Coda

He followed the familiar tune through the fog: strings, horns, that impossibly sweet voice. The gloom lifted to reveal the girl, singing her heart out under the spotlight, invisible orchestra in accompaniment. He cried tears of joy, felt love, and also something not quite love.

"You sing it to me every night in my mind. But it sounds so much clearer now. Why?"

She smiled sadly. "Can't you guess?"

*

"Is he dead?" The reporter watched the killer's body inside the execution chamber.

"Yes."

He peered closer. "What does he have to smile about? He murdered that girl right on stage!"

From Guest Contributor Clay Waters

Human Beings Are The Only Wild Animals

Whenever I fly into a foreign country, I’m afraid I’ll be dragged into a room and forced to answer questions I’ll fail to understand. “You can do better,” the examiner will say, just before firing an electric current through the alligator clips attached to my ears. By the time I’m released from custody, I’ll be bent, shriveled, gnome-like, and afflicted with tremors. These events repeat themselves in my mind on a loop, every recurrence worse than the last, now involving sleep deprivation, now an inmate orchestra playing a German requiem, now corpses sprawled half in, half out of broken caskets.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

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