Only Flying

It was not until it hit the blade of the worst rock, riddled with femurs and water skulls, that the river split open and found the leverage to jump out of its bed. It left comfortable moss, minnows’ gossip, and the sound of its own body rubbing past stones, on or around. It surrendered, leapt without choosing, a reflection in air of the path it had known before—the meadow, the factory, the wooden swing. The cottonwoods, black and white. It had become the ocean it had always wanted to meet, silent now, still on the same path. Only flying.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. She teaches college writing and is the co-owner and chief editor of BluePlanetJournal.com. Her nonfiction, poetry, and flash fiction have appeared in Creations Magazine, Little India, Outpost, Nowhere Poetry, and The Syzygy Poetry Journal.

In the Paris Catacombs

My tour is just two thousand meters of the hundred kilometer labyrinth that forms this subterranean ossuary.

The tunnel walls are stacks of femurs, tibias, scapulas, et alia, interspersed with grinning skulls.

Six million dead unceremoniously disinterred, generation upon generation, from centuries ago.

Good, evil, male, female, beautiful, ugly, aristocrat, artisan, everyone has attained an undignified égalité here.

I could laugh myself to scorn at this macabre absurdity. Not a ghost in sight, merely piles of bones!

Back in the land of the living, I emerge into the rush hour: busy throngs of stick people, all sharing the same destination.

From Guest Contributor Ian Fletcher

Ian studied English Literature at Oxford University many years ago. He has had short stories published in various genres in Schlock! Webzine, Schlock! Bi-Monthly, Short-story.me, Anotherealm, Under the Bed, A Story In 100 Words, and in anthologies by Horrified Press and Rogue Planet Press. He is an Affiliate Member of the Horror Writers Association.

Tepid

6:17 am. Chilly out. Her teeth, against the pink roses on the gold-leafed rim of her chipped tea cup with matching saucer cradling renegade drops of Lipton's--headquarters in Hoboken--clink and chatter. Behind her, tractor wheels first crunch and smash the little stick fence, cracking like femurs, then pummel the daisies, until finally the front door splinters apart. Empty Campbell cans and Hellman’s jars, lost tin and remnant timber crash the family photo, not hers, from a Sears’ catalog, but nonetheless... Miss Dallyworth takes the last sip, while the gentrification continues on, at her new address: the curb.

From Guest Contributor, Jennnifer Sarah Cooper