Moon Shot

You can open your eyes now. The walls are covered in scribbled physics equations. Nothing wrong with that, but someone has to get on that rocket and get blown up, maybe. Take it from me, you don’t want to overlook product warnings (“Do not insert in rectum or vagina using fingers or mechanical device.”). Awareness is just so important. Everything happens too fast, as if hurled in irrational anger by the hand of God, though it’s really fluid dynamics. Even a momentary lapse in concentration can result in the sky cracking, dripping, burning, and the blue of night remaining unsolved.From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Faith, Hope, Etc.

The next time you’re caught in a really bad place – the kind of place where people are always asking each other, “Oh why can't they get that baby out of the ground?” – take some frequently used verbs and combine them in a bowl with Hindu magnet incense, a bit of forgotten history, brain fluid, and warm dog’s breath, and then let the mixture sit for 20 minutes, after which you should be able to see a faint glow up there, see it coming over the hill, women wearing sky blue T-shirts that say “Quaker” and waving signs that say “Love.”

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's latest collections are I'm Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submissions Press.

Mary Of Silence

From where she stood, she watched the blood soak into the hard, compacted earth. It was like watching water that has spilled from a glass onto the countertop evaporate in fast motion. Soon it would be as if the dark fluid had never been there, absorbed into this wasteland where it could serve no purpose.

Mary wanted to scream. But her voice had fled long ago. With no one willing to listen futility had eventually won out. The doctors called it aphasia.

So Mary watched her husband die. Here, freedom surely was a bitterness. Alone, she started walking towards sunset.

Delia

She waits at the bar every night, alone in the corner. Her eyes smudged with fine lines and tear stains from years gone by. Lipstick is applied to chaffed lips and she brushes harsh, greying hairs. Her wrinkled hands fiddle aimlessly with yet another glass of the only fluid that offers relief. Her clothes are worn, unchanged throughout the fashions of the last two decades. Every night she drinks in the corner. Every night she drags herself home, a cigarette slouching from her drying mouth. She remembers little else.

With heavy heart she waits for him. He promised to return.

From Guest Contributor Kerry Kelly

That Which Grows, That Which Dies

Lisa found a pallid yellow seed on her pillow. She rolled it between her finger and thumb, speculating that if planted, a good husband would grow. One that didn't drink or stay out all night. One that wouldn't smoke, swear, shout and scold. Her man would come, different to the others.

The seed cracked and an ocher fluid seeped onto Lisa's fingers. She licked at it as the crack repaired itself. The fluid was hot on her tongue. It erased all the thoughts she had of the perfect spouse and replaced them with images of sleeping pills and razor blades.

From Guest Contributor, Horrorshow