Conspiracy Theory

Beyond porch lights, snow piles up, sealing in anxious women. They stand at windowsills watching the sky glower. Blinking in the fists of children are glo-stix to throw at the towering drifts, aiming where the eyes should go. Elsewhere, a child snaps his birthday gift of a bow-and-arrow in half. The moon rolls down a hill and thunder beats its metal chest, a rattling that distracts everyone from the whir of an incoming drone. It kicks up all the snow but means no harm, though some will insist the machine was an alien ship, come to take the glo-stix home.

From Guest Contributor Cheryl Snell

The Bully Business Professor

The asshat in an ascot quoted Foucault. He made faculty senate holy hell. I think he was in English, maybe History; I knew he wasn’t in athletics!

Anyway, motherfucker just loved the drone of his self-important voice. How about the dulcet tone of a head slap?

I snapped and pummeled him. An Engineering professor high-fived me before public safety came.

At my hearing, I learned he was old money, Ivy League—his mom and dad were philanthropists. He smirked when I got suspended.

Afterwards, I gave him a super wedgy and nasty pink belly.

That’s my story.

Paper or Plastic?

From Guest Contributor JD Clapp

House Rules

"No!” the vacation condos manager barked, his stink-eye getting stinkier by the second. “You cannot borrow a screwdriver to repair your drone. Drones are strictly forbidden on the property!”

“Geez, alright,” I said. Man, there’s a harshness on the edge of town. Last time I book with Wazoo Properties.

“And by the way,” he said. “No more ukulele playing on the lanai or by the pool. It’s strictly…”

“Forbidden?”

He nodded yes.

“One more thing,” he said, pointing at the NO SMOKING sign.

“So, what you’re saying…”

“Yes. No drones, no tools, no frets...and you don’t get no cigarettes!”

From Guest Contributor Lee Hammerschmidt

Lee is a Visual Artist/Writer/Troubadour who lives in Oregon. He is the author of the short story collection, A Hole Of My Own. Check out his hit parade on YouTube!

The Tempest

The trees about Raoul start to strain on their top masts and branches. Fog flees, a great wind comes, a storm too.

Raoul continues his walk, waiting, patient. Ever aware of the menace about him. The sky about him blackens. Cold winds herald the approaching storm before him, devouring and chasing back the once settled fog bank.

Mountains now appear in the distance. He eyes the storm dancing down their peaks, dragging the the veil of night with them and...the frozen tempest coming.

Over the drone of the wind, Raoul distinctly hears the Watcher in the Woods growl, 'Raoul!'

From Guest Contributor Brett Dyer

Anechoic, Deprived

I once thought I heard my father listening to Santana on our back patio. He never listened to music. The only soundtrack to his workaday life was the eight cylinders rumbling at his foot’s command. A kick drum reverberating in his chest that echoed his life. A violent explosion shrouded by modernity, reduced to a drone. I eased through the sliding glass door and found him staring at the beyond the lower pasture in silence. “Be still,” he said. His words hung thick in the mid-summer air. I still don’t know if I wanted the music for him or myself.

From Guest Contributor J. Andrew Goss

Anthropology 101

You hear the droning, a high-pitched whistle that keeps interrupting your sleep. It's your anthropology professor, bombinating about some god awful theory of ethnography that can't possibly be as interesting as the dream you're having.

You hate anthropology and its awkward mixture of science and philosophy. What does Dr. Dunham have to tell you about modern-day reality.

And then you understand that life was all an illusion, that the reality may be that you are spending your last living moments in the Arctic on a scientific expedition, and as you die of exposure, the 100-mile-per-hour winds whistle in your ear.