by Rahel Gamma

“I’ve listened to Yves’ last report. The whole thing. He kept calling the subject beautiful. Said he healed on the table. I don’t know what he saw. But I believe he saw it.”

by Mario Georgiou

“Inside the coffin, Norman shivered. He lay in his favourite suit…He had a bottle of whiskey and three biscuits wrapped in tissue at his side, but it was too risky to indulge just yet. The last thing he needed was a resurrection.”

by Pete Mitchell

“A welcome breeze blew, lifting the scent of the candle across the yard. Citronella was meant to keep the mosquitoes away. The candle flared, the only light outside, now all his mates have gone.”

by JD Clapp

“I turned 55 today, double knuckles, racing headlong into they call the Golden Years. Shit, with the ways things are going, fool’s gold maybe. Happy fucking birthday to me.”

by Neil Randall

“‘This damn civil war has raged on for three long years,’ Tomaz said over his shoulder from the passenger seat up front. ‘The infrastructural damage alone will take many generations to put right. But what it’s doing to the hearts and minds of the people will never be fixed. Believe me. Hatred breeds hatred.’”

by Kahlo Smith

“He dug his fingers into the ground, rooting himself like a tree to the earth that had given him up. Tears welled like mist rolling over Eden.”

by Christina Ellison

“It’s a summer hurrah before your final year of college, the last summer bookended by a school year, the last “real” summer, as y’all have been calling it. A childish conceptualization, maybe, but the notion had been born from childhood routine.”

by Jonas David

“the late Mr Darling had been until his recent and (I struggle to put it any other way) horrifying death, a very competent and renowned taxidermist known for his large collection of blackbirds ravens and crows…”

by Frank Reardon

“The depths layered with sunlight swallowed the skeleton into the deep dark. The cars on the Tobin kept going to and from, horns honked. People screamed out their windows. The church bells chimed over the water. The fishing line began to twitch.”

by Stan Kempton

“It was after midnight when the incident occurred…Whatever the reason, the signal was captured and carried, aiding in the brief escape of the sound of coarse fabric, the low-wheeze-of-a-breath settling in close to the mic, then a kind of voice only forty years of smoking can produce…”

by Mei Backof

“I could tell you things, things about the town of Mammon…None of the men swam Mammon Lake, not after the family down the street lost their little girl to the swallowing waters.”

by Emily Teresa

“Loving tendrils guide my hard-segmented body up. In the mirror—I can actually see now. My new form. Red shell, like dried blood made into armor. Segmented plates running down my torso and my limbs. Sharp and beautiful…I truly am beautiful.”

by Tif Robinette

“Her mother knelt her at the altar of the cabbage soup diet as a young girl, a penitential broth of vegetables and powdered onion mix that left her perpetually dizzy and prone to fainting spells punctuated by thunderous sulphuric farts..”

by Tyler Efford

“[Society] always teetering on the edge, pretending everything’s fine while the cracks keep spreading underneath.

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.”