Life’s Surprises

I’m walking along the parks path and the sun is so hot, sweat drips down my neck. The trees are full of sparrows chirping in unison, and the benches are full of elderly men reading the newspaper or just staring ahead. One man is eating chips and crumbs stick to his mustache. I chortle and move along. Mothers with children, some eating ice cream, drop sprinkles on the ground and the ants come in droves.

It’s days like this I don’t take for granted. Life is full of surprises and I never know what will be, once I start radiation.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

As You Wish

There's a man on the television in an outdated suit. He is talking to a famous interviewer I have always liked. The words on the screen read: William Goldman -- Author, The Princess Bride.

This is not the truth. I know this for a fact because I have read The Princess Bride. It was not written by a man. It was bequeathed to us fully formed by Prometheus, who stole it from the heavens.

There is one thing the man says that I agree with in addition to his mustache. "The easiest thing to do on Earth is not to write."

Lunch With Maurice

I was doing time at another warehouse.Another W2 in a factotum year.Maurice, pudding formed with a handlebar mustache, sat across from me.He liked security. “I keep a weapon in every room. I don’t even lock my door. I have got a shotgun on the wall, a handgun in each room unregistered. I got a bat in the bathroom and a sword under my bed with a knife between my pillows.”“Expecting trouble?”“My dad was in the navy. Antiwar activists target the relatives of veterans.”Maurice was found dead in his apartment.Stabbed in the eye.From Guest Contributor Michael Zone

Michael is the author of Fellow Passengers: Pubic Transit Poetry, Meditations & Musings and Better than the Movies: 4 Screenplays. His work has been featured in Because Eileen, Dead Snakes, Horror Trash Sleaze, In Between Hangovers, Three Line Poetry, Triadae, and The Voices Project. He scrapes by in Grand Rapids, MI

Craigslist

It got dark early. He said he would wait in his car since the apartment was hard to find. I put the twenty in my back pocket and even in the headlights walking closer I could see it in his eyes, this kid with a smudge of a mustache, and before that on the phone too something empty under his voice like might as well, like nothing else to do. He called me ma'am and handed me Guitar Hero. He said he hasn't played in a while because the Xbox was his girlfriend's, and she took it when she left.From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

After graduating with a BA in English from Vassar College, Brook landed her first paid writing job as a reporter for a small-town Colorado newspaper. She left it to travel to India, where she fell in love, got married and canceled her ticket home. She and her husband Gaurav write freelance articles for dozens of publications, including Outpost, Ecoworld and Little India. In 2013, they launched www.BluePlanetJournal.com, which she edits and writes for. She also teaches writing at a community college, is earning her MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University, and is writing a novel.

The Empty Seat

There's a seat open right next to me. It's the only empty seat on the entire bus. You know that during rush hour you're lucky to get a few inches of space, let alone a seat.

Why don't you sit down. I will try my best not to squeeze up against you. I'm sure we'll touch a few times going around the curves, but always by accident.

If I lean in really close, we'll be breathing the same oxygen molecules. The hairs of my mustache might tickle your check.

Please, go ahead and sit down. I don't mind at all.

The Mustax Pandemic

When the pandemic hit, we'd never seen anything like it. More than its destructive power, its peculiar behavior was what struck us as so frightening. We were at a loss to explain why it mostly affected adult males--a few women, never children--and seemed to be spread through barbershops and police stations at a statistically significant rate. No one mourned when hipster neighborhoods were disproportionately afflicted, but it posed more questions that we struggled to answer.

It took days before we figured out the virus was only attacking mustaches. We should have realized when Tom Selleck was the first to die.

How These Things Get Started

The group staggered out of the party, swaying violently towards the next bar. “Wait!” Janet said. “I have the GREATEST IDEA EVER!” They emerged from the tattoo parlor an hour later, fingers oozing blood. “Now our whole lives are stache bashes!”

Future history textbooks would be filled with pictures of the sinister curled mark. Some were on pennants flying above military parades. Others adorned young officers, their fingers outstretched towards state enemies. But, inevitably, the tattoos made them easy to find. As nations were brought to account, some pleaded that they hadn’t known.

But how could they not have known?