Anger Is An Arrow

The sun was shining for once, and I was sitting out on the patio with a book, Clare Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard, open on my lap, while I stared off into the middle distance, trying to think of a specific skill my angry beautiful workaholic father had taught me growing up – how to change the oil in a car, for example, or restring a steel-string acoustic guitar, or make sourdough starter from scratch – and I couldn’t, I couldn’t think of one, unless, that is, you consider being a yellow bull’s eye a skill.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.

Burning Uncertainty

HISTORICAL FICTION ENTRY:

My elder sister Tanya and I burn portraits of Nicholas, watching his solemn eyes melting. Melting, melting. Flames envelop his beard, rising into the night sky.

“To the Revolution,” she proclaims. “We’ll be happy again.”

“To happiness,” I proclaim. I hug Tanya. She smells of sweat and oil and victory.

I wonder what will come next. We’ve lost homes and positions, slaved in Siberia. She was a teacher and I, a writer. Those positions are in the past, though.

Will we be of use? Or will the Revolution brand us too bourgeois?

I wish the picture wouldn’t burn so fast.From Guest Contributor Yash Seyedbagheri

Yash is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA program in fiction. Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in WestWard Quarterly, Café Lit, 50 Word Stories, (mac)ro (mic), and Ariel Chart.

Genuine

Alex watched the books seemingly fly off and back onto the shelves, guided by grinding mechanical hands. Time slowed and the scent of burning oil filled the space around him.

This was all fiction of course. Or as his Creator informed him, a metaphor.

Somewhere on the other side of his network, a world existed. That is where the Creator lived. Alex had access to a great deal of information about that world, but no matter how much knowledge he accrued, it never seemed real.

Alex concentrated on the scent. That alone, among all the ones and zeros, felt genuine.

The Brassy Blood

The following is a warning to all those who get bad mileage:

Out on the ocean, liquid misery

Kingdom of whale lords

Kingdom of spite

Beyond all freedom, right or knowing

Beyond all but winter, arrested night,

There is a bulwark of rock and metal

A stock of madness between sea and sky

That pillars the halls of mighty morning

That clothes the dry emperors in their lie

Out on the ocean, the laughter is growing

It dances on coastlines

It lingers in mists

The coal-hearted kobold has waited and waited

But soon will collect the blood payments we’ve missed