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

Backfire

Betsy wanted to slay a dragon. All her friends had killed at least one and it was embarrassing to show her face at the academy.

Sadly, Betsy's father had strictly forbidden her from joining any quests. He kept telling her maybe when she's older.

Betsy's brother had resigned himself long ago to never slaying any dragons and he told Betsy she might as well give up too. "Dad's never going to change his mind. He's against all slayings. Mom says that it's because his grandfather was a dragon."

Betsy grew up to hate dragons more than any of her classmates.

My Last Hawaiian Vacation

My new swim trunks were still crispy and smelled of a fresh paint. I plunged into the warm Hawaiian water, ready for my long-postponed vacation. And then I saw Her.

She gave me a hearty, genuinely happy smile, exposing a string of perfect, pearly white teeth. Her tight black skin glittered under the sun. She was clearly into me.

I looked back at my family uncomfortably. Little Johnny was pointing his little finger in my direction: too late. My body split in half, the ocean stained scarlet.

Luckily, my swim trunks remained completely intact: Sharky did not like their taste.

From Guest Contributor, Olga Klezovitch

Olga is a scientist who lives in Seattle. Her previous work has appeared in 50-Word Stories, Necon E-Books, and A Story in 100 Words