by Jesse Lifton

““If you do not duel me to restore the honor you have besmirched, I will shoot you dead.”

by Rick Taliaferro

“But Harris kept his serious face on as he gingerly lifted and opened the bag.  For a second, a whole fryer chicken.  The next second, a tuft of dark hair, squinted eyes, blue lips parted.  He recoiled as he dropped the baby.”

by Christian Fuller

“When Paul set his shoes on fire, we told him to piss it out. That, like, he’d better hurry. He was only supposed to light up the insulation we’d pulled out from the eggshell walls…but we were sixteen and drunk enough to fist fight god and things just had a way of happening.”

by Finnegan James McBride

“Sand crunched under Sharon’s feet as she approached the tent. The lake shimmered in her peripheral vision. Her hands were cold. In the woods, the jackals wailed like they were pleading for something.”

by David Hinson

“Cats appeared again the following year, in a newsroom in South Dakota, a design studio in California, a public relations firm in Texas, and a commercial real estate company in Mississippi. And then it didn’t happen again that year or the next year…”

by JP Lor

“We’re gonna watch my girl’s ex get beat up. The plan is simple: go to his cage match and collect a few things – his blood, sweat, hair, hopefully teeth. Then we’re gonna burn them in a pot I got at Goodwill. Burn him from our lives.”

by Christopher Kostyn Passante

“The cobalt light first appeared outside Caelan’s window the night Evie went through the ice. A small orb no bigger than a butternut and shrouded in updrafts of blown snow played at the witch window in the guest loft of their half-Cape…”

by Jon Wesick

“After taking the escalator to the basement, he set out lutefisk and loaded the coffee machine with K2-cups. Addicts filed in and arranged folding chairs in a circle. A man in a sombrero stood. ‘I’m C.D. and I’m a lawncare addict. I’ve been six-weeks clean.’”

by Joelle Killian

“Whatever those chemical wizards add during synthesis to create this effect always leaves you with glitter-snot for days.”

by Michael Holtzman

“Her hand rested at her side, fingers curled around a heavy key. In the hour between the dog and the wolf, the key slipped free and dropped slowly down the long well of a waking dream, striking the metal bowl beside her chair. The sharp clang broke the spell.”

by William Jennings Chalk

“…narcissists are difficult and self-centred to the extreme, but they are not actively trying to hurt you. Malignant narcissists, on the other hand, take pleasure in causing others pain, they enjoy your suffering.’

by D. C. Martin

“The kid looked up at him and squinted at the light. Telford saw himself in the blinking reflection of the kid’s eyes. An angry old man with a sledgehammer raised above his head.”

by D.J. Huppatz

“Cruising back to Nassau after my arrest and subsequent release for obstructing a bulldozer in the last Irish rainforest, my thoughts turned to the fate of the high-vis goons who smashed the forest’s fairy ring.”

by Olivia Ardine

“I left work that day somehow more satisfied than usual, feeling like I had done something good for the world. This was not a feeling I had daily, not a feeling I experienced by following the schedule.”

by Craig Demi

“The picture taking didn’t last long. How could it? We were bus drivers, not supermodels.”

by John Sara

“I keep a box of ideas stashed beneath my bed; misshapen balls of flesh I cut from my body and mail to my editor. (Um, thanks, but I didn’t actually ask you to do that).”

by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

“…you know what it makes me think of, those engravings of camera obscura where the outside gets projected in but backwards and upside down, like Plato’s cave…”

by Danila Botha

“Someone told him he looked like Ed Sheeran once, a few years ago, and I saw his lip curl, like he wanted to say something mean about pop stars who look like lawn gnomes instead of looking like Harry Styles…”

by Andrew Eastwick

“Seized one morning by an impulse, Joel parted his hair on the right instead of the left…Though a little uncertain, he convinced himself he liked it. Maybe it was a long-overdue change.”

by Margaret Cahill

“My father’s brain tumour changed everything for me. He collapsed at home a week after my thirteenth birthday and sunk into a coma he never woke up from.”