Crossing The Line

“How can a guy talk with a girl without looking foolish?” asked Paul.

“I’m not the one to ask. Last date dumped me, said I’m boring,” Don grimaced.

The buddies commiserated over their lunches in the school cafeteria when an attractive dark-haired girl glided past them.

“That’s her!” Paul announced. “I’ve been eying her for…”

“Go for it! Be your charming natural self, bro.”

Paul rose from the table to catch up with the girl of his dreams. He asked if he could join her. She accepted.

It was a new frontier he was willing to cross into and experience.

From Guest Contributor Krystyna Fedosejevs

For the prompt Frontier

Fingertips to Her Shoulders Like Wings in Her Sleep

She is a bird perched on this moment, holding tight to the splintering branch of the past even while the warm chinook of now swirls up from the canyon whispering promises to her flight feathers, visions of vistas that shudder up through the tunnels in her hollow bones. The hurricane of her hair twists in the wind as she stretches, inches closer to dreams of silence deeper than the abyss of midnight sheets. There is no cage that can hold her, no rope that can bind her, no dead story that can stand before her when she decides

to fly.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Dreams Of Fallen Ashes

He didn't ask.

He just slid on the shoe, and that was that.

Granted, it was all a huge improvement from my previous position – a dizzying improvement. I had to keep reminding myself that everything was real, everything was fine, that I truly was in a fairy tale. And granted, I had asked – no, begged – to go to that dance in the first place. If I hadn't –

If I hadn't, I would still be wearing sturdy leather shoes, sleeping in warm ashes, and dreaming.

Not here, undreaming, with ankles caught in sharp chains of diamond and gold, watching others dance.

From Guest Contributor Mari Ness

Be Easy

Tomas nervously made his way to his seat at the very back of the lecture hall. He'd originally staked out this spot to avoid being called on during class discussion, but if it afforded him the opportunity to surreptitiously glance at his neighbors' test answers, that was just a happy accident.

He prayed this final was easy. He needed an A on the exam to ensure a passing grade. Failure meant his dreams of medical school would be over.

The first question contained the word "Gluconeogenesis."

Tomas stood and walked out of the classroom. The world needs car mechanics too.

Maxwell

When Maxwell slept, he always dreamed of chocolate. According to his psychoanalyst, this was a long repressed association he had with the candies his mother gave him as a child. His medical doctor insisted it was a result of his chocolate allergy (technically three different allergies to milk, nuts, and soy, but who's keeping track). His wife believed it was a sign he should get her a Valentine's Day gift (collateral damage be damned).

Maxwell visited a dream analyst. She said chocolate represents an indulgence, and his subconscious was telling him to live life.

In other words, death by chocolate.

Ripped To Bits By Ghosts

I moved into my workshop, with a gas-ring and pair of chickens in a cage. I needed no assistants. I watched the sky from a hilltop laboratory, harnessing the lightning.

In reality I sleep under the stairs in my friends’ flat. He’s a motorcycle courier, she’s a receptionist. I work where I can, wherever the agency sends me, seven days a week. If I’m ill I rely on her noticing and bringing me soup or something. I have a notebook to record my dreams. Huge flights of geese turn furrows through the red November skies. Worlds can barely contain me.

From Guest Contributor Geoff Sawers

The Dark Arts

If I look different, taller or fitter, it may be because a kind of prisoner swap has taken place. Somehow I’ve wriggled out from under the extreme judgments of a cold, tyrannical god. I’m still me but not the same. My failures suddenly seem less painful, viewable in retrospect as a series of valiant gestures against the authority of received narratives. Indigenous names for places have been restored, our pale winter bodies renourished. And so we lie down together, she and I, consumers of dreams, while angels dabble in the dark arts and the sniper kneels at the corner window.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is author of the poetry book, The Dark, available from Sacred Parasite, which will also publish his book, Akimbo, in 2025.

Two Ottos

By the time he awoke that Saturday morning, Otto was exhausted. It was another night of running dreams – of being on a treadmill, getting no place fast. And, then, of the treadmill ratcheted up to greater and greater inclines.

How much more could he take?

Painfully, step after step, he stumbled into the kitchen. Were his feet blistered?

There, in the cage on the counter, was Little Otto, his hamster.

And on the ridiculous hamster wheel.

Little Otto's legs moved faster and faster.

"Stop it."

But Little Otto only sped up.

"At least wipe that damned smirk off your face."

From Guest Contributor David Sydney

Microplastics

Too small, too tough, the forever stuff. Five millimeters to a nanometer, all recycle cheaters. Polyethylene is not green. Debris in the sea, in the sand, on the land, in the air. The minuscule plastic molecule – drink it, breathe it, absorb it. 200 thousand microplastic molecules in you every year. Perfect hair, revolutionary skincare – just vain dreams ruining streams. All the sales promotions on lotions and potions, laundry soap, shopping bags, and tags. So much trash; it’s the sin of the bin. It’s hard to be a container abstainer, a nature campaigner. This is the mess we’re in.

From Guest Contributor K Mayer

Sentinels

With the heavens above, eyes perceive blackness below. The silhouettes of lonesome silos dotting a barren landscape gives way to perceptions of ancient obsidian obelisks, sentinels erected by the offspring of some long-forgotten civilization, sating deities of seasons past.

Against a moonless night, one can appreciate the unencumbered band of the Milky Way, glorious gold and white light from hundreds of thousands of stars, blues, oranges and reds, sparkling beacons of potentialities adorning the night sky.

I repose beneath a blanket of starlight, and the encircling melody of coywolves lulls me to sleep as I long for dreams of you.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster