A Scorned Woman

You must realize my darling, that men have more immediate needs than a woman? Allowances should be made for us. You women don’t have to contend with an unruly member when it gets a whiff of a beautiful woman, especially if she smiles back.

You truly don’t have to do this. Please let me out. If you send me back, I’ll not ever be able to return. Please, please, Ruthie, I swear to you I won’t ever stray again. It’s the only time-machine in existence, and I’m much too fat to run from the dinosaurs at my time of life.

From Guest Contributor Len Mooring

Firstborn

The soon to be father entered the delivery room wearing a hastily tied paper gown.

“You’re just in time, Dad. We’re about to have a baby,” the doctor said. A large set of forceps flashed before vanishing behind the curtain. “Okay Mom, one more good push.”

Mom screamed while attempting to crush her husband’s hand. After a smack on the rear, the newborn sucked in its first breath and wailed.

“Congratulations, you have a baby girl.”

Tears of joy filled mom’s eyes as her daughter was placed into her arms, and she said with concern, “She looks like an alien.”

From Guest Contributor Eddie D. Moore

Eddie travels hundreds of hours a year, and he fills that time by listening to audiobooks. When he isn’t playing with his grandchildren, he writes his own stories. His stories have been published by Kzine, Alien Dimensions, Black Hare Press, Nomadic Delirium Press, Fantasia Divinity Publishing and by dozens of online publishers. You can find a list of his publications on his blog, eddiedmoore.wordpress.com, or by visiting his Amazon Author Page, amazon.com/author/eddiedmoore. While you’re there, be sure to pick up a copy of his mini-anthology Misfits & Oddities.

Life’s Surprises

I’m walking along the parks path and the sun is so hot, sweat drips down my neck. The trees are full of sparrows chirping in unison, and the benches are full of elderly men reading the newspaper or just staring ahead. One man is eating chips and crumbs stick to his mustache. I chortle and move along. Mothers with children, some eating ice cream, drop sprinkles on the ground and the ants come in droves.

It’s days like this I don’t take for granted. Life is full of surprises and I never know what will be, once I start radiation.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

The Importance Of Listening

I went on my own because I couldn't get anyone to come with me. What had once been an orchard was now a graveyard for old tires, sprung mattresses, rusty paint cans, even broken microwaves, scattered over the slope like the indecipherable wreckage of some puzzling event. The trees, untended for years, had long since stopped producing apples and been twisted into painful shapes by time and storms and then overwhelmed by creeper vines and opportunistic birds and insects. I just stood with my head cocked to one side as if trying to catch every single word the crows said.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie co-edits the journals UnLost and Unbroken.

Quick Examples Of Homonyms

“To bare one’s soul is a difficult thing indeed,” Pappa said.

Baby Bear tried to balance on one leg and fell over.

“Not that type of sole, dear,” Mamma confided, helping her son to his feet.

“What sort of education is that school providing,” Poppa growled, we can barely bear the annual fees. They don’t mete out value for honey.”

“Only the bare essentials, dear,” Momma said, ladling porridge. “That principal, Goldilocks, operates under the principle that bears have no role in The Academie.”

“I must meet her.”

“Deer meat – where?” Baby Bear licked his lips.

Poppa rolled his eyes.

From Guest Contributor Perry McDaid

The Knock

There’s a knocking on the spaceship door when there shouldn’t have been. For Chris-sake, I’m umpteen millions of miles from anywhere and here’s this knocking. It’s deliberate, and it’s the all too common knock of: knock, tiddly-knock-knock, knock knock. Is this a space hallucination? I’ve heard of them, but hell’s bells, I’ve only been up here for 50 days, surely it couldn’t happen as soon as this. Oh, mother, it’s peering in the port-hole now and looks just like me. I do feel a bit lonely now, maybe we could get along. I’ve just got to get this hatch open...

From Guest Contributor Len Mooring

The Goddess Becomes

It was a pleasure to burn. Of the eight, it was my most beautiful arm: the hillside slope of the shoulder, the tender elbow, that lilting wrist, narrow yet invincible. Had he seen it in the dance, or still in his Sistine posture, even Michelangelo would have known God is a woman.

The downy hair went up first, and then the skin, the perfect fingernails, the sizzling fat and muscle. There is always a relaxation in admitting the truth, even a truth that smells like sulfur and charcoal: I am the flames as much as I was ever the arm.From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and humor have appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror Magazine, Harbinger Asylum, MoonPark Review, Little India, Dămfīno, Nowhere Poetry, Rat's Ass Review, Peacock Journal, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and other journals and anthologies. In 2013, she and her husband Gaurav created Blue Planet Journal, which she edits and writes for. She holds an MFA from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry and creative writing at a community college, and is writing a novel. See more at www.brook-bhagat.com or reach her on Twitter at @BrookBhagat.

Library Literate

I was the kid who sparkled when they walked in the door. The bookish brat who would make her father chuckle while balancing a mountain of literature above her head.

There, I discovered the internet’s secrets. Every minute on their computer spent in obsession.

My friends and I chattered like hens between the book shelves. We scavenged through comics like vultures through the teenage fiction.

I read novellas under the summer sun. I ate my lunches before memorial statues.

Every trip was coming home and every inch towards the door was a step back in time.

Until it was gone.

From Guest Contributor Alexandra Sullivan

Lost

The only time I thought I’d seen a fairy was awakening with a hangover and propped up by the television set playing a Disney channel. But now I’m sober, standing upright, and engaged in talking to one that’s lost her way. She had proved her credentials with a wave of her wand and producing a glass of some mixture she said would quell the aftereffects of over-imbibing, but her wand wasn’t up to the GPS instrumentation. I didn’t tell her that her mob lived at the bottom of my garden. She’s tall and beautiful, and now shacking up with me.

From Guest Contributor Len Mooring

Later Life

Given the choice, I would want to be the sort of shrewd, goatish old man it’s said Rodin was, strolling the broad boulevards and ornate arcades of Paris after a productive morning in the studio, a young Russian-born French lady leaning lightly on his arm, and if her eyes were too wide apart for her to be considered a classic beauty, or if she didn’t actually read any of the books he recommended, he wouldn’t care, because it had just turned fall, and the air was like a crisp white wine, and they always felt at least a little drunk.From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost.