at the edge of the jungle, hidden within shadows and shrubs. Ahead of me, a wide road cut through the mountains, winding its way north to Spring City. For over an hour I had gouged holes into that dark, unyielding asphalt. Planted metal spikes into the road one by one, like flower bulbs. They had bloomed slowly under the cloudy winter sky, but now there was a full row of jagged points gleaming in the moonlight. A garden of beasts eager for their meal.

Right before my fiftieth birthday, I asked my husband if he minded if I had sex with another man. He didn’t answer me, so I persisted.
“Listen, I’m almost 50 years old, I know. Who would want me? I’ve had two kids and a hysterectomy. I’ve got stretch marks, scars and cellulite. And I know I need to lose at least 50 pounds.” No response. “It’s been a long dry spell, you know. Almost 15 years. I think I’m entitled to at least one more orgasm that does not come from something powered by a 9-volt battery.” Still nothing. “Okay, then, I take your silence to mean I am on my own in this. You don’t have an opinion one way or the other. Right?”

When numerous alphabet agencies hunt you, it is best to keep a low profile. Rule #1: Avoid the limelight’s burn. Rules #2 and #3 are to eschew drama’s sting and duck trauma’s pain. However, you’re bleeding from the left temple, the cop on the floor is face-down dead, sirens scream in the distance (but coming fast) and the bad guy has a gun — your SIG Sauer P220 — aimed at your forehead. Worse? This is not at all how you’d planned to tear up Hollywood. It’s apparent you have failed, again, to observe the rules of The Divine Assassin’s Handbook.

Without realizing it, Mara had spent an entire afternoon in the comforts of the sunlit sanctuary, looking once again for solace. She had sought a pew set behind one of the large, oak support beams, in hopes to stay hidden from any counseling pastors and their shallow words of comfort. "Words - there are no words - there are no answers" Mara thought bitterly. Exhausted, between her outbursts of sobs and quiet moments of hopelessness, she rested her head on the pew and fell into a light sleep. In the course of her repose, the evening hours loomed and the diminishing light shining through the stained-glass windows moved slowly across the vaulted room; a shadow engulfed the sanctuary's large suspended cross. Another day, amongst many, was lost to Mara's misery.

“I don’t know how to love him!” She warbled the song from the Broadway musical, breezy, but not quite carrying the tune, as the two of them skipped along, one behind the other, occasionally pushing aside the low branches that overhung the trail from the log cabin to the lake. She led the way and so did not see his smile, wide and playfully impish, but grim at the corners of his lips. You don’t know how to love me?

Poor penmanship has its advantages. Especially if, like me, you're a kid with "anger" and "impulse control" issues. Like when mom found DEAR GOD, I WISH YOU WERE DEAD! violently scrawled in one of my notebooks. Heartbroken over my crisis of faith she sent me to talk to Father U, the religious director at school. I have no idea what the U is for. Ulysses, maybe?. At school we call him FU for short but not to his face because he is a priest and also because he coaches the wrestling team, is kinda jacked, and rumor is he's an ex-Marine. But anyway, I didn't write GOD, I wrote GDD, which is what I call the GOD DAMN (retarded) DOG my sister the basket-case college-dropout dumped on us six months ago that I've had to feed and walk and wash and who also, very inconveniently, showed up dead in the front yard next to a bloody baseball bat about a week ago. So, yeah, poor penmanship saves the day!

Hope. It is as sweet as the smell of distant land. Round and full it soars in lazy circles high above like a gull on the wind. Hope alights on his upturned face as though it were sunshine; reaches out before him like the deep sea. Ancaeus sucks the taste off his lips and smiles—giddy, a delighted boy, a drunken man. The polished and waxed wood of his ship knows his touch, the rub of his feet, and the pull of his hands as he climbs to the prow. He walks along the narrow point of it, out over the water. Ocean spray wets his kilt, washes his feet. Wind and waves blow hair from his face. He holds the ropes and feels the sail swell with speed. Out across the Aegean, Ancaeus scans for the land he longs for, the smallest sliver of an island interrupting the mirror of sea and sky rushing out before him.

Watching the front end of an enormous truck barreling straight toward her, Leslie Matthews feared for her life. Her fingers dug into the cracked, black vinyl seat behind the taxi driver as she braced for impact. Some part of her brain suggested yelling a warning might be a good idea. The words didn’t make it out of her mouth though. They got stuck in her throat and ended in a feeble squeak. She held her breath, couldn’t move.

Lara Wells-Coburn

Wow. I'm the Anonymous writer of "Hope.." who has obviously hit the wrong button!

“Let go! Seanna, it’s done. Stop! You’re KILLING him!” Laney’s words were frantic, almost unrecognizable through the feral screams reverberating inside my skull. The vileness of stealing a man’s soul was not nearly as torturous as the act of restoring it. Never would I have believed giving back, performing a good deed, would cause such horrid feelings. That is, until the very moment I made an attempt to release Dr. Dallon’s essence. Even more excruciating pain followed when I tried to inhale him back.

Simone sits in front of her computer speachless. Angel Makers just broke the one hundred mark in sales. Simone checks the numbers again and takes a long pull from her hot coffee. She hardly registers the new texture of her burned buds. All she sees are the numbers, big numbers. This last order is a huge: 365 custom garters, plus garters for the bride and her twelve maids. Some crazy chick in Pennsylvania is inviting 365 girl guests to her wedding: one for every day of wedded bliss in the year. Simone will have to reign this bride in. Pulling up a convo tab she sets in to write the first of what is sure to be a long chain of messages. She labels it “Ballistic Bride” and begins.

Lyndon Harker entered his apartment to find the living room covered with mounds of paper. Shredded paper to be exact. A dozen tiny heaps of ripped up, cut up, and obliterated stationery were scattered about the apartment. Mostly old newspapers and magazines. His home looked like a mole field.

******

I don’t remember much, I was six years old. But I do remember my mother yelling from the kitchen for me to put on my shoes and jacket. I’d just woken up from my nap and although the clock's little hand was on the three like it usually was, it was dark outside.

******

Not very many people know Thomas Jefferson invented the coat hanger. Or that Ulysses S. Grant got a twenty dollar speeding ticket for riding his horse too fast down a busy Washington street. Lucky for me, my photographic memory and talent and love of useless trivia is exactly what landed me a spot in the Jeopardy kid's tournament of champions this summer. I didn't make it past the first round, though. I froze every stinking time the red light on top of the camera flashed on. Stupid nerves.

When I was seven, I told my mother I wanted to be a courtesan. I didn’t know what it meant, but they wore dresses and beautiful makeup and half masks. My oldest brother Rafeo said they spent their nights at balls and parties entertaining the nobles. I believed him. I believed in that life of beauty and luxury instead of blood and death.

For most people, the day after Thanksgiving was the biggest shopping day of the year. But for as long as Candice Frost could remember, it was known as the day Christmas caught the flu and threw up on her house. For the past sixteen years the day was commemorated by it being covered in countless strands of brightly colored lights, a plastic Santa Clause being pulled by eight (not so tiny) reindeer, and a giant nativity had given the privilege of gracing the front yard.

I gazed east, down the state route and past fields of nearly-grown corn. Eleven miles away sat James Madison High School. For all fourteen years of my life, it was the high school, the one towards which I was inexorably moving year by year until this August, just days from now, when I would finally arrive. And I was never going to see the inside of it.

John le Carre once said that history keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But I can tell you with complete certainty that I have a secret that history will never know.

Gavin Tonks wrote
Tysoe and the world of dreams - The Chilam Balam

Every story has a beginning some beginnings are longer than others, but how do they end? – That is why we follow them

“Please Sir, out of the way,” I shouted as nicely as I could as I exploded down the passageway toward the lecture room.

I had Bayard’s lecture notes and copies of the priceless manuscripts in my bag, slung across my back. Various creatures milled around in the marble lined passage. My shouting cleared a path for me to clatter down. Bayard, my boss a large bay horse gifted with speech, was always early for lectures. He tended to get impatient if I cut my arrival too fine, which was about to happen again.

Not only was the opening of Hell brighter that day but also the fires that arose made it so hot that even God was seen strolling the grounds nude.

Bright blue tights sagged down my legs, making them look more elephantine than lizard-like. Over a long-sleeved turquoise thermal – who buys turquoise anything? – I wore a hideous blue and green spotted t-shirt. The worst piece of the outfit was a tie between a pair of shimmery blue soccer shorts – I had quit before the first practice had finished – and a blue latex swimming cap. I looked more like a psych-ward escapee than a superhero.

The last thing I expected to hear my favorite pastor say: "Don't panic, but I've been arrested."
I almost dropped the phone. And I did panic, but only for a few seconds. Then I took several long deep breaths and tried to concentrate on what my husband was telling me. "Call Larry Crawley," he was saying. Right. That made sense and I desperately needed one shred of information that didn't seem to have come from the twilight zone. Larry wasn't a lawyer, but I knew he would know someone who would be able to help. I called him immediately after hanging up, left a message in his voice mail and then prayed all the way to the police station, my mind swirling with possibilities, none of them comforting.

Sarah Conner was the last person Dylan’s mother would want him to talk to. Anyone could see that she was trouble. Even though the Zenith had declared that a woman’s long hair was the only beauty she needed, Sarah’s dark hair was chopped off at her shoulders, and she wore a silver bracelet on each wrist. But Dylan knew more than that – he was sure that she was part of the high school’s underground resistance movement. He couldn’t afford to get involved in such illegal activity, but he had to know if the rumor was true: if she was Lightning Born, like him.

Most people don’t know this about me, but I have a spaceship. Normally, people don’t have spaceships, especially ninth grade boys. Not even these days. But I do. It’s a small round ladybug looking thing with two seats. It’s a super-compact that’s shaped like a college girl’s hatchback, but don’t call it a chic-car because it’s a rocket ship. I hide it in a barn. I hide it because spaceships mean trouble. You don’t want to get caught by the Air Force. And you sure don’t want to get caught by those aliens. Most people don’t know I have a spaceship, but Brandon does. That’s because Brandon has been my best friend since forever.

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I wasn’t supposed to be home when they showed up at our apartment. But I hadn’t left for school because I overslept. And I overslept because I took a sleeping pill the night before. And the reason I took the pill in the first place—well, I guess that’s where it opens to multiple interpretations.

A small steamer trunk arrived at the tradesman’s entrance of my London residence in Bedford Park on the morning of May 20th in 1887. As all luggage from my recent transatlantic crossing on the Great Morning Star had already turned up the week before, I told the Cunard shipping officer that I firmly believed his delivery to be a mistake. He protested, pointed to the sticker fixed to the wooden trunk, and raised an uncivil eyebrow. His condescending silence said it all: he was English, I was Italian. Quality or not, I was still a foreigner and therefore naturally stupid and unwelcome. I pressed one arm against the puffed overskirt of my day dress and leaned down to take a closer look at the sticker. It was then that I recognized young Pandora’s Southwark's quirky handwriting—each ‘e’ written as a reversed number three—the very same as every ‘e’ in the address she had written on the back of the calling card she'd offered me during our passage from New York to Liverpool. I frowned. There was only one conclusion to be made: Miss Southwark had deliberately crossed off her address and written in mine on her trunk. But why?

Amber’s work boots crunched over the charred carpet as she moved through what used to be a dining room. She swung her flashlight beam along the length of the wood beams supporting the ceiling, flinching at the damage. "I hope that’ll hold."

The time had finally arrived and my choice was made. Surprisingly it wasn’t a difficult choice at all. It was like Ruth had said, “When destiny comes there is no decision.” So with a simple touch, I whispered the words softly, yet felt them course through my whole being. “Be healed.”

Dinner was a hunk of rough bread and a mushy stir of cabbage and beets, with a side of icy silence. I poked the limp mess with my spoon, wondering which would be harder to force past my lips – the food, or the apology my mother was obviously expecting.

Bullet slumped against the burned out reaper. Its iron body was still warm, and Bullet pressed himself into it to fight off the chill rising up his back. His brother, Kenner, tramped back and forth in front of a ramshackle shed fully engulfed in flames. It was a beautiful sight: the shifting inferno piercing the night, orange and red fury cut with low pockets of blue, haloing Kenner’s pacing figure. Bullet was an artist.

A few minutes after noon on May 9, 1978 a man entered a phone booth at Rome’s Termini train station and dropped two telephone tokens into the slot.  Outside the station, noisy Vespas, Lambrettas, and bicycles were zipping through traffic, swerving around taxis, buses, and cars dropping off passengers.  Uniformed police and armed carabinieri roamed Termini, eyeing pickpockets, people selling black market cigarettes from boxes strapped around their necks, zombie like heroin addicts begging for coins, and hustlers from Naples enticing people to play ‘gioco delle tre carte’ (three card Monte).  

“Not again.” Evan cringed as Vince, the resident bully, swaggered toward yet another freshman. A sly grin spread across Vince's face, and with practiced precision, he upended the boy's lunch tray. Meatloaf landed on the top of the boy's head, mashed potatoes flung into his hair, and low-fat milk splashed down the front of his shirt. "Oh, so sorry. Let me help you with that," Vince said, as he used his fingertip to swipe and flick a dollop of potato from the boy's nose into his face.

It was a testament to the deceased that so many people came to the funeral. The whole town had turned out. Did they have enough food at home to feed everyone when they came back to gossip and gorge themselves at the farm? A small part of her realized that most of the people were truly sad to see him go and they would bring gifts of food and mourn his passing. But Rachael was feeling uncharitable. All she could think of was that grandda was dead and that grandmother’s heart was breaking. So was her own.

Delia walks over to the couch where I’m sitting, asks me, “Seriously, why’d you manslaughter your baby?” I tell her she already knows I don’t know. “Huh,” she considers as she crosses her arms. Her hair a tangle of grey curls. Maybe, maybe-not Delia has room to judge: she manslaughtered her mother, who was eighty-three.

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Mozart’s Lacrimosa plays in the air, a composition sung by angels for angels. I close my eyes and listen to the masterful piece. It makes me happy, but it also makes people panic.

When he received his orders to kill the princess, he was glad. Although he did not relish the added weight of another death on his conscience, he knew that this was one that would rest lightly: why, indeed, the greater weight would have been to let her and her kind continue in their arrogant oppression. The princess, he had come to see, was a metaphor for all that was wrong with their country: spoiled and shallow and unhappy, too stupid to see the cause of her own unhappiness. It was the duty of a fisherman to dispose of the rotten fish before he brought his wares to market; he did not weep for the discarded ones, but rejoiced in the fish that were left, firm and untainted.

Samson Gregory awoke one morning to find that his pet cockroach was gone. Sometime during the night, he had abandoned his customized toaster oven; and struck out on his own. Samson would have to conduct his search alone, and quickly. If anyone else discovered that Kafka had gained his freedom, his life would not be worth a rolled up newspaper. His life was not worth much more than that on his home planet of Skeezix, either.

The first to sense something was up were the flowers. They burst from their beds on the cold March morning in an array of color that took everyone's breath away. For a full week before the school's annual trip to the Thorgbottom Chocolate Factory, the people of Rabbit Hole, New York pulled over in front of Reginald Mead Elementary to admire the unseasonable display. The unexpected attention made head groundsman Gus Charles predictably ornery. Every time one of the teachers would compliment him on his green thumb, he'd grumble a defiant rebuke and storm away. He had no idea why flowers were suddenly popping up out of ground still cold with frost. It wasn't natural. The last thing he needed was some vigilante gardening group fussing with the school's landscaping.

Sudden steps on the paved driveway behind her made Nora wish to be as tiny as the ladybug climbing her shoe. It was barely visible—camouflaged by her red sneaker—but Nora watched it move as she crouched down behind an over-sized mailbox. And just as she was about to try and count the spots on its shiny back, the ladybug's wings separated. It almost seemed to Nora as if she was about to be let in on some kind of secret. She let out a breath of disappointment when the tiny thing just flew away and left her there all alone. And only then did Nora remember that she did, in fact, have company.

"Mey, do you think I'm an unreasonable man?" Henrik Stakkis pushed away the papers on his desk. Every detail of Tarrasque business was on them and he spent all his days studying the numbers and watching the growth of his empire. Today was no different to any other except he couldn't concentrate on the reports in front of him. Something had to be done. Meyrem stopped wandering around the room, put his hands on his hips, and rolled his eyes.
"This is about the girl, yes, my friend?" Mey said.

Nothing but cold mist is keeping Mama and me company tonight. We wait at the door of Captain Reynolds’ house, head of our Section’s Vigilmen. Mama is in her usual good mood. She gets that way when she’s delivering one of her constructions. I am in my usual sour mood. Drug from our warm flat, here I stand around, while Mama makes a fool of herself fawning over some great person or other. She is always telling me that these are necessary evils of our survival, but I think she secretly enjoys displaying her smarts and her inventions.

Lilly’s eyes searched the base of the maple tree for the source of the new, intriguing scent. The autumn leaves were thick, the whole forest was coated in them, and it took her a moment to see him, almost completely submerged in the orange and yellow. His tan, flushed face was framed by a mess of brown hair. His eyes were closed and the leaves covering his chest rose and fell rhythmically. He was breathing, not drawing in breath to speak, but really breathing, like pushing-air-past-pulmonary-capillaries-to-oxygenate-blood breathing. Just like the animals in the forest. Only he wasn’t an animal, he was like her.

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Emily looked at her team-to-be. Their faces were smeared with dirt. Zak eyes were bulging like a gazelle’s waiting for an arrow. The sickly glow from their nanocomputers lit up the limestone walls and bounced off the golden artifacts, making them look like Halloween zombies. The stale sandy air was tinged with the smell of the fresh grains that had been stored for the pharaoh’s afterlife. At least they might find something to eat if they couldn’t find a way out. Although, with a larger than life statue of the pharaoh glaring down at them, it would take a lot of guts to risk a curse by poking through his provisions.

Time is a funny thing. People often discover this quite young. You can be in time, on time, buy time, waste time, but you can never trust time. Even though some folks will claim time’s on their side, or their ally is time, or they have time, time doesn’t know them from any other of the trillion souls that live and breathe upon the earth. Time is oblivious to us and likes it that way, thank you very much. “Time,” as most people know it, is purely a manmade manifestation of numbers on a watch or shadows on a sundial, even radioactive isotopes oscillating rain or shine, but Time itself is as elusive as the future to a dying man. We desperately seek to control it, manipulate it and force trains to run to it, but as we never understand from whence the universe came or where it’s going, we’re lost in contemplation of Time’s vagaries. For instance: the past can be as alive to a person as the present, seeming to exist as one within the eye of the observer, just as Einstein posited. To those who insist upon it, time - the present and the past - can be experienced simultaneously. Bartholomew

Time is a funny thing. People often discover this quite young. You can be in time, on time, buy time, waste time, but you can never trust time. Even though some folks will claim time’s on their side, or their ally is time, or they have time, time doesn’t know them from any other of the trillion souls that live and breathe upon the earth. Time is oblivious to us and likes it that way, thank you very much. “Time,” as most people know it, is purely a manmade manifestation of numbers on a watch or shadows on a sundial, even radioactive isotopes oscillating rain or shine, but Time itself is as elusive as the future to a dying man. We desperately seek to control it, manipulate it and force trains to run to it, but as we never understand from whence the universe came or where it’s going, we’re lost in contemplation of Time’s vagaries. For instance: the past can be as alive to a person as the present, seeming to exist as one within the eye of the observer, just as Einstein posited. To those who insist upon it, time - the present and the past - can be experienced simultaneously. Bartholomew Lewis was just such a man.

I awoke to the sound of gunfire. Not the kind of random gunfire one can hear on any given Saturday night in the city. No, this was rhythmic. Mechanized, even. Living in this part of the world I'd heard it many times before, of course, but have never gotten used to it. It was the sound of the morning executions.

Mackey’s been dead fifty years, but I can still smell the sweat on his jersey. If that wasn’t bad enough, they make me wear his gym shorts, too. At least those aren’t crusted in blood. As I listen to the chants from my teammates, I stick a finger through the hole in the jersey, and stretch out what’s left of the faded gray thirteen—Mackey’s number. Every year, some unlucky bastard has to put it on. This year it’s me.

Hours of ear-piercing screams stopped. The abrupt silence held everyone spellbound, despite the medical team having performed dozens of these procedures with labor and delivery always that grueling. Nevertheless, the end continued to affect the staff because of constraints on interference. Prior endeavors to anesthetize the hosts had detrimental effects on the altered gene structure of the fetus, and subsequent team directives mandated the staff refrain from intervention. A moot dictate, since sustaining the life of the engineered fetus during the gestation period required multiple intravenous therapies. The complexity of drugs used, diminished the life expectancy of the mother, so easing the host’s pain wouldn't alter the outcome. As the quiet lingered, the staff surrounding the woman’s inert body stared down at a serene childish face, the smooth pale skin glistening with the perspiration of her efforts. She had taken her last breath.

The nineteenth of August began as an in-between day. Wonderland catered to extremes, but for the staff the daylight hours slipped through the cracks. While the punters walked a road paved with polarities we hunkered down in ennui, hiding our envy beneath greasepaint and tired slapstick - a charade of prosthetics and latex. So the days became in-between months, and before we knew it we’d racked up a year of neither the good nor the bad, but the perpetually ugly.

Safe to say, my five year plan needed a little work.

- Katie Sloane

This was disgusting and embarrassing.

“You still in there, Georgie?” Moira called as she knocked on the bathroom door.
“Yes,” Georgie moaned, which made her stomach lurch in that horrible way that makes you shudder and almost gag. She closed her eyes and her mouth tight and squeezed herself into a tighter ball on the floor. She hated being sick. That was more disgusting and embarrassing than what was happening to her now.

I had almost given up on ever finding them again - until today... When I opened this great tome of a diary to record the event, I laughed out loud as I thumbed through the spider-like scrawl of my past countless entries, the words often indecipherable, interspersed with blotches of black ink where the quill had failed to keep pace with my outpourings. The rantings of an old fool grown sour from too much looking and too little seeing. I had allowed myself to become immersed in the murk of the world and its dramas. The endless cacophony of the cities that I searched had made my gait slow and painful. My fingers had begun to bend inwards from clenching them in soundless frustration. I stretch them now before me and feel the energy return. My quill glides and the words dance in my head the way they once did when my purpose was clear.

P. ROSSOUW

Sometimes you have to do what you’re told. Other times, not. I’ve always been one of those good girls, listening to everyone, well, mainly her. My heart and head are so full of her nonsense. I can’t take her anymore. And I won’t. It hurts too much.

5671Someone screamed in my ear. A heavy object hit the floor beside me as I sat up in bed, not exactly awake, but no longer asleep. It took a moment to realize the scream I heard was my own.

No one has ever returned from Nocturna. The entrance, an enormous square pit sits carved into the earth before me. Stone stairs wrap in zigzags around its border and sink into the earth. When I peek over the edge, looking to find the bottom, a sickly tingle tickles my feet and shoots up my calves. The nervous flutters pool in my belly, leaving me ill and light-headed. Though time is running out, I step back one pace to compose myself and grasp the straps of my parachute.

I tried to kill myself the night my father died. Maybe he kicked it from the sheer shock of seeing me bleeding out on the bathroom floor. But more than likely, he’d already taken his swan-dive down the stairs when mom found me. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation and I’ll probably never know.

It was aliens that killed my family’s prize bull.
I knew this the moment I found Gladiator lying dead a quarter of a mile from the nearest fence, on the wrong side of that fence, and with the gate locked and nearly rusted shut anyway. I knew this because Dad and I spent half a day walking along barbed wire barriers, and not so much as one strand of the three layers was damaged or missing from one fence post to the next. I knew this because there was no way that bull could’ve gotten under or in between those wires, and he didn’t clear them because at one full ton Gladiator couldn’t jump over his own turds.

When I look back at my family five years ago, I picture the Grade 2 art project we did on symmetry, where we each got half a face split down the middle from forehead to chin. It could be a person, a lion, anything with a face. If you got the right half, you pasted it onto white paper and drew the left. Mine was a blue parakeet. But that is not what I see when I look back. I see Aiden’s drawing, a drawing that infuriated the sub, Miss Rogers. She gave him the left half an orangutan with its hand pressed on top of its head, orange fur poking up between dark, leathery fingers. He took ages to pick up his pencil, unfazed by Miss Rogers’ sighs as she paced past our table of four. When he finished, she snatched it up. His two halves didn’t even connect. The zig-zag line he drew between them was a few centimeters wide. The new side wasn’t an orangutan at all, but a man with a mustache raising his arm and pointing a gun down at the head of the animal side. Miss Rogers ordered Aiden to the time-out corner. “We don’t do weapons in school. You know that. I’ll be sending a note home to your parents,” she said, having no clue that his dad was in prison and his mother lived in a nursing home on the south shore of Nova Scotia, about an hour away. I knew, because he showed me a picture once. His mother had hair the colour of that orangutan. She was staring at a lawn while Aiden leaned over the armrest of her wheelchair, trying to show her something on a sheet of paper. So, yeah, it’s Aiden’s drawing with the disconnected halves I see when I think back on my family. That jagged dark line like a bleak column of zeds.

The girl I loved had been dead for two years. The latest, I should say—I’d had as little choice with her as I had with the others, a long line of condemned humans stretching back as far as I could remember. But this one had hurt, more than I would have expected after all this time. I’d heal. I knew that. But I also knew that the moment I glued my broken heart back together the Dagda and his laws would come along to rip it to shreds again.

My legs were throbbing, my hands were filthy, and my knees were raw. I had no food, no soap, and no idea what I was going to do. I tried to think of something that would calm me down. I thought of Oliver. I pictured how his eyes sparkled like sunlight hitting the ocean when he was excited, which was hardly ever. I pictured how his blonde hair fell in his face when he was thinking intently, which was almost always. I thought about four-leaf clovers, and how Oliver told me what the four leaves symbolized. I thought about hope and luck and faith and love, and how at that moment, lying on a straw bed in a cell in a dungeon in another world, those were the only things that could save me.

I’ve done it before. Always alone and from the confines of my room with the door shut and the shades pulled down, but at this point I’m an expert. I remember the first time it happened. I got all panicky because it made me feel like a freak and I hate when weirdness sticks its nose where it doesn’t belong. Plus, my dad got super pissed. I tried to tell him Bill Walton did it, but it’s not really something you can blame on the dog.

"Jobie, get out of bed. Right. This. Minute." I had a dream last night that my teeth fell out. I was in front of Mrs. Allen's Creative Writing class reading a poem I had written about T.S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when I felt something hard and loose in my mouth. “Dare I? Dare I?…”/ I watched as my tooth traveled toward the linoleum. Then another one fell. I tried to hold them in with my hand but they slipped through my fingers. "....RIGHT. THIS. MINUTE.” I remember reading somewhere that people who dream their teeth are falling out are afraid that their youth is slipping away from them.

I would have given Mom a good-bye hug, but StepThad’s arm rested across her shoulder. Like the two of them were glued together. Double hug or nothing.

It was bad enough our new high school’s colors were orange and black, its mascot was a raven, and it was dedicated on October 31st, but when Mr. McKay discovered the body of a student on the third floor landing, there was just no way our town’s new school was going to escape the nickname Halloween High.

Vasiliev Bershadensky stood by the penthouse window overlooking Central Park, New York City. Outside a spring storm was brewing, and the sky grew dark with large purple clouds. Down below people moved along the sidewalk while cars blew their horns and trucks unloaded groceries to high-priced restaurants. It was a typical day in the city. Far above on the twenty-second floor, Vasiliev pressed his forehead to the glass, his hand gripping the report from the detective. He let the paper fall to the floor.

Before the BREAKING NEWS, before my old mom decided she wanted to tear my dad limb from limb, before I moved with Dad and Kathy into the smallest house in Hometown Heights, which constantly reeks of sanitizer, denial, and day-old tacos -- so before all that -- Monday was my favorite day of the week. Mom and I would hop in her Chevy Malibu, crank up Elvis, and roll down to Evergreen Asian Diner, proud purveyors of the best Kung Pao chicken this side of the Great Wall. At least that’s what the billboard said.

Johnny Brisco woke to a tangle of sheets damp with misbehavior, a throbbing headache and half a boner. At his age he thought, two out of three wasn’t bad.

In the western foothills of a mountain range not quite high enough to see any part of the world that mattered, Darke stood motionless amongst the trees, a crude pine arrow drawn in an old bow. The knuckle of his right thumb pressed against his cheekbone and his right eye narrowed to a pin. Eighty yards down the hill an elk considered a stream. It was a young bull, its antlers not quite three feet across.
“Slow down, friend. Relax,” Darke said.

I never believed in magic until I met Sukesh. Don't get me wrong, I was skeptical at first just as you would have been. And the fact that he won me over despite my air of skepticism is what makes this story so glorious. Sukesh surmounted my false paradigm, and he did it in a greasy cruise ship bar with only a handful of people around to witness it. He was an unassuming Indian man with a chubby face and soft but intense eyes behind which it always seemed that the robotic gears of his brain were grinding--working methodically to remember, to deceive, to delight. When he pulled off the trick the right corner of his mouth would tick upwards against his will almost as if he too couldn't believe he had successfully hidden the card between the volunteer's wrist and watch without his notice.

Choosing a table in the cafeteria is torture. Today I sit by Leonard, mostly because instead of hitting me he just squirms, snaps four fresh rubber bands onto his braces and leaves. I dig out the lunch my grandmother packed and see the note scribbled on the outside of the paper bag. In lipstick: Love you, Titus. Show those rocket ships who’s boss!

Maria Grazia Swan

The stench of death permeated the air.
Morning rain didn’t wash it away. Afternoon sun didn’t singe it away. It hovered, unaffected by the chirping of birds, the scurrying of spooked lizards or the skittering of pebbles under Mina’s shoes

The lab stank. Not just your usual funky science smells, either. Jeb tried breathing through his mouth, but even then he could taste the stench on his tongue. Rotting rugby socks. He’d never actually smelled rotting rugby socks, but figured it would be similar.

The lightning struck Bree, hurtling her into wet grass. Electricity surged through her body. The last thing she saw before her vision went black was the illuminated treetops of the pines lining the field.

Charlie Casey just stared at the framed record. Eyeing the treasured 45 RPM was a longtime standing ritual of his that he did just before leaving to make a paycheck. The record, hung inside his home office, always worked its magic—getting his anger built up. During the last few years, he especially leaned on it for inspiration since the job of killing had begun to bore him.

If you died today, what would the things you left behind say about you?
I think about this every single day. Not that I plan on dying anytime soon. But because I'm the caretaker of Annie's things. I'm the one who snuck around and snatched up everything I could before the vultures descended.

Beneath a crystal chandelier, the professor’s wife rose to make a toast. “I have known my husband for twenty-one years,” she said. Her bare shoulders gleamed in the condensed starlight. The professor reached for a cup of water – but his arm was made of stone. “Oh,” the professor said. A waiter stopped, dangling a pair of tongs. “And every day is still a surprise,” said the professor's wife. A champagne cork popped. The professor collapsed in his chair. The diners applauded. The emergency room was empty, except for the skateboarder with a broken wrist, who watched curiously as the professor received the pharmaceutical jolt which recalled his soul from the other world. From that entire evening, the professor remembered only one thing: a thick syringe, raised to the light, emblazoned with the trademark of a grinning fox.

The night the police came to talk about the incident with the gun, Eli was upstairs in his bedroom whittling a spoon from a cottonwood branch he’d found in the backyard. As he peeled the bark off revealing the white wood underneath, Eli remembered the first time he had used the knife to trim asparagus shoots in his mother’s garden. His 8 year-old hands had trembled with its weight and sharpness until his mother put her hand on his to show him how to shave the tough outer leaves without damaging the soft white part underneath. That was the summer before she left, four years ago, but who was counting? Time could be measured by the knife’s elk antler handle which now fit perfectly in his hand.

The night the police came to talk about the incident with the gun, Eli was upstairs in his bedroom whittling a spoon from a cottonwood branch he’d found in the backyard. As he peeled the bark off revealing the white wood underneath, Eli remembered the first time he had used the knife to trim asparagus shoots in his mother’s garden. His 8 year-old hands had trembled with its weight and sharpness until his mother put her hand on his to show him how to shave the tough outer leaves without damaging the soft white part underneath. That was the summer before she left, four years ago, but who was counting? Time could be measured by the knife’s elk antler handle which now fit perfectly in his hand.

Dunbar Jones knew it was wrong to hurt a book. That didn’t stop him from desperately wanting to hurl the cookbook on the kitchen counter across the room and smash it against the wall. The thirteen-and-a-half-year-old boy wasn’t sure of the title because the book was written in French, and Dunbar couldn’t read French. That wasn’t the problem. The cookbook spoke English. The problem was the book’s thick, haughty French accent.

My Grandfather died of spontaneous human combustion. I just wanted to state that immediately so it won’t come as a shock later. Combustion happens.

In 1816 the madman of a tiny town in Bulgaria invented a machine to take him from point A to B without moving a muscle. An ugly thing - the machine, not the man - all wires and a big 'ol wooden crate filled with who-knows-what. But it worked. The most discerning thing about it was the mess of wires and mud-laced string that wrapped around the head; it resembled a crown. Befitting, seeing that this ingenious contraption would soon be prized by King and Country. The madman called it a GOT: the Gift of Travel.
And I, for one, no longer consider it a gift.

The eerie blue fog permeated the planet, but not a soul panicked. At least, not at first. Why bother? Scientists had sufficiently explained the strange phenomenon away like usual. Something about excessive ash in the atmosphere from a series of explosive volcanic eruptions and sea smoke that supposedly gave the foggy mist a radiant blue tinge. It was a matter of weeks before we found out the truth. A truth that surpassed any form of scientific gobbledygook. An unfathomable reason why in a short period of time we lost almost everything because in reality, the blue fog was only the beginning. I say we lost almost everything because we still had each other, but for how long?

Leo stood rigid at the redwood rail of the balcony, his hand curled around the ring. The beach was empty, the sea calm. Larreta was as perfect as always, but his chance for happiness had died with Bobby when she walked into the time rift three weeks ago. The ring burned in his palm. He didn’t have to look to remember every detail of the gold link band with the single blue stone—a polished oval azurite, common on Larreta, but precious for what it represented. Could it be only a month ago that Bobby had given it to him to celebrate their three-month anniversary? He had given her a necklace, and she had given him the ring, both with the same stone, to mark their decision to join their lives together. Over. All of it. Leo lifted his arm high, and sent the ring sailing down, past the lower deck and onto the beach where it disappeared into the soft white sand.

Eric Black paused in the hazy glare of a streetlight just long enough to light a cigarette and release the safety on the handgun in his pocket. He continued walking along the sidewalk, his black trench coat cinched at the waist and his military-issue HRT boots slowly sounding off his pace with a steady ga-gump ga-gump ga-gump. The rotten stink of garbage and the bitter stench of body odor hung in the air. A brief summer shower had died down to a trickle, leaving behind a fetid sauna instead of the relief the storm clouds had promised. The smoke from Eric's breath lingered as he turned the corner.

"It's not that I'm leaving you again..." He said very serious. "It's that you have to leave here...leave everyone and everything in order to be with me again."

"What!?" I cried out, choking on the burning fear in my throat.

"The four centuries end now. Our mortal path changes today..."

The hiccups were prevailing my trembling body as I recalled the god awful morning I woke up to find his dead body next to mine.

"You have to die...Like I did..."

By Kara Ferguson

When she's three, Katelyn Black runs away from home. She will absolutely not eat that cabbage, and she will not go to bed. Instead, she grabs a handkerchief and wraps up her valuables (a plastic gemstone and a teddy bear,) and climbs out of her window. Her elbow scratches against a bush's branch on the fall down, and the cut begins to bleed an angry red. Tears well up in her eyes, but she presses on. Wounds are to be expected on adventures. She mastered walking two years ago, and uses that expert knowledge to waddle her way down the street. It isn't late, but no one is out to see her on her journey except for one dog still tied to his chain in the otherwise drowsy suburbia.

Oceana saw the bunyip but the bunyip did not see her. The bunyip was eating. To be exact, the bunyip was eating Jetervus Betrude’s unceremoniously removed head, which was fine with Oceana because Jetervus Betrude was the nastiest boy in Mount Azron, never happy unless he was making someone else miserable; he was the yank on the underwear, the elbow to the head, the punch in the nose. In short, Jetervus Betrude fully deserved to have his brains eaten by a bunyip or any other creature predisposed to munching on that soft gray lumpish tissue scattered with bits of shattered skull fragments in a kind of grotesque crunchy casserole.

Oceana saw the bunyip but the bunyip did not see her. The bunyip was eating. To be exact, the bunyip was eating Jetervus Betrude’s unceremoniously removed head, which was fine with Oceana because Jetervus Betrude was the nastiest boy in Mount Azron, never happy unless he was making someone else miserable; he was the yank on the underwear, the elbow to the head, the punch in the nose. In short, Jetervus Betrude fully deserved to have his brains eaten by a bunyip or any other creature predisposed to munching on that soft gray lumpish tissue scattered with bits of shattered skull fragments in a kind of grotesque crunchy casserole.

Catherine Dobson had to accept the prophetic glow of the low oil warning light appear on her dashboard. A cracked engine casing or oil was leaking into the radiator. Could have been a fluke like a fuse gone haywire or if she shut the car off then turned it back on after counting to ten the light wouldn’t reappear. Could be it was something more vague that required she kept track of things. She feared a breakdown leading to a wreck. Hated sirens. The worst accident she had ever been in in the old Escort was from a misfire on the fourth cylinder in the thick of Memorial Day weekend traffic. She was lucky she “buttered a curb” as the tow truck driver put it. “Quick thinking got you out of a real jam,” he added, and “no significant damage either, I can’t see any, ‘cept you might wanna have a mechanic take a look at it”.

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I suppose some of my friends might call my birthday present wonderful. Others would say it was stupid for a girl my age to receive a fancy dollhouse for my ninth birthday. Now, before we go any further, I have to let you know something. The dollhouse is not the gift I asked grandma to get me. Let's get that straight right away. I wanted a puppy. I had dreamed of having a puppy for like…well forever! And I knew right where to get one.

In the land of Greenwood, in a time before this, a very peculiar thing happened on an otherwise very ordinary day. The music stopped.

My life has come to a screeching halt exactly twice. The first time was the day my mom died. The second was today when my dreams of the future, a Yale education and a prestigious med school, imploded and came crashing down around me like a demolished Las Vegas hotel.

"The first time I thought of killing him, the two of us were having chicken sandwiches at that fast food place on Marshall Street. The red and white one with the oversized rubber bird anchored to its roof."

My life has come to a screeching halt exactly twice. The first time was the day my mom died. The second was today when my dreams of the future, a Yale education and a prestigious med school, imploded and came crashing down around me like a demolished Las Vegas hotel.

I stepped off the Texas State Corrections Special Case Prisoner Transport and stood in front of my new home and my new Parole Officer. Neither impressed at first glance. Or at any number of other glances, either. Ashpole, Texas seemed to consist of nothing but hard-pan and scrub-brush as far as the eye could see, which wasn't that far because of the scouring wind that blew grit and trash non-stop. A few buildings here and there gave your eyes relief from the mind-numbing brown nothingness that surrounded you, if ramshackle and boarded up businesses could be considered a relief. The building I stood in front of was so dilapidated and wind-blown that it looked like a caricature of itself. I read the sand-blasted signage on its roof and frowned. It proclaimed that I stood before the Last Stand Trailer Park and Parolee Community. I shot a quick look over at my new PO. Short. Stocky. Unkempt gray hair and beard. His left eye was the gray of storm clouds. I assumed the right one would have been as well, if the eye-patch covering it didn't suggest that it no longer resided in its socket. He grinned, lips pulled back to reveal very large, very square teeth. "I know what you're thinking," he said. "You're thinking 'Shouldn't that say Last Chance Trailer Park?' I'd allow how it should, if I were in any way concerned with saving your soul." His grin grew larger. "Sadly for you, I'm not so much concerned with your soul as I am concerned with keeping the world from ending. Again."

Twelve-year-old Fergus O’Leary, eyes closed, laying in bed, could hear the whoosh whooshing of the German zeppelins as they hovered over his family’s rural Irish farm. He felt the air around him vibrating with impending explosions. He nodded, calm and ready. Today was the day. He would finally become a hero like his oldest brother Garret.

“Fergus,” his mum called up the stairs. “No more day dreaming. I’ve found your other boot. Time to round up the sheep.”

- Sarah R. Parker

My father Titus wasn't a doctor like the kind you'd see for any illness or broken bone, but he sure smelled like one. And that smell stays with you same as any other. Don't believe me? What time of day do you associate with bacon frying in a pan, or the way the color yellow brings back memories of cramped buses filled with slimy seats and nervous children? No, my dad wasn't a doctor like any you'd imagine in the usual way. He was Strange Oak's Medical Examiner, and giving a voice to the dead was what I think he was born to do. He looked at all them dead folks with a certain reverence and curiosity, always coming home with stories about how his newest arrivals, zipped up and tucked away in freezers, met their unfortunate ends. Even then, he always smelled the same, like tongue depressors and rubbing alcohol, at least until that poor woman was found dragged to death down the road from our ranch. Dad smelled different in the days after he’d examined her body. I didn't have a name for it then, but I do now. It was fear.

Death lurked within the black depth a few feet from Syeda. She clung to the wooden pole with her weakened arms, blinking away the stinging salt as the waves pounded the troubled ship. A tanned satyr screamed with his last breath as he slid overboard, losing his grip on the edge.

Momma sees the mosquito fog truck as soon as we pull out of the Safeway parking lot. Shifting the car into gear, she pops the clutch and scoots out into the street. "Caroline," she orders. "Hold on to those eggs and don't let them break. We've got to beat that damn thing home." She grips the wheel, fingers clenched white, muttering, "Damn, damn." Then, with a quick glance in my direction: "Pardon my French."

She’d labeled me fragile.
Fragile implied something easily broken, an inaccurate description. I wasn't fragile. I was destroyed, damaged, irreparable. I didn't need to be handled with care. I needed to be discarded as the hopeless shell of a human I’d become.

Daniele Forrester did not belong in Walden Lane -- just like the man in a tattered overcoat standing at the end of her street. She knew that Mrs. Walters would frown at the state of his coat and that Mrs. Lincoln would be horrified by his long, scraggly, orange hair. In fact, she expected them to gather their army of 'upstanding ladies' and drive him out of their precious town. Yet, none of them seemed to notice the man. They were all watching her, as she passed by them on her way to school. As usual, the whispers started, increasing in volume with every step she took. On cue, Mrs. Wright pulled her children away, as Daniele passed by them, and told them to stay away from her. Mrs. Graham followed suit and grumbled about letting the crazy folk mix with the normal people. At that remark, Daniele looked at the strange, disheveled man once more. He was staring directly at her, just as oblivious of the townspeople as they were of him. His eyes seemed to glow, as she neared him.

The afternoon sun baked the cracked pavement in front of Jefferson Middle School, lighting a match to the already frayed nerves of twelve-year-old Judy Sparks. At the end of a long, winding driveway lined by a few old oak trees and patchy bits of wilting grass, Judy sat and waited impatiently for her mother. The middle school was deserted—every wing of the wide one-story building sat locked and quiet, the parking lot was empty, everyone had gone home. Everyone, that is, except for her and Grub Darnell. And, unfortunately, she sat downwind of him.

I think I just burned my eyebrows off. I grit my teeth and squint one eye open, just in time to see my jar of glaze chemicals roll through the shed door. A hot trail of sparks leads outside, smoldering and threatening to burn holes in the floor. Epic! How did ceramics glaze ignite and blow out of my hands like that? Oh good, I still have hands. Time to stomp those little fires out now before my shed totally catches on fire—wait, my ceramics shed is on fire!

Velu knew tonight would seal his reputation one way or the other. It was his time to take the Dare, and he planned to pull it off in a way no one would forget.

Travis prayed Ma wasn’t dead. With flashlight in hand, he focused on the circle of light burning into the cornstalks in front of him. He scanned its contents, looking for any movement. When he was sure there was none, his hand jerked the flashlight a few inches to the right, concentrating the giant circle onto another segment of the harvested field. It was so quiet out here that it wouldn’t be difficult to hear her. She might call for him. Any sound from her would help, even a moan. He hoped he’d hear his name and not the moan. He funneled all of his concentration into what he heard, but the more he noticed the silence, the less silent it became. Cricket calls and the snap of dry cornstalks underneath his feet cut through the air.

“I know the contract said dead or alive, Kane, but did you really have to cut off his head?”
Kane Ashwanti scowled toward the shadows of the alley. Decapitation wasn't Plan A but after enduring four hours in that god-awful nightclub chasing his prey, payback was a bitch and its name was Plan B. He watched as a familiar form stepped into the dim light from a nearby doorway lamppost.

This is not a book. If this purchase was made by someone who likes “books,” for the purpose of escaping reality, then that person should walk away right now. The following story is reality, it’s a “I woke up in pine needles, the glue stick saved my life, and I used to put my favorite comic strip in the lining of my waistband” reality. I hate social media because it’s necessary but so many ignorant people use it to ruin lives. The philosophical thought life is dying right before my eyes and no one thinks about the repercussions of the written word. Everyone posts their thoughts as if their first thought is the one that is important; when, in all truth, it’s the first thought that births the thoughts that truly matter to create revolutionary change. My story is the solution, and it starts as follows:

There is a saying in Everafter, guilty until proven innocent. If you’re unfortunate enough to be accused of a crime everything you’ve done, or said, or been will be scrutinized, pulled apart and left in pieces. All in the name of proving what they already know to be true—guilty as charged. You’ll forever be branded as the leper; the outcast; the criminal, whether you committed the crime or not. Even if— by some miracle— you manage to prove your innocence, it won’t matter. The damage is done. Your reputation ruined. My slip into leper status started the weekend before the new school year.

The murder trial shocked the good people of Decker County, Texas, as much as had the tragedy itself, and Maryann Chapman was no exception. As the mother of two young boys, her heart ached for the Jones children and their grieving mother. At first, everyone assumed it had been an accident. In the weeks before the fire and the trial, the question of guilt or innocence dominated daily conversation in homes for miles around the fire’s epicenter. Journalists from across the country poured into the small town, feeding on the unfolding drama. Neighbors offered eyewitness statements and gossip to reporters and investigators, but their conflicting stories added more confusion than clarity. Maryann avidly followed the local news coverage, which centered on two disturbing facts: the children had burned to death, and their father was on trial for his life.

One day, about a month ago, I made two mistakes. Two unconscious mistakes within a 24-hour period that turned what could have been a pothole in my life into a bottomless pit. Harmless errors that can’t really be called errors, since they are things that most of us do as essential parts of our day, every day, without a second thought.

Never sleep with your sister, especially one with the marauding libido of a rock star and a propensity for easy insults. Advice noted, rule made. Except that right now, and for the foreseeable future, Jemima couldn’t see any alternative. Three nights ago Circe had marched through the front door and into the only bedroom, locking the door behind her without a word. Who knew it was with the intention of never coming out again? At least, she hadn’t appeared yet, and until she did, Jemima and Roxy would be forced to share the fold-out futon with the horizontal iron bar across the small of their backs, making both of them even crabbier and more sorry for themselves than usual. If that was even possible.

Never sleep with your sister, especially one with the marauding libido of a rock star and a propensity for easy insults. Advice noted, rule made. Except that right now, and for the foreseeable future, Jemima couldn’t see any alternative. Three nights ago Circe had marched through the front door and into the only bedroom, locking the door behind her without a word. Who knew it was with the intention of never coming out again? At least, she hadn’t appeared yet, and until she did, Jemima and Roxy would be forced to share the fold-out futon with the horizontal iron bar across the small of their backs, making both of them even crabbier and more sorry for themselves than usual. If that was even possible.

At the start of each school year, my teachers would pass out lists of extracurricular activities and try to convince us to “get involved.” I read the list carefully each year, but I never signed up for anything. Nothing spoke to me, and unlike my peers, who threw themselves at any activity that could give them an edge when applying for college, I didn’t see the point in wasting my time with shit like debate club or badminton when I couldn’t throw my heart and soul into it. It wasn’t until my boarding school decided to ban fifty books from campus that I decided to “get involved.” I created my own activity – running an underground library. Who wanted to be president of student council when you could be the head of an illegal book smuggling ring?

Michael should have positioned himself closer. He scanned the three lanes of traffic, not losing sight of the minivan caught between a Greyhound and a hybrid electric car. The cars heading north on the one-way street were at a standstill, a result of a stalled garbage truck a quarter of a mile up the road. The minivan idled in the middle of the intersection, its windows up, one of its occupants lost in what was taking place inside the car.

I can never run for president. Girls who were born in Honduras can’t be president. It’s not that I actually want to be president, but there’s something about being told you can’t do something just because of where you’re from. Running for president is the least of my worries at the moment. Thinking about getting into a good college trumps any incidental thoughts of running for high office. But even before thinking about college, comes the mundane task of deciding what to make for dinner tonight.

The security line, a quarter-mile-long stretch of humanity two and three deep, snaked along the twelve-foot-high concrete wall, disappearing around the corner. Many in the queue leaned or sat against the wall, competing for shreds of its tiny midday shadow, each waiting to run the gauntlet of x-ray machines and gloved, wand-wielding guards for entry into Northeast Wilson Park. Those within view of the gate took turns wondering aloud how the steady advance of people past the checkpoint could produce so little forward progress farther down the line. The usual sunny-day throng of bicyclists, joggers, dog-walkers, supervisors of young children, couples on blankets, and players of organized sports packed the paths and fields of the Park’s other three quadrants. Camera drones, indistinguishable from remote control helicopters available in a toy store, silently hovered at regular intervals along an invisible grid twenty feet above the ground, drawing concern only when a ball or Frisbee flew nearby, causing a brief breathless hush among the responsible parties. Alone in the line, scratching at the sweat on his neck, Reid stood directly beneath a drone, trying in vain to forget it was there.

A dust cloud belched as the boy bit the dirt. His bike gouged the grass beside him, tires still spinning. Jeering at him a few yards back stood two bigger, rough-looking boys in baggy T-shirts and sagging jersey shorts. About 30 yards back, Dillon crouched by his bike in the shadow of pines, praying the boys hadn’t seen him. A motor buzz cut through the jeers. Taunters jerked around, cursed, shot the finger, split. Spitting gravel at the runners, a motor scooter burned a circle and stopped. Unfolding long legs out of the dirt, the boy stood pale and freckled and tall. He knocked the dirt from his helmet and shook out dirt from a shock of dark red hair. “You okay?” The scooter rider took off a black and pink helmet, and shook out long, dark wavy curls.

Range Benson was my only friend lucky enough not to live in the Sunset Mobile Home Park. Instead his family lived in a farmhouse littered with rusting cars, surrounded by a tall metal fence, with a big sign out front that read “Beware of Dog”. Never mind the dog was a Yorki with one eye and a bark like a parakeet hit by a dump truck. The sign was to scare people away from the trailer they kept out back of their property. Range’s dad wired the trailer for electricity and told everyone he was turning it into a workshop. We took over the trailer when it turned out Range’s dad didn’t like to work.

At 4:17 PM on a Tuesday, Sean Greyson lost his fingers. They said he'd lose his mind next—or his lunch—but what the hell did they know? They'd been fluttering about him all afternoon like a gaggle of mother hens, explaining and re-explaining every last part of the procedure and what might go wrong along the way. Like he might have a psychotic break or some shit. Please. The Army had put him through far worse than this, and he'd never cracked. Never would crack. What'd they think he was, a Marine? Fuckin' pansy-ass scientists.

Sherri Cassidy was lying flat on the couch, on her back, with her arms raised over her head. Naked except for a pair of powder pink satin panties trimmed with black lace and a small pink bow in the center of the waist band. She looked completely relaxed by the small smile on her lips. Her violet-shaded eyelids were shut. Her long, tan legs were draped over the suede arm rest, one sandal still strapped to her foot, the other dangling by her recently painted toes. Her hands twitched slightly. Her full breasts, thanks to the best plastic surgeon in Chicago, rose with each slow breath. Sweat beading on her forehead rippled under the breeze of the ceiling fan as her blonde hair stuck to the side of her face. A closer look, at what otherwise would appear to be a young girl having just achieved some sort of sexual euphoria, would prove that she was, in fact, overdosing. The heroin was coursing through her bloodstream and her lips were already turning blue. Her breathing getting shallower with each minute, as the camera on the table in front of her recorded her death.

The shovel slammed into the man's shoulder, tore through his crisply ironed shirt and the edge of his waistcoat, and left a welt the size of Rebecca's fist on his exposed skin. Simon dropped the sack in his hand and staggered back, clutching his arm where the flat had hit it. The bag rolled into the ditch at the bottom of the hill. "It was a sincerely meant offer!" he cried.

"No!" Amarande's silent scream reverberated through her entire body causing her already white knuckled grasp to tighten on the note. Her eyes flittered over the few perfect pen strokes staring at her from the page trying to discern any clues from the curt words. "A missive will follow." No name, not even an initial. Nothin else was included; only those cryptic black words stark against the textured parchment. She felt a twinge of panic building as she folded and returned it to the thick envelope. "They only ever come after...." She attempted to shake away the unpleasant thought before it could fully form. Her fingers traced absently over the intricate broken was seal, so familiar, yet so rarely seen. "For more than ten generations they have only ever come after...CALIAN!"

amberd75(at)gmail.com

The calendar proclaimed it Good Friday, but there was nothing good about that day. The weather was typical for New England--unsure if it should rain or snow, it did neither. Instead, dingy clouds swirled over the treetops, sending thin offshoots to settle in the nooks and crannies of the lawn. I sat staring at my telephone, and it stared back, unaware of the mood of the day. It took no responsibility for its actions and offered no apologies. It had no remorse.

It was an eerie sound. A faint hum, just above the water. Gregg couldn't spot anything that seemed to match the sound as far as his naked eye could see. But it was escalating rapidly; almost much more audible now; it seemed to be moving towards them. He reached for his binoculars. "What's up, Mate?" Andy wouldn't hear a whale shattering their hull when he slept. Gregg turned and just shook his head distractedly at the sleepy eyed kid who had come up behind him. He lifted his binoculars and started to turn back to face the water. "What?" He stopped halfway, as he caught the expression on Andy's face. Then it hit him. The engines were off. The hum. It was too close. Shit. He turned...and shook like a leaf in a gale...the binoculars fell from his hand and hit the deck hard... Rolling on the floor and vibrating in harmony with his shiver...

It was September 1979 when Pope John Paul II brought sex to Ireland. A Papal Mass might seem unlikely foreplay, but consider the evidence: one and a half million sweaty bodies packed into Phoenix Park; the surprise scrap of September sun; the mad romance of the Pope, hopping out of a helicopter like Sting himself. Not to mention the sermon. Didn’t he spell it out clearly enough? Divorce, contraception and abortion were all knocking at Ireland’s door, but we would have the double-bolt fastened. Our pious past proved our worth but it was our strapping youngsters that assured our future: an army of bright-eyed young things who’d ward off modernity with their Miraculous Medals. Wasn’t it only a matter of time before one lad would rise up from our troops of priests and bishops and assume the ultimate position? The Popemobile had barely shut its doors before the race was on to conceive the first Irish Pope and sure enough, Granny Doyle was at the top of the line: Papal-blessed holy water in her hand, a devious plan in her head, and only the slender will of my poor mother to stop her.

Our house is a hundred years old, which means the hallway floor is creakier than a retirement home at exercise hour. It'll be a miracle if I get to the front door without my dad hearing. I creep out of my bedroom, sliding my feet. I take maybe four steps before the floorboard groans. My right foot balanced in the air, I hold my breath like that'll somehow make me weightless.

Entering Mr. Taálix’s Book Emporium was like entering a new world. It flickered with hundreds of beeswax candles and smelled wonderfully of leather, paper, ink and…Jinxx wanted to call the scent knowledge, but of course that wasn’t a smell. Yet this room of narrow aisles was closer to a place of pure knowledge than any she’d ever seen. Once, her mother took her to the Temple Naserys to rent some grazing land. The pra’s office was lined with bookcases full of hymnals, commentaries and even a book on mathematics! But the Emporium was so full of tomes they couldn’t fit them all on the copious bookshelves; they were stacked on benches and on top of every surface available. Jinxx was sure anything anybody knew had to be in this room if you just looked for it.

"The winner of the national science fair is Mr. Fred Brown."

Tanzin stared at the wreck of Headmaster Swinn’s office in equal parts awe and disbelief. The Headmaster’s face twitched, his round eyes protruding and brows spasming like a dying fish. While the man technically was unable to produce a glare rendering him nothing but crispy bone and ash, Tanzin felt that he would soon join the splintered wood and smoldering remains of the warded door.

There was nowhere left to run. I sat on the asphalt, cold water seeped through the denim, and I tried to shrink into the gap between a cracked brick wall and the gnarled front end of a mini-van. A man stood on the sidewalk amid a wasteland of broken bodies and black blood. He wasn't one of them. I could tell he was still alive. His heavy breath showed he was still alive. His over-muscled arms bore scars and scabs in all states of healing. He casully rested a long, black sword on his shoulder. He fixed his dark gaze on me, and in a rough growl he said, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

The workers streaked out of the factory like raindrops on the windshield of a car at high speeds. I stood waiting for him at the top of a small hill, underneath both a tree and an umbrella, my shields against a fairly belligerent fall day. They all looked so similar, and my eyes had grown tired of examining their faces while trying to keep his unaltered in my mind. I was looking for a face I had never seen outside of the narrow bounds of a photograph, a blurry one at that, and despite what she had said, I didn’t think he resembled me in the slightest. The rain drummed down arrhythmically as my eyes fell back into the sea of faces.

www.franklywritten.com
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The workers streaked out of the factory like raindrops on the windshield of a car at high speeds. I stood waiting for him at the top of a small hill, underneath both a tree and an umbrella, my shields against a fairly belligerent fall day. They all looked so similar, and my eyes had grown tired of examining their faces while trying to keep his unaltered in my mind. I was looking for a face I had never seen outside of the narrow bounds of a photograph, a blurry one at that, and despite what she had said, I didn’t think he looked anything like me aside from the part above his eyes and below his mouth. The rain drummed arrhythmically as my eyes fell back into the sea of faces.

It began outside Mirwais Nika Girls School in Kandahar last year, while I was stationed at Bagram. Indeed the naïve report I filed then gave a rather cryptic assessment of the incident. As the new boy I was sent to Kandahar, with an Afghan interpreter, to investigate the most recent Taliban attack on one of their most hated enemies — girls. It was the sort of routine file-and-forget assignment that new arrivals here are allocated.

London 1918

The wind crawled across the city bringing the scent of fish from the wharf and sulfur from the factories. Dr. Archibald carried the smell on him as he entered St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. With the influenza epidemic spreading through the city like water to a dying plant, patients filled every corner of the hospital. Grimm nurses raced through the halls carrying bed sheets and clipboards, avoiding Archibald’s determined steps towards his office. He sighed, reached for the knob, and prepared himself for what lay on the other side of the wooden door.

Taylor Lopez

Kirsten Alexander:

In January, Brisbane flooded. I should have recognised this as a lesson, a warning. Everything I thought I could control was uncontrollable. The shape of my city shifted, and life took on a new form, shimmery and unpredictable as petrol on a wave.

Meredith held her breath as she approached the altar, staring at her father’s face and wondering what secrets were hidden behind his sparkling eyes. “He’s dead,” her mother had said, with usual dramatic flair, “and the truth died with him.” Whatever that meant. Meredith reached for the poster and grazed each of the deep dimples on his cheeks. “I will not revere him,” her mother had said. “And I will not be some widow stuck in the shadows. Don’t you dare expect me to be a widow.”

On Luka Willaby’s first day at Bonnyduke Middle School, the strangest thing happened. As soon as he walked through the double doors of the main entrance, everyone stopped talking. At the exact same time. It was as if someone had hit the pause button on the remote control, so that all the other students just stood there in the school hallway looking at him with their mouths hanging wide open in mid-sentence. Luka shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t used to the attention. In just about every way, Luka was as average as an average twelve-year-old kid could be. He wasn’t particularly tall nor was he especially short; he wasn’t all that skinny but he certainly wasn’t chubby either. Maybe his blond hair did stick up at odd angles sometimes and he probably had a few more freckles than other kids, but not so much as to look weird.

It stood there.
It was large and forbidding, with stark stone walls on each side. There were brambles and nettles everywhere. Everywhere, except for the area in front of it; even though there was no path, no sign of anybody ever having been there. A huge spider’s web was strung from one side to the other, a big fat spider in its centre. The wind was beginning to pick up, blowing leaves about, dancing in front of it.

If God met Beauty he would’ve never created that dumb rule about killing. In fact, he’d have done it himself. She stands like a goddess in front of our bedroom window illuminating light in a room full of darkness. The curtains are shut, and the day that slips through the cracks begs the sun to come out. No angel would ever touch her, easily fooled. It’s left up to me to kill my sister.

Tonight Rob would kill the monster. That voice in the shadows, always ready, always cruel, would finally shut up.
He kept moving along the street, straining to look normal as he stepped from street light to street light. The funeral would be over in an hour; long enough to do what he had to and get back. No one would know. The monster hadn't bothered to attend, and nobody would expect to see him until late the next day.
He wouldn't be missed, not in time.

Out comes this guy from the theater. His eyes are fixed on mine and are piercing my brain clear through to the back of my head. I glance away. Did I see that or imagine it? I glance back. I would like to say that he is looking in a “Hey, baby, you are one fine example of the female sort” kind of way. But, no. He is looking in a way that suggests he is mentally speaking with his good friend, Lucifer, and currently reserving my spot in Hell. His eyes are not moving to various points of interest on my body. I do know what it is like to be checked out. This is not that. His eyes do not move, in fact, away from my eyes. I glance away. I glance back. His eyes do not move from mine. They do not look at his feet. They do not look at the young couple canoodling in the car opposite me. They do not look at the great new sign displaying movie dates and times. They, in fact, defy all rules of proper eye contact etiquette. They defy all rules, and they ignite my head into invisible flames. I feel that I should move as he marches toward me. He is coming for me. He is coming for me, and I am not prepared to die. I forget briefly that I am in a parking lot and that, perhaps, he is marching toward his car and not toward me.

Up at the stones, Cat couldn’t hear her mother screaming. There was some sort of calm in that, though not much. How could there be any calm when you knew she was screaming? Cat looked up into the wind, towards her house, strands from her mud-black hair pulling out of her braid and stinging as they lashed her face, the pages of her pre-calc textbook fanning out as a gust caught them. But there was only the sound of the breeze rumpling the tree leaves, the crack of paper in air. The screams were all inside her head.

After a week working the hostess station at Titans Gentlemen's Club, I lusted after the job I hadn't taken at the donut store down the street. It had been Ruby’s idea for me to take the gig at Titans. She denied it, saying, “I would not have told you to seek employment at a go-go club,” but she had told me to take a job doing something I had done in my First Life, something I had experience with so I would be comfortable and slip into the environment. And there's no way to deny that in my first week at Titans, I slid back into the pool of sex and velvet like I had never left.

“Watch out, Asshole!” It is a short list of events that can take my focus away from the BlackBerry, even in dangerous situations like strolling the downtown streets of Indianapolis after work. I just can’t risk missing the one message that must be handled immediately, late hours be damned, to prevent the world from combusting or the boss getting pissed. Most days I would rather the world explode, but the possibility of either scenario keeps me focused on my device. Well, usually I am focused. Verbal assault is one of the allowable distractions, so I looked up from my email screen to notice I had veered away from my intended trajectory on “Monument Circle” and nearly ran into a Jimmy John’s sandwich delivery bike. Since the delivery had to be “Freaky Fast,” there was no time for the rider to stop and discuss my transgression. The cyclist, who I thought was quite large for someone getting exercise at work, had kept huffing around the circle without kicking my ass, and I had again looked down at my BlackBerry messages screen. It was now 6:08. “Fuck, I’m really late again.”

Had Daro spared half a head for politics or pagentry, she never would cut through the Strand. Most days, the Strand was a serene jewel at the heart of the city, set apart from the bustle of Estarria’s streets by three rivers that ringed the small span of sacred land. Today, every pinch of earth was occupied. Enterprising vendors and bakers had parked their handcarts along the banks of the isle, while children and elders alike pressed up against the edge of the promanade, craning their heads for a glimpse. In Estarria, a well-born young woman celebrated her eighteenth Namesday by formally inviting one of Estarria’s Eld into her skin. While the joining was sealed over rarifed wine at an aristocratic ball, today’s revel catered to a different crowd. Tumblers and acrobats, fire-twirlers and luminaries feted the ascent of another Estarrian heiress. Daro shook her head. No use being rich, if you couldn’t emblazon your daughter’s name across the darkening sky.

-- Julia

Grandpa’s gold cross digs into my palm. I swallow back what breakfast I didn’t lose down the girls’ room toilet last period and assess the crowd again. Those kids who aren’t gaping open-mouthed aren’t bothering to pay attention at all. My throat burns and my mouth tastes metallic, a side-effect of skipping my anxiety medications today. Making this speech off the pills isn’t a step forward; it’s a leap. Grandpa would have been so proud.

If the man glaring up at me was a cop, I’d cheerfully allow him to haul me off to jail. He could cuff me, even.

Mrs. Damone hurried down the hallway, her high heels click-clacking against the old hardwood floor. She snatched a framed photo of a smiling teenage boy from the foyer table as a can of green beans flew through the air and whizzed past her ear. She screamed, nearly dropping the picture, and bolted for the front door, ducking as a bowl of Jello salad rushed toward the side of her head. It smashed into the wall, its fruit and gelatin innards oozing to the floor like a slimy slug’s trail.

Plummeting hail sends salty splashes into my face. I spit out the briny grit and wipe my eyes. My thumbs press against my forehead. The momentary shelter is no match for the ice bombs. A wave rebounds off the seawall, collects my hair and sends it coiling around my neck. Strands net my face, cutting off my air supply until I scrape them away. If the ocean doesn’t kill me, my hair will.

Every eye locked on her: the students, their professor, and the television crew. Lilith wiped her sweaty palms against her pants and swallowed past a suddenly dry throat. She wanted to run, to hide, to escape. Her khaki button down shirt, vest, and pants blended perfectly with the beige rock of the Montana dig site. In any other situation, she could have nodded along with other students and faded into the background. But their professor insisted each student have a moment or two speaking on camera. If it had only been the other graduate students, she could have almost handled it, but TV, too? That raised the bar, even if it was just the Ancient Explorer channel.