Cut

I had my heart set on a buzzcut. My mother forbade it.

But what she didn’t know was I had been raped. Repeatedly. I need this. She relented.

I grabbed my shears and made the first cut, leaping up and down, hands flapping all over in joyous stims. This is what it feels like to be in my body, isn’t it? I grabbed the clippers.

Three stripes gone. Nothing in the world could bring me down.

Five. Every bad thought, every traumatic moment that’s happened left me.

Seven. I couldn’t stop stimming.

Finally, it was all gone.

I’m me again.

From Guest Contributor Grayson Pride

A Matter Of Degree

To explain what had happened to me, my friends showed me a movie called “Blast from the Past,” about a man who spends 35 years in a nuclear fallout shelter before entering the world.

Like him, I’d lived my 22 years underground with my family, never knowing there was anything above us.

Now, looking at the blue sky, sun, stars, and trees, I was sad to have only experienced light from cooking fires and candles.

So my friends showed me another movie called “Encino Man,” about a Cro-Magnon man who’s thousands of years old, frozen since the first Ice Age.

From Guest Contributor Susmita Ramani

Getsulma

On the highest motorable road in the world, H. tells me she's thinking of staying. Yesterday, a nun named Khunzes declined to tell H. her 36 vows – "Unless you become a nun." We laughed. Now we're not laughing.

But the street signs are still laughing:

Drive with care / makes accidents rare

After drinking whisky / driving is risky

Darling I like you / but not so fast

"So what do you want to do?" I ask. "Become a Ladakhi nun?"

"Would that be the end of the world?"

I don't know. We're on top of the world. I can't see the end.

From Guest Contributor Zachary Smolar

For the prompt Frontier

A Parent's Nightmare

Her parents are concerned that her boyfriend is two dimensional. Living entirely in one plane would limit his prospects. If the relationship became serious, they could predict he would become their ward, unable to hold a job in three dimensions. They could see the two of them moving into her bedroom, taking up domestic residence under their roof. She would argue they likely could support themselves on her waitressing income, he needing little in his flat world. But then: children. The simple geometry must be astounding. And the – then - grandparents would be always explaining to those not at the wedding.

From Guest Contributor Ken Poyner

For the prompt Frontier

Evening Walk

I still smelled the floral scent of my wife’s perfume and dreamed of her laughing, a soft cackle that used to bring a smile to my face. Her beautiful complexion used to turn heads wherever we went. She was flawless.

One evening the air was perfect for a walk, or so we thought.

That was the evening a man wearing a mask robbed my wallet. When my wife called him a coward, he shot her in the stomach. When she laid on the ground, my hand cupping her head, she whispered, “I love you.”

My world was never the same.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

First Star Of The Night

According to the old superstitions, it was considered bad luck to see the first star of the night. Just one of many bits of unwelcome advice Sean's grandmother had plagued him with during adolescence.

He thought about her words whenever he was outside at twilight. It wasn't that he was willfully ignoring her, but he refused to let some old-fashioned view of how the world works to stop him from enjoying the sunset.

What Sean didn't realize, but his grandmother knew all too well, was the evening star stole the soul of the first person to see it every night.

Every Ending

Needle prick. Anesthesia kicks in. You’re floating, light as a feather, then you fall back into your body. But not in this dream. You won’t wake up again.

Harsh hospital lights. There’s no capacity to sustain you. To build homes in this scorched world. You couldn’t afford them, not even before the natural disasters. Instead, one-square-meter pods in space—compact and cheap—for your brain. For all human brains. Other body parts are redundant.

We need to shrink. Reduce our footprint. The resources have been exhausted.

Before your eyes, the scalpel blurs. Remember that every ending is a new beginning.

From Guest Contributor Bettina Laszlo

Living Water

After the world died, when our water had left us and even the sea divulged its deepest secrets, that was when they came. They had waited until our darkest, driest hour. And with them came the living water. And so we drank. But in our haste to escape the desert we had made of our world, we were blind. They had made the water a gift, to save us from ourselves. But the living water was a bitter gift. For it was alive; alive with them. And now, we are satiated. But now we are them, and they are us.

From Guest Contributor J.S. Apsley

Sweet World

"I agree. I do find the world very sweet. I know there's a lot of ugliness in the world, and not everyone is as fortunate as we are, but there's always a bright side, even at the darkest moments. Like puppies. If there's one thing that we can all agree on it's that puppies are the sweetest thing under the sun. Nothing can be so bad that a litter full of puppies won't bring a smile to your face. Know what I mean?"

After a long awkward pause...

"I was talking about 'Sweet World.' The candy shop. I'm craving sugar."

Unfinished Business

I returned from the dead, a list in my pocket: wrongs to right, pleasures to reclaim, truths to confess, sins to own. Mostly I needed to know how the world had fared without me. Apart from my poor mother, a grieving ghost of her former self, it was as if I’d never lived. Never loved. Never mattered. A stranger slept in my bed, alongside my darling wife, in my home, the one I’d slaved to pay for, my manicured garden now wildly overgrown. I fed the list to the fire. I’d start over from the very beginning, wherever that was.

From Guest Contributor Elizabeth Murphy