No one can understand why Elena stays, and neither can I. If it had been me, I’d have left; there are plenty of other Cornish seaside towns to live in. Actually, if I really had climbed those steps and seduced a sixteen-year-old like Elena did, I’d have jumped from the watchtower onto the rocks below. They were discovered in the act by the caretaker, Jim.
Continue reading “Watchtower by Rebecca Klassen”
“I won’t talk about the past anymore,” she said. “I’m only talking about what will happen from now on. I’m using this pain to make something wonderful.”
He held her hand, like he had so many times. Her masculine hands. Creative hands for making wonderful things. Like her saddest smile.
Continue reading “Doll Parts by Ximena Escobar”
On July 5 of 2033 Antarctic bases McMurdo, Davis, Casey and others reported earthquakes of 6 magnitude on the Richter scale. South Africa and Tierra Del Fuego in South America had minor tsunamis shortly after the earthquakes. Helicopters flew to the suspected center of the disturbance near the South Pole. What they saw was deeply disturbing. An area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers had subsided anywhere from a few to a hundred meters deep. What appeared to be naked humans were slowly digging out of the steaming slush. As the observers goggled at the scene, something like a red guided missile flew out of the depression so fast it was just a blur. There was no safe landing place, so the helicopters which were short of fuel flew back to their bases. When the film they had taken was released, the world observed a second odd event.
Continue reading “Kingdom Collapse by Doug Hawley”
“Sir?”
The Artist jumped, whirling away from the attic window out of which he had been staring.
“Stay there,” he barked, and the figure he had been sketching immediately froze, Lot’s wife on the heels of her one bad decision.
Continue reading “This is My Rifle, This is My Gun by Shannon Greenstein”
I’ll tell you, I saw my fair share of weird. It was par for the course when I was a belief policeman. I never passed judgment. I once tested a man whose One True Belief was a body part and a woman who worshipped a raw potato. It takes all kinds, but I moved on as long as my detector beeped twice and the OTB wasn’t harmful. If my OTBD beeped only once, I took the heretic to my district HQ. What happened next was outside my control. I told myself my hands were tied.
Continue reading “Scattered Faith by David Henson”
To supplement my pension, I had taken a summer job: crewman and ticket-collector on the Small Isles (Rousay, Wyre and Egilsay) ferry in Orkney – I was the full extent of the extra staff required to meet the demands of the enhanced summer timetable. It’s a fact that when you collect tickets you look at hands, not faces. So I didn’t notice him when he boarded. No car, no luggage, no band, no guitar.
Continue reading ” The Ferryman’s Tale by Mick Bloor”
The spring sea lapped upon the shore of Yokohama. In the city a familiar New Year tune played over a radio. It had been ten years since I heard that song. I mouthed along the words half-remembered from nights when, in drunken stupor, my friend, the poet Sunokaze Heki, would recite tanka alongside the music.
Continue reading “Rosa Rugosa by Thomas J Daly”
I tried to eat an apple whole the other day. I spit it up on the tile, watching as my saliva bubbled atop the cracked checkers. Vince and I laughed hard at this: my attempt, the fall, the wet sound of bruised apple flesh. We stopped only after Vince sat on the wicker chair so hard it splintered. I put a blanket over it and Vince biked home, using his jacket sleeve to gather my spit-stained apple and throw it outside – for the squirrels, he said. Three days later, Mom took the blanket to wash and when she screamed, I told her that Hurricane Nancy must’ve done it. Mom said that wasn’t funny; last month’s hurricane had taken Grandpa’s beloved chicken coop and now he had to buy the factory-farmed eggs they sold at the grocery. I said, “Wow, what an inconvenience!” and was grounded for a week.
Continue reading “I Tried to Eat an Apple by Billie Chang”
Warm tones hit the mahogany bed posts, struck by the sudden light entering the room. The French door moaned as the veil curtain swelled, and a leaf spiralled onto the crochet bed cover, the terracotta tiles, the dresser table.
Frida held a deep breath, albeit restrained inside the cast, until her ribs complained. As if she could capture the light within her lungs, the gap of blue that she envisioned open in the sky. Something inside her had changed; the narrowest ray of light had filtered through the fill of her darkness.
Continue reading “Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress by Ximena Escobar”
With most first dates, I knew within seconds that we wouldn’t meet again. I didn’t feel that with Janet. Except for a few wrinkles, she could have been years younger than me. Maybe her eyes were too far apart and her mouth too narrow, but when she smiled all her features worked together. That said, getting her to smile was a challenge. We exchanged questions about each other, learning nothing more than in our online profiles. I couldn’t help studying her again as she walked to the toilet – her bright floral dress showed off her figure (was she rolling her hips?) and her long hair was jet-black. Waiting for her to come back, I decided to raise the topic that the dating site matched us up with.
Continue reading “It’s Never Too Late by Tim Love”
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