The Ascent

The door heaves open. Light floods me while darkness retreats inside me. The guards shove me outside my cell. On the stairs, my heart beats like a war drum. One step. Two. Many more. While my chains gently clink. At the summit, I look down and the people cheer. I see their mouths moving but I can’t hear a sound. All I hear is my panicked breath. As they take off my chains, the darkness escapes. I feel so light that I lose the ground under my feet. I smile, in the twenty-five meters that separate me from the abyss.

From Guest Contributor Davide Risso

Davide grew up in Italy, but his itchy feet led him to live in Ireland, Germany, the United States, and travel around the globe. Scientist by training, writer by passion, rock climber by vocation, his fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, RumbleFish Press, Literary Yard, and Cranked Anvil among others.

Capricorn

The stubbornness with which the constellations cling to the sky is the stuff of religion. Whatever your beliefs, that kind of tenacity can't fail to inspire the fickle and the insane.

Molly had never thought of herself as a sheep, but how could she explain why she followed him into that abyss? Was it his persistence? His loyalty? The sensitivity he allowed only her to see. Or just a refusal to read the signs even as they became more apparent?

The lawyers who decided a restraining order would be protection enough better hope hell is less real than the Zodiac.

The Pit

There is an island floating above a shattered and charred plane of earth. It's a little black island, untouched by the sun, hovering above with an unsettling presence. It is awaiting something.

An eerie cosmic wind sweeps into a bottomless chasm beneath the island, the deepest pit ever known to exist.

It stretches from the center of the planet to the edge of reality's outer realms, a limitless abyss that devours anything thrown into it.

Nature's laws do not apply here.

This pit is the only law. It will not be content until it has devoured everything in the world.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

Molded Reality

A tap on the shoulder a jolt back to reality, not reality to an abyss. Weary as someone falls on the ground blood everywhere. Running and screaming in vengeance. The puddle grows sticky I melt into the floor, watching time slow down. Put on a pedestal not to adore or admire but to pity. Voices behind me question our reality. Time slowly tick-tocks by. A car ride later, bright lights and people dawned in blue hovering over me. Green silk and glowsticks draped with fresh blood dripping on the expansive white linoleum floors. Going back, I see a molded reality.

From Guest Contributor Bandit Taylor

Bandit is a student at Pikes Peak Community College. He Is only 16 and is loving going to college for education. He is currently working on a novel based in Leningrad, Russia during the Cold War.

Gently Home

Seagulls arced lazy turns as an angry ocean pounded my listing fishing boat. Separated, the submerged boat lights cast a green glow around me, making the ocean even darker as the light trailed into abyss. Floating, my thoughts went to all life in the ocean, reacting, surviving, inching slowly along the ooze and undulating mid-water with goals ingrained. Ocean smell, thick with sea spray and sargassum, cradled me like a childless mother. Dipping below the horizon, the boat disappeared, sunset style, leaving me with only the immensity of space. Gazing at weightless gulls, the blue mire pulled me gently home.

From Guest Contributor Wes Keller