by Dave Erlewine
74 words
Bleeding from his lip, his eye darkening, my son cowers in front of the door.
"Did you throw a hook, at least a jab?"
He whispers something I'd need to bend down to hear.
"The other kid, he explaining anything to his dad or high-fiving him?"
My son's eyes, especially the darkening one, look glazed.
"Get in," I say, moving my leg, not watching him pass, afraid a hug might turn into a strangle.
Dave Erlewine is a fiction editor at Dogzplot. His stories appear (or soon will) in Tuesday Shorts, The Pedestal Magazine, Word Riot, and a number of other literary journals. His sad little website is www.whizbyfiction.blogspot.com.
3.31.2009
Glazed
Check Out
by Noel Sloboda
100 words
Richard had hoped Mary wouldn't see Karli behind them in line. But Mary had sharp eyes, which darted at his former lover. Richard just looked down at the cart, pretending to inventory bran bars and mangos.
Mary radiated the same iciness that nearly drove him from their home after he'd confessed the affair. Richard kept his eyes lowered, but he couldn't ignore the chill coming from Mary.
"How are you going to pay?"
Richard had so many answers inside his head that the cashier had to repeat her question twice before he realized she was the one who'd asked it.
Noel Sloboda currently lives inPennsylvania
100 words
Richard had hoped Mary wouldn't see Karli behind them in line. But Mary had sharp eyes, which darted at his former lover. Richard just looked down at the cart, pretending to inventory bran bars and mangos.
Mary radiated the same iciness that nearly drove him from their home after he'd confessed the affair. Richard kept his eyes lowered, but he couldn't ignore the chill coming from Mary.
"How are you going to pay?"
Richard had so many answers inside his head that the cashier had to repeat her question twice before he realized she was the one who'd asked it.
Noel Sloboda currently lives in
Leaf Death
by Sean Ulman
97 words
As aspen leaf butter-based spades fluttered to his feet the welder understood that each leaf was touching-down its only time. He believed the leaves still breathed as they lay on the ground, fragrant pre-parchment, supple, smooth. The wind gusted. Besieged by the beauty of so many leaves lives ending, he focused on one leaf. As it shuttled toward him his hand involuntarily shot out. But thinking it best to not interrupt its journey, he returned his hand to his pocket. No event in his life matched the magnitude of each leaf’s life ending, and he knew it.
Sean Ulman received his Master's degree in fiction from the Stonecoast MFA program through theUniversity of Southern Maine University of Delaware
97 words
As aspen leaf butter-based spades fluttered to his feet the welder understood that each leaf was touching-down its only time. He believed the leaves still breathed as they lay on the ground, fragrant pre-parchment, supple, smooth. The wind gusted. Besieged by the beauty of so many leaves lives ending, he focused on one leaf. As it shuttled toward him his hand involuntarily shot out. But thinking it best to not interrupt its journey, he returned his hand to his pocket. No event in his life matched the magnitude of each leaf’s life ending, and he knew it.
Sean Ulman received his Master's degree in fiction from the Stonecoast MFA program through the
Chess and Clarabelle
by KJ Hannah Greenberg
97 words
Clarabelle took comfort in that youngster, regularly hugging the baby to her stomach and sipping in his gurgles or his bubbling saliva. She watched her hands in relationship to his face. While she toyed with ideations of not supporting the baby’s head and spine, she, nonetheless, remained careful. Sometimes, though, Clarabelle left him in a wet diaper until Alex came home.
She smiled at the thought of Alex lifting up a sodden child. Such delays kept Alex from reaching for her and from adding one more bruise. Such deterrents did nothing, though, when the baby stayed asleep.
KJ Hannah Greenberg’s layered language has been published/accepted in an eclectic mix of dozens of venues worldwide, including: Australia ’s Language and Culture Magazine, and Antipodean SF, Israel ’s Mishpacha Magazine, The Jerusalem Post, and The Shiur Times, the UK ’s Morpheus Tales, The Mother Magazine, and Winamop, and the USA ’s AlienSkin Magazine, The American Journal of Semiotics, and The Externalist. KJ Hannah Greenberg is a former National Endowment for the Humanities scholar, the mother of adolescent sons and daughters, and the caretaker of an entire hibernaculum of imaginary hedgehogs.
Sweet Tooth
by Shome Dasgupta
52 words
At the age of eleven, Cornelius tried to hang himself in the attic. The rope, made out of Glide dental floss, tore. He crashed through the attic floor and into the kitchen, where next to the sink, was a box of cookies. He stood up and fixed himself a glass of milk.
Shome Dasgupta holds an MFA in Creative Writing fromAntioch University Los Angeles
52 words
At the age of eleven, Cornelius tried to hang himself in the attic. The rope, made out of Glide dental floss, tore. He crashed through the attic floor and into the kitchen, where next to the sink, was a box of cookies. He stood up and fixed himself a glass of milk.
Shome Dasgupta holds an MFA in Creative Writing from
Shelley Pulled Out of the Sea
by Willie Smith
81 words
Model airplanes make me fly. Provide the glue makes me wonder why. All the parts nowadays stuck on backwards. Model plane wrecks more like it.
I have become a champion of debris. Visions of cities burning. Babies napalmed. Vaporized hospitals. Daisies cut. The very worms obliterated.
Close my eyes and hell erupts.
Trouble is, could I trouble you a sec, get you to say – are my eyes open? If not – this somnambulation got a plug on it a saint might pull?
Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human. His work celebrates this horror. His novel OEDIPUS CADET is available from amazon.com. Please visit: www.youtube.com/wsmith49 to see him further embarrass himself.
3.16.2009
100% Proof
by Culbin Forrest
97 words
And didn’t the Scots knock all the duty off whiskey after they got independence?
97 words
And didn’t the Scots knock all the duty off whiskey after they got independence?
And didn’t the Whitehall redcoats slap it right back on?
And wasn’t that the Solway smugglers back in business, after three centuries?
Now Willie Nobutt was a double-dealing, two-faced liar.
Didn’t he tip off the excise men?
Mind you, Logan Carr was no better.
Hadn’t he filled all but one of the bottles with tap-water, and that the one they drank on the beach to seal the deal?
Sure, and there’s no law against running tap-water, and nobody mentioned the Trades Description Act.
Culbin Forrest mostly writes short stories, but also poetry, and he’s tried the odd play. He’s won a few prizes locally, has been published here and there (mostly there), and had been featured on the Liars League website from time to time.
Beautiful Broken Things
by Mercedes M. Yardley
94 words
You think that your role is to destroy beautiful things. She thinks her role is to support your ugliness.
My role is to stand between you and the things that you hurt. Your nails get caught in my clothes while I hold The Broken Things in my hands. They mewl and sigh and heal while you scrabble at my skin and snarl your fingers in my hair. When The Broken Things aren’t broken anymore, I let them fly away while you shriek.
Your scream is the sweetest sound on earth. I smile every time.
Mercedes M. Yardley often wears poisonous flowers in her hair. You can learn more about her at www.abrokenlaptop.wordpress.com.
94 words
You think that your role is to destroy beautiful things. She thinks her role is to support your ugliness.
My role is to stand between you and the things that you hurt. Your nails get caught in my clothes while I hold The Broken Things in my hands. They mewl and sigh and heal while you scrabble at my skin and snarl your fingers in my hair. When The Broken Things aren’t broken anymore, I let them fly away while you shriek.
Your scream is the sweetest sound on earth. I smile every time.
Mercedes M. Yardley often wears poisonous flowers in her hair. You can learn more about her at www.abrokenlaptop.wordpress.com.
firing hope
by E. Miller
100 words
cloaked by clouds and the green-grey sound of silence, your eyes flickered farewells that were beyond syllables.
time blurred clarity, but as i climb years like mountains, i remember that gaze - fearless though inevitable, unbroken though incomplete.
when you returned, you opposed memory. i tried to find yesterday buried with the bones of men you killed or did not save (what's the difference, anyway) but your innocent irises have decayed with sun.
reading engraved names, my tears mix with whispers. i recite the losses that they do not list:
your heart, your spirit, your love
and god, those eyes
e. miller is fifteen years old and just now learning to breathe. Her previous publications include Boston Literary Magazine.
100 words
cloaked by clouds and the green-grey sound of silence, your eyes flickered farewells that were beyond syllables.
time blurred clarity, but as i climb years like mountains, i remember that gaze - fearless though inevitable, unbroken though incomplete.
when you returned, you opposed memory. i tried to find yesterday buried with the bones of men you killed or did not save (what's the difference, anyway) but your innocent irises have decayed with sun.
reading engraved names, my tears mix with whispers. i recite the losses that they do not list:
your heart, your spirit, your love
and god, those eyes
e. miller is fifteen years old and just now learning to breathe. Her previous publications include Boston Literary Magazine.
&(ninety-six)
by J. A. Tyler
100 words
There was a baby, at some point, born as it should not have been. That baby was taken care of. That baby was rectified, adjusted. And there was another baby too, never born at some point, unliving in the air, in the sky, flying. So there were these two babies at least, both girls, existing where they shouldn’t have. And one is flying now, pointed in an unknown direction, while the other, the one of two babies who became where they shouldn’t, that one was set down on a stump and adjusted, rectified. That baby was easily unborn at least.
J. A. Tyler is the author of the forthcoming novella Someone, Somewhere (ghost road press) and the chapbooks The Girl in the Black Sweater (Trainwreck Press) and Everyone in This is Either Dying or Will Die or is Thinking of Death (Achilles Chapbook Series). He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press and was recently nominated for a Pushcart. Find more info here: www.aboutjatyler.blogspot.com.
100 words
There was a baby, at some point, born as it should not have been. That baby was taken care of. That baby was rectified, adjusted. And there was another baby too, never born at some point, unliving in the air, in the sky, flying. So there were these two babies at least, both girls, existing where they shouldn’t have. And one is flying now, pointed in an unknown direction, while the other, the one of two babies who became where they shouldn’t, that one was set down on a stump and adjusted, rectified. That baby was easily unborn at least.
J. A. Tyler is the author of the forthcoming novella Someone, Somewhere (ghost road press) and the chapbooks The Girl in the Black Sweater (Trainwreck Press) and Everyone in This is Either Dying or Will Die or is Thinking of Death (Achilles Chapbook Series). He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press and was recently nominated for a Pushcart. Find more info here: www.aboutjatyler.blogspot.com.
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