Nothing

The engine gives out and we’re about to crash. I guide the plane as best I can and brace for impact. Then there’s blackness.

When I wake, Ted has a blank stare, and his head is twisted in an awkward position. He’s dead.

The bone in my left ankle is protruding from the skin and I’m having trouble breathing. I’m sure I’ve ruptured my ribs.

The door is jammed and I can’t walk. The airplane will soon explode and there’s nowhere to go. I say a silent prayer and close my eyes.

There’s a crackling noise, flames and then nothing.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Devastation

Jack and Angela surveyed the scene with racing hearts. What they'd just witnessed was pure devastation, as insatiable leviathans sucked flesh from bone, leaving nothing but emptiness in their wake.

Jack and Angela felt lucky to have survived, as if one false step might have left them vulnerable to the same fate. Like a dog that bites the hand that feeds it, had they tried to intervene, they too might have been stripped to the bone.

"I guess I'll start cleaning up," said Jack. "I'll wash if you dry."

Angela followed into the kitchen, lamenting she'd ever agreed to IVF.

Survivors

They live presently. Now they tear the soft meat from the bone, now they hear the twang of resistant tendons. The vibration of it. A chorus of crows. Scudding wings of moths that search for the darkness just beyond. In the pit is hunger. We exist, hands pasted to rifle stocks, glimmering gunmetal eyes, rattle-boned. They know family born of teeth, defined by the low moans of their communes. Their tongues hang together. Our hands hang separately, our nails scratching our own stomachs, our thighs, our faces. But we are all hungry. We will all ooze the same black ichor.From Guest Contributor Carrie Cook

Carrie received her MA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University and is currently living in Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Columbia Review, Midwestern Gothic, Menacing Hedge, and Bartleby Snopes.

Song For Ancient Children

You’re moving away rather than moving toward something. I can't be sure if you’ll ever come back. The sky is dotted with clouds that resemble ominous black eggs. You want to scream for help, but you’re out of breath. You’ve no idea at all what you should do next. “Fuck the clown!” you confusedly think. “Where’s my clock?” Just as someone is saying it’ll be OK, you feel a bone break. You see buildings toppling over, trees melting back into the ground. You hear angels approaching at full speed in chariots. There aren't even parking spaces big enough for them.From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press.

A Hard Blessing

When the Iron Giant fell from the sky thousands of us died. Thousands of us crushed, frail flesh smeared; muscle, brain and bone pulped. Phosphorus flares turned us to char. We starved and burned and died.

Toppling down from heaven, a hard blessing; we stood in its shadow and begged it to stop. But no ears heard us; they were shut tight to our prayers.

The Giant gouged the earth sending dust into the air choking us. We starved, we fought, we fed on one and other, and we survived. And the Iron Giant lies waiting for us to come.

From Guest Contributor David Rae

Skin

In the weeks after her mother died, Pamela had no skin. Everything was surface—every twitching nerve, every gush of bile. When Creepy Carl told her to smile as he dropped off his rent check, her lips peeled back to the bone.

At home, she told Ben: I know about the girl you’ve been fucking for the last four months. Your intern. In our God damn bed.

Come on, baby, he said, it wasn’t like that.

But it was. She wouldn’t have her raw insides sheathed in lies. She slept in the guest room, on top of the blankets, oozing resentment.

From Guest Contributor Carrie Cook

Carrie received her MA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University and is currently living in Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Columbia Review, Midwestern Gothic, Menacing Hedge, and Bartleby Snopes.

On A Rainy Day

Twenty years of door keeping had taught me not to be late to work. I started early on a rainy day. Just round the corner, I saw this puppy wet to the bone. I took him home, dried, fed, cuddled and put him in cozy box. I rushed to my work a good thirty minutes late. The big man called me in, fired me from service. I went back home.

Honest loving pair of eyes greeted me with joy. Twenty minutes care had raked such love in him, I felt, my twenty years of service just went down the drain.

From Guest Contributor Thriveni C. Mysore