Burn Book

The colors bled into the paper as the flames curdled the corners. Names, dates, crimes, it all melted into ash before their eyes, disappearing into oblivion. They all vowed never to speak, even in a whisper, what was written within its binding. Their sins no longer existed.

Most religions have a bible or a creed that is a resolute anchor of all that is sacred. For those lucky souls who inscribed their names into the burn book, their holiness was birthed out of that which was not recorded. Their spirits flew forever free, their futures untied to fate or destiny.

For Yulia Navalnaya

Beware, murderer. I know widows. I watched my mother become one, imagined how my face would bend and darken in the shadow of the word that means shroud, dusk, ash. What lies inside the bones of a woman who does not crumble before you—who wears this word to war, vowing not to yield? Something heavy: iron, redwoods. Oak, like him: an oak among reeds who knew he would be uprooted, just as she knows she will be. No, it is light, hydrogen fusion in the belly of a star, howling life, dawn, freedom. Beware of this widow on fire.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook Bhagat (she/her) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won or placed in the top two in contests at Loud Coffee Press, A Story in 100 Words, and most recently, the Pikes Peak Library District 2023 fiction contest. It has been published in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal and a professor of creative writing Read her work and learn more about Only Flying at https://brook-bhagat.com/.

The Dig

A woman’s voice beneath the ash and rubble signals me. I tell her to keep talking and follow the sound, digging, my hands and arms aching.

“We’re almost there,” I say, gasping, dripping sweat and thirsty.

One of my workmen approaches. “Ben, she won’t survive long if we don’t get her out soon.”

“Keep digging,” I say.

An image appears and to my stunned eyes, I see a protruding stomach. She has lost consciousness and is covered in earth. I get her onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.

I take the shovel and begin digging for the next victim.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

The World Is Nothing But Chaos And Entropy

Brian stared at the devastation. Where once stood his immaculately kept garage, packed with 45-years worth of careful philatelic curation, was a skeletal frame and mound of black cinders. His eye would be diverted by what momentarily struck him as an envelope floating on the breeze, but turned out was nothing but ash.

His wife attempted consoling him. Imagine the insurance payout! But his devotion had never been about money. Only now, staring at the remains of his life's work, did he truly understand his need for the comfort of a well-aligned stamp in a world of chaos and entropy.

Old Fire Station - Berlin - March 20, 1939

HISTORICAL FICTION ENTRY:

Removing his peaked cap, Gerhard runs his hand thru his fair, slicked-back hair. He is only a soldier: molded by the Nazi party. He isn’t a person just something to enforce Chancellor Hitler’s government. This time though, the instructions come from Joseph Goebbel. Anything marked with an X gets no mercy.

Gerhard stares into the inferno that devours the art dubbed degenerate. The canvases feeds the blaze, bubbles, and burns: turning into searing embers that fade to ash. He never understood art. The only thing he knows is everything burns. No matter the color, vibrancy, culture, religion.

We’ll all burn!

From Guest Contributor McKenzie A. Frey

Buried

HISTORICAL FICTION ENTRY:

Quintus, uncomfortably warm, found himself staring blankly at the frescoes on his wall of intertwined naked ladies and men. Startled out of his daydream when the floor shook and the walls cracked, he ran through the atrium to the front wooden door and opened it. People scrambled the streets, colliding into one another screaming in terror. Mount Vesuvius had erupted into fiery lava, ash and pumice.

Quintus ran, but the roof collapsed and buried him in a pile of burning rocks. With shallow breathing, and his lungs collapsed, he bid farewell to Pompeii as the sound of dying screams faded.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Last Dance

Rain blackens the windows, dime-sized water balloons of toxic ash. We haven’t had sun in months, and now this. You look up and say, Think it’ll stop? I love how you still look up, that instinctive angle of hope, of God.

It doesn’t matter since ration deliveries have ended, but I don’t say that.

We stand on the porch and watch the rain. Our last neighbors emerge from their house, wave, then slow dance down the street. By the time they reach the corner they’re convulsing like punk rockers. I ask you to dance but you pull me back inside.

From Guest Contributor Charles Duffie

The Chariot

Pale reaching hands slipped below powdered ash and blood-soaked mud, pressing tighter to the earth, seeking salvation in the grave-like ditch. War thundered overhead as gunpowder sparked and chorused above. The soldier turned his silver eyes over the mud—to the cemetery of barbed wire and bruised corpses.

A high-pitched scream wailed distantly from two warring steeds tethered together. He watched the blood-stained Roan shriek and kick as it fell into the sea of barbed wire; the moon-kissed Arabian jolted from the tearing spikes, her gas mask hanging from bloodied leather, not knowing whether to die quietly or while struggling.

From Guest Contributor Mikayla E. Gruber

Mikayla is currently writing a fantasy/sci-fi novel and studying English and German at Pikes Peak Comunity College. She is also working towards a CPDT-KA Certification.