Parts

There are so many parts. Kept in so many places. Compartments. Boxes. Bags. Bottles of fragile glass. Crumpled notes. Silent emotions. Screaming thoughts. Swept under the rug, in full view for all to see. No one cares to look. Feet itch. Throats burn and choke. There is pain. A fullness in the head. Legs are terrified. Hips want to cry. I don’t know why. Go, in search of questions. Lost with all your parts. Unable to fix. Unable to stop. Unable to flee. Unable to look you in the eye. Scared of what you already know. Parts of a whole.

From Guest Contributor Courtney King

Call Of The Deep

It was his first and last voyage to sea. An escape ship. His duty; to scrub the decks. He watched as jellyfish gathered around the keel, unnoticed by the experienced sailors. A simple extra hand. Days passed, or months.

Brine burned his lips, rum quelled his pains.

The jellyfish still gathered.

In the moonlight glow their beauty morphed into that of a woman, her tail flowing along the starboard side.

She called to him, and the dragon uncoiled. Drunk with thirst and madness he dove into her arms, and the dragon swallowed him whole. Only the birds’ song remembered him.

From Guest Contributor Valkyrie Kerry

The Party

The smell of quality cheese and the clinking of wine glasses told Mark he was at the right party. He was feeling good. That is, until they came in.

The divorce destroyed him, and there they were. At the same party. With him.

It took two years of therapy for Mark to recover, to heal, to become whole. They were supposed to be out of town. But here they were.

They walked up to him.

“Hello, Mark. Good to see you.”

She was holding Nanette. One look at the poodle and Mark knew two years of therapy was not enough.From Guest Contributor NT Franklin

NT has been published in ​​Entropy, ​Page and Spine, Fiction on the Web, 101 Words, Madswirl, Postcard Shorts, 404 Words, Scarlet Leaf Review, Freedom Fiction, Burrst, ​Alsina Publishing, and Fifty-word stories, among others.