Teeth Of A Dragon

“Isn’t he great?” the mother asked amid clanging cymbals.

She looked down noticing that her toddler was no longer by her side.

The dragon who wiggled towards them, opening and closing its massive jaw, had danced its way into the crowd.

The mother searched frantically, calling out her son’s name. She passed grills barbecuing kebabs and performers playing folk music with pan flutes. In better times she enjoyed the ethnic celebration.

An intercom announcement prompted her to hurry to the admin office. Her child sat silently when she arrived.

“I got scared, Mommy. Did you see the dragon’s big teeth?”

From Guest Contributor Krystyna Fedosejevs

The Ghost Fox

We had never seen such a white fox. At first we called it a ghost fox.

Foxes cannot talk so think of it as a fairy story and go with it.

I was teaching the white fox binary arithmetic. There are 10 types of fox. Those who understand binary arithmetic and those who do not.

What he said at first was reassuring in a way.

"We do not eat humans. You are too big and the meat just goes off."

"We do kill you though." The last bit was a little muffled because he had his teeth in my neck.

From Guest Contributor Derek McMillan

In The Memory Of A Thought To Be

Vernon took his knife and silently pulled it from the tree bark. With a shriek, the first crow flew from the hollow, resting on the ragged grass. Its feathers ruffled, and its face pinched.

Vernon's skull pushed itself upward, bursting through his skin, and making a nest in the now-vacant cavity. Vernon's eyes fell upon the recess within, creating a rotted root system.

He could not believe in any of those things.

Vines sunk from branches covering the ground, winding around tree trunks and breaking them apart. The crow's mouth yawned open, tearing at Vernon's thoughts with claws and teeth.From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

A Routine

The morning light was still dim, but the streetlamp sufficiently illuminated the permanent marker slipping down the glass door of my cafe like eels: STOP EATING DOGS.

I felt my fingers dig into my palm, pressure building between my clenched teeth. I looked around—no cameras, as usual. I kept reminding myself to get one but I never did.

A heavy sigh fogged the glass as I unlocked the door and tramped to where the cleaning supplies were kept. “The fact that I’m Asian doesn’t make me a dog-eater,” I muttered, but once again, there was no one to hear me.

From Guest Contributor Rina Olsen

Rina is a Korean-American teen writer living on Guam. Her work has either appeared in or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Dreams and Nightmares, 101 Words, Nano Fiction, Friday Flash Fiction, and Mobius: A Journal of Social Change, among other places.

Written Florida

The hospital counter balanced the consequences of Chloe’s belief in radiological.

“Poise Samuel. It’s dosage and daydreaming. Don’t slam this shut, there’s no ambush in it.”

Samuel’s reptilian wheelchair spontaneously defended his ego with a damp pelvis moan.

“You need to explore your obsession with maintaining haste.”

And then Chloe was behind him, creating an exit.

Outside the gravity of habit drew dated windows and naked brick into Samuel’s response.

“Chloe, you are the answer to a whistle.”

Her blouse threw out naked holes of laughter until the urban inside her tongue finished the joke.

“But you have no teeth.”

From Guest Contributor Geoffrey Miller

On The Sweet Path

Ice cream? Al declined. It hurt his teeth.

“Good of him to do so,” acknowledged his school’s principal.

There were other reports of the afternoon sightings. About the SUV parked in front of their school. The dark sunglasses leaning out on a balding head. Words offering a sweet treat.

It happened two days in a row. Possibly three. No one paid close attention until bits of news dribbled out, spreading across the community.

Plans were drawn to nab the culprit.

He must’ve known for no longer was he seen.

Another school needed to heed to the call for ice cream.From Guest Contributor Krystyna Fedosejevs

Krystyna writes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction regardless of the season. Although she prefers spring.

Cold

He’d never told a girl that he loved her before. The anxiety was far worse than a first kiss, his teeth chattering as if he’d been blasted by cold air. Although the June night was hot, she rubbed his arms, to warm him.

He started a couple of times, the vibration of his teeth getting in the way. Finally, amid a sparse chorus of crickets and the buzz of the street lamp over head, he said the words.

She responded by kissing him and holding him tightly, but that summer she would never say the words he craved to hear.From Guest Contributor Ran Walker

Ran is the author of 24 books. He teaches creative writing at Hampton University in Virginia. He can be reached via his website, www.ranwalker.com.

A Warning

The three dice feel like cold teeth in Kate’s hand. She rolls each one separately, as Dorothea instructed. Mumbling, the old fortune teller stares at their placement inside the chalk circle.

Candles flicker on the stone mantle. Kate shifts, sweat dampening her armpits.

“Interesting,” Dorothea mutters.

Suddenly, a sound like beating wings erupts from the fireplace. The candles extinguish and darkness swallows the room.

“Kate!” a familiar voice exclaims. Her mother, murdered exactly three years ago, channels through the fortune teller’s throat.

Kate starts to cry. Somewhere down the hall, a window breaks.

“Run!” her mother screams. “They’ve found you!”

From Guest Contributor Heather Santo

Tourist In My Own Mouth

I’m inside my own mouth, seeing what the dentist sees. I’m awed by the whiteness of my teeth – their lingual surfaces, anyway. I don’t notice the tongue, any more than a carpet under my feet. The teeth are like panels of marble. But they have labels on them, which seem to be just A4 sheets printed out and laminated, as we might stick up temporarily on an office door. Some of them seem to be self-praise for fillings and crowns: “Great Job!” and “Fabulous!” But there is criticism as well: “Lousy cap that she got in Italy in the 1990s.”

From Guest Contributor Cheryl Caesar

Cheryl lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and taught literature and phonetics. She now teaches writing at Michigan State University. Last year she published over a hundred poems in the U.S., Germany, India, Bangladesh, Yemen and Zimbabwe, and won third prize in the Singapore Poetry Contest for her poem on global warming. Her chapbook Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era is now available from Amazon and Goodreads.

Hope

Rachel’s hands icy cold and legs so frail she could hardly stand, she gagged from her own body odor. The babbling of the malnourished became constant and she tuned them out. Her skin was riddled with bug bites, her teeth loosed from lack of nourishment, and her lips craved water. Rachel’s crime was being Jewish, and the suffering had only begun. She didn’t know where the train was going, but knew it was bad.

In the last minutes of her life, when she and the others breathed in the noxious gas in the dark enclosed chamber, she adhered to hope.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher