This Morning I Lost My Favorite Sock And I Knew The World Was Ending

I wake up to the sound of volcanoes and people screaming.

Outside, Kīlauea glows. The Goddess of Volcanoes is sitting at my breakfast table, drinking coffee as she makes the world burn.

I say: “I hate my life. Take it.” I rip at my shirt collar, thrust my naked breasts forward.

Pele blinks. She is so, so beautiful.

Anxiety mounts and I wonder: did I come on too strongly, too like a beggar? A murderer’s least satisfying victim is the one that wants to die, after all.

Pele sits up and kisses me. Her tongue, velvet lava, melts everything away.

From Guest Contributor Andrei Șișman

Andrei is a fiction author and memoirist from Bucharest, Romania. He is currently wading through a forest of banalities in search of the perfect Tweet. By trade a lawyer, his literary work has appeared or is forthcoming in Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, and other places. Andrei can be found at andrei-sisman.carrd.co and on Twitter at @sisman_andrew.

Buried

HISTORICAL FICTION ENTRY:

Quintus, uncomfortably warm, found himself staring blankly at the frescoes on his wall of intertwined naked ladies and men. Startled out of his daydream when the floor shook and the walls cracked, he ran through the atrium to the front wooden door and opened it. People scrambled the streets, colliding into one another screaming in terror. Mount Vesuvius had erupted into fiery lava, ash and pumice.

Quintus ran, but the roof collapsed and buried him in a pile of burning rocks. With shallow breathing, and his lungs collapsed, he bid farewell to Pompeii as the sound of dying screams faded.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher