Hungry Hannah

"HUNGRY HANNAH EATS REAL FOOD!" I thought all robotic dolls were creepy, but my twin daughters loved that commercial.

And they loved Hannah.

At least until tonight. Tonight I find the babysitter's back gnawed down to her spine. Karen lays legless, dead mid-scream, a broken doll herself. Samantha's face is chewed to tattered strips of scarlet skin -- wet ribbons staining hectic red hieroglyphs across the carpet. Her eyes and scalp are gone.

I find Hannah looking up at me. Her painted eyes are flat black coins. Her plastic teeth, still moving, are soaked in violent crimson.

"Feed me," she bleats.

From Guest Contributor Eric Robert Nolan

Once They Cross The Brambly Bridge Far Too Far From Town

The man in the black coat turns around, long ears dangling, striped vest pink-and-white, smiling. The children have followed him into the woods against their parents’ warnings, but just for a minute, not very far they say, as he pulls the golden ivory box from inside his pocket’s silk lining, lifts the top and their eyes grow wide for they are each inside, two inches tall, ceramic dolls he’s carved on a carousel winding round-and-round the emerald mound on tiny white ponies they’re riding, cymbals in their hair, penny whistles singing, ‘til they no longer hear the dinner bells ringing.

From Guest Contributor Kathy Miller

Kathy is a writer of poems, stories, songs, and screenplays. She lives in Michigan and has a B.F.A and an M.F.A. in Writing. Her publications include HarperCollins’ It Books, Universal Music Publishing Group, and The Aviator.

If You Climb, Fall

There was a wound-dresser in the forest, somewhere deep, maybe sleeping in the sticky tree hollow that still sometimes holds nesting dolls and eggs, tiny gifts, talismans, things we know matter, twin feet in this world and the other. So, when you came, under sun, scabs freshly bloomed, populating your back’s nude surface, to announce what the branches had left when you slid their surfaces from canopy to ground, I handed you a ticket for the woods and we left together, closing each door behind, certain that another Carthage burns softer the closer we come to any shore at all.

From Guest Contributor Kelli Allen

Kelli is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has won awards for her poetry, prose, and scholarly work. She served as Managing Editor of Natural Bridge and holds an MFA from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She is the director of the River Styx Hungry Young Poets Series and founded the Graduate Writers Reading Series for UMSL. She is currently a Professor of Humanities and Creative Writing at Lindenwood University. Allen is the author of two chapbooks and one flash fiction collection. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books in 2012 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.