Today will be like any other day. You’ll softly snooze the alarm clock as it sounds, just over an hour before your train pulls into the station. You will feel the groggy effects of sleeping fitfully, as has become the norm. Pressing snooze, you tell yourself you’ll get up on the first alarm tomorrow, already knowing you won’t.
Continue reading “A Day Like Any Other by Danielle Rhodes”
“One of his girls, the youngest I think, got killed by that thing a few years back. Got her scarf caught and strangled.” Like many of her father’s words, poorly formed and slick with alcohol, these came with a belch.
Continue reading “Sorting Apples by Ann Marie Potter”
Q never swerved to avoid a beast on the road – dead or alive. He would drive through it with an iron fist, as if fur and soft tissue were nothing. A mental illustration of focus, a kind of road karate like the art of board breaking. Always direct your power beyond the wood stack. A fox, a kangaroo – he had a bull bar and was not squeamish about death – an emu once near Broken Hill, had snapped a rabbit’s neck.
Continue reading “Swerve by Tamara Barrett”
‘Tiredness can kill. Take a break.’
The sign expanded, glowing in the beam of headlamps, and was gone.
The lights in the darkness were beginning to blur; the flecks of winding taillights, the flickering ribbon of the lane markers, merging to one. He put on some Iron Maiden to drown the hum of the engine and lowered the window for an inrush of air. The icy blast stopped him yawning. He blinked and leaned forwards.
Continue reading “Tiverton Southbound by Matthew Roy Davey”
If she hadn’t looked at her phone at the exact moment she was crossing the road she would have…
Continue reading “A Game of Consequences by Sandra Arnold”
John coiled the rope thirteen times around itself to form the hangknot. The ridges of the knot felt strong, almost muscular, in his hands. John knew his knots. Working on farms will make you an expert in practically anything, or anything practical. He slid the noose open and held it at arm’s length, looked at it carefully: it’ll serve.
Continue reading “Rebirth by Martin Toman”
I aim my phone, recording chaos. My classmates can’t beat this, several hundred miles away. An ambulance, a snow-covered hill, a sea of Ponderosa pines, spectators and bright red and blue sleds.
Continue reading “Downhill by Yash Seyedbagheri”
On impact, the demon exploded out of the steering wheel airbag and ripped my husband away from this world.
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