Chaos Angel

Bill stood overlooking the Hudson River, contemplating what reason he had for still living. He half expected an angel to appear, a wise guardian able to show him all the people who'd miss him were he no longer here. Instead, he found himself completely alone, a feeling that had grown so oppressive that any outcome would be preferable.

Bill did have a guardian angel. His name was Donald. He was scheduled to be at the bridge at exactly the moment he was most needed. Unfortunately, Donald did not believe in keeping a calendar. He preferred to wing it (pun intended).

Drunk

First, there's a moment when you are just crossing the threshold from complete oblivion, wrapped in blankets and darkness, to reemerge into the light of the living. You are not a person yet. You have no recollections or anxieties. This is probably what it was like right before you were born.

You don't realize you have a hole in your memory until you're halfway to the bathroom. How did you get home last night? Where's your car? Why is the floor slanting away from you?

You stare at yourself in the mirror and promise you're never going to drink again.

East Of Deadwood

Off in the distance, hundreds of lifeless began to shuffle toward town. Vernon turned and saw the cowboy he'd killed staring at him with bloodshot eyes.

"We have to get out of here," Vernon said.

Emmett answered, "I agree. It'll only get worse."

Vernon patted him on the back. He was a good man to have on his side.

They watched them scurry about like insects surrounding the few remaining living. The corpses hadn't crossed a burned-out piece of road.

Vernon added, "West is our ticket out."

Hell-bent for leather on horseback, they left the living and the un-dead behind.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

Haunted

We lived in that house, but we died in it too. It ravished the souls of the living and confined those of the dead. We lived with our eyes closed, but we died with them open. It took us slowly, a gradual disorientation of the senses. We lived far too short, but we died ages ago. It trapped us with a treacherous hive mind, seduced by the whispers in the walls. We lived apart, but we died together. It didn't hurt and it won't hurt for you. I watch at the edge of your bed; the ghoul in the shadows.

From Guest Contributor Margaret Gleason

Currently, Margaret Gleason attends Pikes Peak Community College, but has dreams of writing, coding, and drawing her own video games.

Conversation Between A Composer And Their Psychologist

“I’ve always heard it.”

“And you coped by writing?”

“Yeah.”

“Did writing help?”

“Yeah, when I write it down the music cadenzas. And I get to perform it and make a decent living too.”

“What do you mean by cadenzas?”

“It’s Latin for stop. Then diminuendo until a new tune starts up in allegro. And I write that down too.”

The psychologist wrote: persistent auditory hallucinations & delusions of grandeur. There might be a book deal in this; a construction worker who believes himself a composer. Hottest thing in ClinPsych since the man who mistook his wife for a hat.From Guest Contributor Harman Burgess

Harman's short fiction has previously been published in CafeLit and Friday Flash Fiction, as well as in the upcoming September edition of Scarlet Leaf Review.

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.