Filmgoers

Many winters ago the blizzard buried Negotin in white noise. Snow sealed doors, and the wind was sending SOS signals all over the town. Power lines were lying in the fields, houses went blind and breath turned to frost.

Only the old cinema stood like a lone lighthouse against the storm. Its generator pulsated like a tired heart. The theater was full, but no one spoke. When the movie began, I realized the actors were the audience themselves, levitating across the screen.

Slowly, the faceless crowd turned toward me. They weren’t watching the movie.

They wanted me to stay forever.

From Guest Contributor Ivan Ristic

Reign Of Terror

When the reign of terror begins in earnest, a street corner poet with hollow cheeks and large feverish eyes will sit at the anchor desk delivering the news in a toothless mumble and then ignore increasingly frantic signals and pleas to go to commercial break and instead recite between pulls on a bottle a long, rambling, incendiary poem, his voice rising and falling like a medieval executioner’s double-sided axe, until all the baskets are filled with the heads of our namesakes and the only sound that is still worth heeding is the disputatious sound of the children’s orchestra tuning up.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's latest full-length poetry collection, Gun Metal Sky, is due in early 2021 from Thirty West Publishing.

Abort

Aliens set a stealth orbit around the planet. They plan to attack and destroy Earth.

First they orbit and scan all commutation signals. After doing this for four Earth days, they met to go over final plans. The meeting includes all officers. The meeting is short and all are in agreement. The minutes are read by a computer, “It is a unanimous decision the plan to destroy Earth will not go forward. The earthlings are doing a very good job on their own.”

The aliens depart. Their spacecraft speeds toward the next destination, the next planet with life to destroy.

From Guest Contributor Denny E. Marshall