Plastic Flowers

Miranda stood alone in a field of colorful wildflowers, carefully examining each one, searching for an explanation of why they were not actually alive, but rather were made of plastic. She had never encountered anything like it in her thirty years of botanical study.

She eventually capitulated and returned to her car. It also was made of plastic. So was the park entrance and the sign next to it. When she arrived back at the lab, her assistants had turned to plastic as well.

She would always consider her younger days, before everything became plastic, as the 'Good 'ol days.'

That Which Grows, That Which Dies

Lisa found a pallid yellow seed on her pillow. She rolled it between her finger and thumb, speculating that if planted, a good husband would grow. One that didn't drink or stay out all night. One that wouldn't smoke, swear, shout and scold. Her man would come, different to the others.

The seed cracked and an ocher fluid seeped onto Lisa's fingers. She licked at it as the crack repaired itself. The fluid was hot on her tongue. It erased all the thoughts she had of the perfect spouse and replaced them with images of sleeping pills and razor blades.

From Guest Contributor, Horrorshow

Nighttime Duty

The sound startles me from my dreams. Instead of the toasty, glowing sands succumbing to the fall of my weight, I hear the dry pricks of teensy feet against the cool tile on which my bed rests.

“What is that noise?” my wife asks.

“It’s those damned worms,” I retort, covering my ears with my damp pillow.

“Aren’t you going to kill them?” She rolls over.

I unwrap myself and step down to search for the culprits. I don’t even take a step when I hear the wet crunches. Too tired to clean my foot, I crawl back in bed.

From Guest Contributor, Bradley Sides

Bradley Sides holds an M.A. in English. His fiction appears (and is forthcoming) in Belle Rêve Literary Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Boston Literary Magazine, Freedom Fiction Journal, Inwood Indiana, Literary Orphans and Used Gravitrons. He is a staff writer for Bookkaholic. He resides in Florence, Alabama, with his wife, and he is working on his debut novel.

A Turquoise Fish

When the brown moths would gather on the ceiling, you would take them up in your hands and set them loose outside. Yes, I miss that. And you are right. It is true that I was vengeful. It is true that I was impossible to pin to the carpet. And I used rhetoric to slip out of body. But what you wouldn't hear, what I tried to tell you, was that I felt like a fish on the shore, begging for water. Love me, please, hear me, please, see? You kept saying, “The sand is water, so swim in it.”

From Guest Contributor, Addy Evenson

Tainted Dress

When I woke up this morning, no way in hell did I think I would wake up feeling like a wrecked ship on the shore. I was the girl that was found emotionally dead in the shallow part of the ocean but was never found in the deep part of her mind. I wanted the water to swallow me whole rather than people find me with my sanity slowly disappearing and my virtue stolen. My white dress was pure but now it has a layer of dirt. Who knew that a dress could express exactly how I feel right now.

From Guest Contributor, Kenzie Nicole

Good Little Girl

The little girl waited. She waited in the casket where her mother had gently placed her before they were discovered. She couldn’t see anything from within and could hear very little, but dared not make a sound. She kept instinctively mum. She heard rapid footsteps approaching their caravan, some voices faintly saying, “There’s the witch, burn her alive.” She felt a stone bouncing off the casket and screaming accompanied by sounds of something being dragged. Much later a pungent smoky odor started filling the casket, but she still dared not move. Laboriously breathing she waited for her mother to come.

From Guest Contributor, Manjiree Marathe

Someone With Nothing

On the first day, they took everything. On the second day, they took everything else. On the third day, I had nothing. (Least of all myself.) This was going to make it really difficult to get everything back. But only if I really wanted it all back.

I think they had taken all of everything from me due to an error of some sort. Some algorithm got confused. Ink bled into a ledger and a decimal was dropped and they took everything. And everything else. (Including me.) They possess even my will to have it all returned. So I’m okay.

From Guest Contributor, Russ Bickerstaff

Tepid

6:17 am. Chilly out. Her teeth, against the pink roses on the gold-leafed rim of her chipped tea cup with matching saucer cradling renegade drops of Lipton's--headquarters in Hoboken--clink and chatter. Behind her, tractor wheels first crunch and smash the little stick fence, cracking like femurs, then pummel the daisies, until finally the front door splinters apart. Empty Campbell cans and Hellman’s jars, lost tin and remnant timber crash the family photo, not hers, from a Sears’ catalog, but nonetheless... Miss Dallyworth takes the last sip, while the gentrification continues on, at her new address: the curb.

From Guest Contributor, Jennnifer Sarah Cooper

The Songbird

There's a songbird outside my house that knows the tune to every standard of the last fifty years. He drives me crazy.

He never stops singing, not while I'm at home anyway. How sexually frustrated does this bird have to be to tweet Paul Simon and Barry Manilow all day long? Visitors find him quaint and always want to take video, and then they make me watch their posts on YouTube. I'm thinking of shooting myself.

He says he'll keep at it until I do, because of how I shot his wife last winter. It's a decision I regret now.

The Meaning Of Divorce: As Told By A Seven Year Old

My name is Caleb Jones. What does divorce mean? It means daddy doesn’t live here anymore. It means mommy and daddy used to fight, now daddy moved away. I don’t cry anymore. I can only see daddy on the weekends. Oh joy. My room seems grayer than I remember it being. My teddy bear, Howard, I hug him tighter than before.

Should I go out to play today?

No it’s raining, that’s ok I’ll read the book daddy bought me, last Christmas. It’s a good book. I read aloud. I can still smell daddy’s pipe as I read. Good night.

From Guest Contributor, Doug Robbins