Sometime after midnight I stepped into a smoky cellar bar, gave the miserable clientele the once-over, and located an empty stool toward the back. The bartender, a cigarette between his lips, was drying glasses with a dirty rag. In my beret and belted black raincoat, I might have been taken for a fugitive Trotskyite – or perhaps the assassin sent to execute him. A woman slipped onto the next stool. She had a face like that of a 13-year-old girl who died of heart failure following prolonged laughter. “I am here to entertain you,” she said, “but only during my shift.”

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and The Trouble with Being Born (forthcoming from Ethel Micro-Press).

At dawn I am brought forth into this world, howling, crying. Mama, a girl hardly thirteen, swaddling my small frail body in a torn shawl. Oblivious that I am a load, or so I think.

By dusk I am an old man walking out of this world, soon. Mama, so long a spirit by now. Papa, a boy hardly an adult.

From Guest Contributor Troy Onyango

I found the broken glass of the window scattered over the shag carpet. Across the room, beneath the armchair, there was a dead sparrow. We had ourselves a mystery.

Ryan was always attracted to the easiest solution. And after discovering that our parents had once been international assassins and were now in quiet retirement, I wished that I had listened to him and ignored my curiosity.

Rufino rode into view on his white stallion. The streets emptied like the receding tide.

When Rufino rode away into the setting sun, every single inhabitant was dead and his skin was considerably darker.