Date

“You talked me into this.”

“What’s to fear?” I said. “We just take her somewhere quiet.”

Zhou was a straight-A student. His only flaw was cowardice.

“You owe me. If you hadn’t pushed me…”

He started the car.

Half an hour later in the old classroom the woman stared at Zhou in fear.

“This isn’t kidnapping?” he muttered. “What next?”

No answer.

Zhou turned. Only he and the woman remained.

“Hello?”

He grabbed the walkie-talkie. Only static.

“Where are you?”

In panic he asked the woman, “Did you see another person?”

Not the best opening for a date, Mr. Zhou.

From Guest Contributor Yang Zefan

Dirty Talk

She answers the phone and lies on the bed, silk sheets touching her legs.

“I’m ready,” she says.

His mellifluous voice responds through the receiver.

“A student's laundry basket.”

“Oh yeah.”

“A tramp's underpants.”

“Umm, yeah.”

“An abattoir worker's smock.”

“Keep going.”

“A bucket of pig swill.”

“I love it when you tease me.”

“The blocked drain of a slum toilet.”

“Please don’t stop.”

“The mouth of a raw sewage pipe.”

“Oh my god.”

“Untreated bedsores.”

“I’m almost there.”

“A puss-filled boil.”

“Yes, yes.”

“A colonoscopy tube.”

“Yesssss.”

He ends their call and returns to his job running the country.

From Guest Contributor Neil Benad

Mrs. Garvey

Tom mostly preferred to forget his high school years, but he did recall his senior English class. He spent an entire semester imagining his future married to Mrs. Garvey. As far as he was concerned, she was the most beautiful woman alive. The fact she was well versed in romantic literature only made their life together even more appealing.

Encountering his former crush at the grocery store should have provided the perfect opportunity to realize his dream. Unfortunately, despite being ten years older, he found himself just as incapable of forming a coherent sentence as when he was a student.

Machine Music

"Why do I have to learn piano if in five years all music's going to be made by AI anyway?"

Gale generally enjoyed his life as a piano instructor, but his sessions with Kimberly were an exception. She was the kind of student who constantly wasted his time and purposefully avoided practice, so even her warm up scales grated on his nerves.

"AI doesn't know the first thing about writing actual music. It's just a bunch of sounds that vaguely resembles a real song. Art can't be created by a machine."

"But my biology teacher says humans are machines too."

Numerical Perplexity

The opened book lured him with its golden glow.

He imagined himself as a student in the day. Calculations done by mind or slide rules. No electronics to verify answers. Would he have had a good friend to ask for help? Were teachers stricter?

If it was a book of literature he would have fully appreciated it. But math? None of it made sense to him. The only value of the book, he determined, was its artistic calligraphy.

“Excuse me,” someone interjected. “Are you soon finishing your observation?”

He relaunched into the present, moving onwards to the museum’s next exhibit.

From Guest Contributor Krystyna Fedosejevs

Death Of A Student

The email arrives just after 7:30 am, and its subject line is blunt: “death of a student”

You read this slowly. Twice. Open the message. In two sentences, the Dean of Students tells you everything: She was killed in a car accident. They’re working to remove her from your roster.

You delete the message, drag it back out of the Deleted Items folder, read it again.

The news isn’t public yet. You can’t say anything in class.

Her seat is empty. You pass out the day’s reading assignment and have an extra copy, which you quietly drop in the trash.

From Guest Contributor Shane Borrowman

Sensitivity Training

Not another sensitivity seminar! The professor already kept his door open when he was with a female student. What more did they want? And who else had been sent this message from the dean? Nobody had been cc’d, so the professor forwarded the message to the entire department, the colleagues scratching their heads when they got it. Why had the professor sent them the dean’s message about sensitivity training? Each colleague checked the skeletons in his closet before flinging their doors open to the punishment of pizza stacked up against the professor’s office. One good prank deserves another, they agreed. From Guest Contributor Cheryl Snell

Cheryl's recent fiction has appeared in Gone Lawn, Necessary Fiction, Pure Slush, and elsewhere.

Turnaround Day

Midway through the exam my lead broke. What to do?

The boy across the aisle noticed.

“I brought extras. Take one,” he coaxed, extending an arm towards me.

Why would he offer to help me? I, the lowest achiever of the class; the one all classmates avoided.

Reluctantly I accepted his pencil, resuming my guesses to multiple choice questions.

“Good luck,” the same boy whispered, bending towards me.

I watched him rush to the front of the room to be the first to hand in his exam. He, the smartest student of the class.

The one who gave me hope.

From Guest Contributor Krystyna Fedosejevs

Krystyna writes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction regardless of the season or location she finds herself in.

Demonstration

I’m going to eliminate demonstration presentations from my Speech course. I was erasing the board after class tonight when a student approached me, asked if I’d approve a ritual for the assignment. “I’ll need to make an altar, bring a knife.”

I turned to face her, “Sorry… no, Moira, that’s not okay.”

She narrowed her eyes, whispered words I barely caught, “within wood…split a stone…find me there.”

I smiled weakly, “Was that a spell?”

She stormed out. I gathered my books and bag and walked quickly to the car. Under my blouse, my jasper cross tingled warm against my skin.

From Guest Contributor Yvonne Morris

Yvonne is the author of Mother was a Sweater Girl (The Heartland Review Press). Her most recent work has appeared in the Santa Clara Review, The Write Launch, and Friday Flash Fiction.

The Moment In My Pocket

Even in your tight orbit of busy and work and home there are moments whose skin slips, crumbles like the dry shell of a red onion, and a person is laid bare in your hands. It stains your fingers, stings your eyes: your sister, a stranger. A student, mother of four, six-month chip in her pocket, stepping off the cliff edge of giving upbut you catch her hand just in timeand you hold the sphere of this moment,paint it, polish it, and keep it safein your pocketto show to someonewho might give up tomorrow.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and humor have appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror Magazine, Rat's Ass Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal. She is the 2020 winner of A Story in 100 Words’ nature writing contest, and the 2021 winner of Loud Coffee Press's microfiction contest. She is an assistant professor of English at Pikes Peak Community College and is writing a novel. Her poetry collection, Only Flying, is due out Nov. 16, 2021 from Unsolicited Press. See the book trailer, read her work, and find out about in-person and virtual book launch events at https://brook-bhagat.com/.