by Cooper Clarence

“Behind me at a distance of thirty yards stood the man with the briefcase. I was used to seeing backpackers…but this man was no backpacker.”

by Michael E. O’Reilly

“…he could run his other business out of the old grocer’s office inside. He needed a new security guard though. The first guy worked out great for a while, but he was too chatty. And way too nosey.”

by Sullivan Rex

“I duck down to the floor and lift the tablecloth to see a huge pool of blood surrounding a severed arm. What the fuck is this?!  I grab the fork and sit up straight. ‘Everything okay, honey?’ the woman asks. ‘Do you want some more casserole?’”

by Kieran Wyatt

“Oscar lingered for a while near the clear water, then pressed his hand down into the soil, searching for a pulse.”

by Isabelle Hughes

“Empty trash bins knuckle the sidewalk. They still smell of last night’s trash like longing. When you have nothing, even your trash can accumulate a sort of sentimental value.”

by Nevin Nahar

“Now I watch, as the thing dissolves from a solid to a liquid. I knot one of her Dior scarves in my hands, and undo them, over and over. The orange flame turns blue under the spoon and the stopper of the syringe moves slowly.”

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.