Abruptly and without my bidding, Alexa announces from her place on the shelf that she’s going to play a selection of music based on my “listening history.” She says it like it’s a good thing. What I might’ve accepted yesterday now for some reason feels kind of intrusive, a digital home invasion. As I fret over the possibility that my computer devices have designs on me, my grandsons, ages 5 and and 11, collapse on the couch, clutching their sides and laughing. They know something I’d momentarily forgotten, that here are only three states of matter, solid, liquid, and farts.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.

There’s an owl outside the window. That’s a bad omen.

The thing about pacts with the devil is they are notoriously difficult to break.

Sharon was proud of all the drugs she’d done. Enough drugs to supply a hospital or fund a revolution in Eastern Europe. Enough drugs that her memories of the last seven years had melted together like the rainbow of candle wax she’d made for her fifth grade science fair.

Sharon did not win that science fair, an injustice she still clings to even in her most lucid moments.

I killed the crew of the Wandering Star, humanity’s last hope.

I wept when I realized why I’d been led here. The leviathan declaring the end of humanity.

From Guest Contributor Rick Ansell Pearson

Rick lives and works in central Mexico. His fiction can be found forthcoming in Year Five: Dark Moments and Patreons, published by Black Hare Press.

My father always says Christmas is a time for family not gift giving. Me and my wife Lili tell my son the same, and it doesn’t fly. So, now I’m driving to the electronics store in the snow to purchase an Xbox video game.

Now I know why he’s been such an angel.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

When Blake brought Miqui home that first evening, he spent hours translating the instructions into a form of English he could understand. Miqui had evolved a language much more sophisticated than his own outdated vernacular.

Miqui is Blake’s only company these days, other than the nurses. He remembers when fish still weren’t able to talk. The fish said it was worthwhile he could still recall the good old days. Nostalgia is a uniquely human trait.

As the new employee at the haunted mansion, I quickly realized that my job is to communicate with the ghosts rather than clean up after them. Neither appeal to me very much.

It turns out that the undead are just as susceptible to gaslighting as the living.

Survivors with faded numbers tattooed on their wrinkled forearms slowly reboard the tourist bus. The archives they were supposed to visit burned down months ago. Yahweh beckons me forward with a curled finger. Don’t make eye contact, I remind myself. Seconds later I feel the blast wave on my cheek. It also knocks off my hat. “Look!” Yahweh booms in his usual angry voice. “Remember!” There are clouds, come evening, that will resemble bleeding stigmata. There are birds that return to nests in the eyeholes of skulls. I could try to explain it to anyone who asks. No one asks.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

The butter-yellow rotary phone was sitting on the carpet in the living room of the empty apartment. It’s cord and wires were disconnected and curled around its body.

David bent over, picked up the phone, and quietly walked out the door.

From Guest Contributor Janice Siderius