Indignation

The kid just ran out. I was only doing twenty-five in a twenty zone. You’re allowed some slack. He magically appeared from behind a van. I didn’t put the ice there that caused me to skid. I didn’t put a school gate by the main road. I wasn’t the one teaching road safety and I didn’t call myself on the phone, talking garbage. Yet I stand accused.

A hundred times his face turns toward me in slow motion, eyes widening, then everything becomes rapid, the exploding noise and flying glass.

Was no one responsible for a traffic patrol? So unfair.

From Guest Contributor Duncan Bourne

Mercury’s Lunchbox

The courier waits outside the O.R. A moment after a surgeon calls the time of death, a nurse emerges, hands her a container. He says, “Go!”

She hits a flat-out run. Courier and container speed in her van to the other hospital. Her supervisor radios warning: the patient’s chest is open. Four or five minutes are the bought time, but here’s a red light. Ninety seconds leeway when she’s met by fresh legs at the E.R.’s drop-off lane.

Before she hears if the patient survived, she’s picked up a container with a kidney in it.

Always urgent, never finished. Hurrying.From Guest Contributor Todd Mercer

Todd writes Fiction and Poetry in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His collection Ingenue was published in 2020 by Celery City Press. Recent work appears in Blink Ink, Literary Yard and Pangolin Review.

The Gift

Today the mailman came with a special delivery package. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and bore no return address. I was required to sign for it, which I did, and watched the mailman jump in an unmarked black van and speed away. I took the box inside and set it on the kitchen island. I wondered who might have sent it. I have no friends or family. It's a peaceful life. Then I heard the screaming—a man's screaming. Hard to make out at first, but once you keyed into it, you couldn't stop hearing it for anything.  

From Guest Contributor Meeah Williams

Sanity

It started to rain as I got down from the ramshackle bus at the edge of the nondescript town. "Which way is the Nowhere Inn?” I asked the man hidden behind the newspaper. There was no response.

“Can you tell me which way…”

“Aren’t we all looking for the way…” the man had strangely glowing eyes. I noticed he had his paper open upside down. “I have an easier route for you…” He flicked out a knife.

Suddenly, a huge van with the legend NEW HOPE ASYLUM drew up.

It was time for me to return to my nightmarish home.

From Guest Contributor Sourya Chowdhury

Sourya is a sports journalist based in New Delhi

The Dead Chill

There I am on the down side of dusk. I stand stock still as the men drag her to the van. She used to be worth a look or two but now she is dead. Dead to me at least. Dead in the sense that I can't see her no more. Dead.

The sun is dead too and the chill is in me. I slink my way back to the house. They mean to ask more of me, but I am spent. What can I tell them this time I had not said times past?

I found her that way.

The Daily Theme from Figment for Feb. 9, 2012

This is a prompt I love to use when I first meet a new class. I tell them to take out their pens and write me a piece--the theme is up to them. It need not be long. But it needs to be a real scene. And the sole rule that frames what they write is this: You may not use a word with more than one syllable. It sounds hard, but "syllable" is the lone word used here that has more than one.