By: Adir E. Golan Maery MacTauthenach followed the fading footprints that stained the snow crimson. With each step the snow revealed a deeper, darker imprint. Bleeding. Maery padded faster. Whoever was injured had to be close, the dulled prints had changed from boots to narrow stretches of furrows. Crunching snow…
By: Jon Epstein “Baba!” my granddaughter Bailey hollers from the bedroom. “Can you go in?” I ask Kelly. I’d just sat in front of the fireplace with my first Saturday morning cup of coffee and an ice pack on my back. “She called for you,” Kelly defers. I pull up…
by M. Guendelsberger My brother Pete was the one to find it once that dry tape finally gave way and the photo drifted down to the black and white tile of my dead grandmother’s basement floor. We had been stacking the chairs on that table, flipping them upside down so…
by Richard Compean Janice got to the registration desk at the Lakeland Econo Lodge just in time to hear the desk clerk inform the elderly couple in front of her that they had gotten the last available room, not their only disabled access room, but a “studio king” on the…
by Chantae Eaton “Beep beep, beep beep.” His alarm sounded promptly at six a.m., the same as it had every Monday since his eighteenth birthday. Today it did not fulfill its duty in rousing him. Rufus was already awake and had been for some time. He’d spent the last three…
by Steven J. Gray The opportunity arrived and they couldn’t turn it down. Seb had been eyeing the house he grew up in for years. It was on the market once before, well before he was in any position to be considering a home purchase. That didn’t stop him from…
by Sue Ellen Snape She has blood on hands, blood down her bodice, the stench of blood up her nose. The hem of her skirt is drenched a dark sticky red. She’s not one to shrink from the sight of blood, oh no. Lopping the head off a chicken comes…
by Michael Horton “What scares you most?” She is hugging her knees with both arms, her head slung back so far it looks like it should hurt. After thinking and looking at her for any hint, he says, “Dying.” “No,” she says and waves one arm like she is erasing…
by Rudy Ravindra While taking a short cut through a lush wooded park to the swimming pool, Rahul glimpses, through haze of the morning fog, a divine damsel in a diaphanous dress, swaying gently on a swing. Her thick tangled hair is pulled back with a white scarf, except for…
by Norman Klein Rita had been visiting her best friend, Jody, in New Hampshire, and two days into the visit Jody called Bill from the hospital. “When she arrived last night she didn’t look right, so I gave her some soup and put her to bed. But she was worse this morning,…