I Heard A Mother Scream

I hear a mother scream. She is haunted by the ghost of all the empty tomorrows, the house that doesn't creak in the night, the silent graveyard safe from superstitious breath.

The desolation of her scream, so familiar, pierces into me. We're both tormented by the life still left to live, unable to excoriate the soul from the skin.

She seeks consolation in her refusal to accept the well meaning lies of those unable to withstand true despair.

I too have that scream inside me, its silence continuing to bounce off the walls, the pain reverberating both inside and out.

Do It Well

Do it well, honey. My lover’s voice echoed inside me as I stabbed my wife repeatedly. Fear flashed in her doe-like eyes. She fell to the wet forest floor and crawled away. I grabbed her ankle and pulled. On my umpteenth attempt, my knife struck through her neck, severing her jugular vein. Blood splattered. The light faded out of her eyes. I rolled her up in a plastic sheet and buried her. Later, I stumbled into my home, choking on her perfume. There she stood in front of me. “What?” I gasped. She brandished a knife. Sharper than my own.From Guest Contributor Fusako Ohki

Translated by Toshiya Kamei

Fusako Ohki is a Japanese writer from Tokyo. She obtained her master’s degree in Japanese literature from Hosei University. Her debut collection of short fiction is forthcoming in 2021.

Girl In Nature

I read a story once about a girl in nature. A man was watching her ride her bike through a field of flowers. She was beautiful, so he stopped her. He frightened her, her fear frightened him, he panicked. He raped and killed her, strangling her in perfectly-rendered fragments, snippets of sun-burnished green, pale skin under cobalt sky, a tale of flushed mania and hazy recollections of doomed resistance. A beautiful life snuffed out in beautiful prose.

I don’t ride alone through fields. I’ll never taste the freedom that killed the girl. Another beautiful life snuffed out in beautiful prose.

From Guest Contributor Tara Campbell

Tara is a fiction editor at Barrelhouse and an MFA candidate at American University. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Jellyfish Review, Booth, and Strange Horizons. Her novel, TreeVolution, was published in 2016, followed in 2018 by Circe's Bicycle. Her third book, a short story collection called Midnight at the Organporium, will be released by Aqueduct Press in 2019.