by Walter Dinjos - There is a reason the mirrors kiss the walls. When my late wife nailed the oakwood-framed one next to my bathroom, she called it a reminder of how far we've come.
by Katie Boyer - She flexes her toes in new high-heeled shoes, feels the press of Earth gravity on her body for one last day, discomfort in the balls of her feet.
by Ken Hoover - On the mesa’s flat expanse, the mine shaft was a crude hole, a soulless eye. As Vallen Doss peered into it, a dank sulfuric breath wafted from the opening.
by Clay Space - The wind on the frozen ice bit through the hides he wore for protection, but he had long ago learned to forget about the bitter cold.
By Jude-Marie Green One rocket lumbers along to the launchpad. Earth-bound and clumsy now, gorgeous with potential. It’s yours. You’re the last. You should be proud of that.
by Sean Monaghan Gemma felt the pain right away. She sighed, stretching, angling her limbs and hips, trying to find a more comfortable position. She blinked, looking at the Arhend side table strewn with folders.
by Nancy Fulda The vase cracks against the hardened floor of our street-house, splitting into a dozen pieces. Shards fly everywhere – under the workbench, across the floor, even beneath the gears of the big mechanical clock that Grandfather brought down the hill this morning. Everyone in the room freezes.
by Joshua Shaw Midway through her love story, in which we are slow dancing atop a creaky fire escape, a boozy swooning to the snow’s pitter-patter as I say I love you I love you for the first time, I interrupt Eleanor to point out that if she loved me she would stop unscrewing my [...]
By Jeff Pfaller Dane peeled back the chain-link fence so Riley wouldn’t catch her curtain of hair as she ducked through. One more glance at the sliver of road between buildings, really just piles of stone instead of anything functional. No one drove on the Upper Roads this time of night. Driving a car meant [...]
By Anne Carly Abad Every cell in the bud’s body vibrated to the girl’s voice. “Fern, cattail, lily, sedge, violet, anemone,” she imparted her knowledge of the wetlands. They were all distinct, and the bud saw them as the girl did: the fiddleheads that characterized ferns, the creamy clusters of meadowsweet, the heart-shaped leaves of [...]