The first thing I did last night was set the alarm for seven o’clock in the morning. I didn’t know the snow the weather forecaster predicted was going to start so early.

When I awakened later that afternoon, the snow ceased, and the sun shined.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

It wasn’t your lifeless body accompanied by sympathy cards and my childhood stuffed animal, not your workplace name tag displayed in your shirt pocket, not the sermon praising your altruism, not the incense that uplifted our prayers, not as a pallbearer guiding you to your resting place.

It was the blasts of a three-volley salute followed by the silence of two soldiers that lifted the flag off your casket and with precision folded it into a perfect triangle, and my realization that if you didn’t survive war and didn’t start a family, I wouldn’t be standing here missing you, Dad.

From Guest Contributor Charles Gray

Beware, murderer. I know widows. I watched my mother become one, imagined how my face would bend and darken in the shadow of the word that means shroud, dusk, ash. What lies inside the bones of a woman who does not crumble before you—who wears this word to war, vowing not to yield? Something heavy: iron, redwoods. Oak, like him: an oak among reeds who knew he would be uprooted, just as she knows she will be. No, it is light, hydrogen fusion in the belly of a star, howling life, dawn, freedom. Beware of this widow on fire.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook Bhagat (she/her) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won or placed in the top two in contests at Loud Coffee Press, A Story in 100 Words, and most recently, the Pikes Peak Library District 2023 fiction contest. It has been published in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal and a professor of creative writing Read her work and learn more about Only Flying at https://brook-bhagat.com/.

When he first started pushing barbells, he did it to get his anger out, throwing the weights from his body, stressing his tendons as he exhaled sprays of spit with every red-faced repetition, every sweaty pump. He realized his joints wouldn’t last long hurling metal, so he calmed his approach, traded manic intervals – of fighting gravity with fury – for calculated precision, and he’d demonstrate, lying down on a chair with an invisible bar connecting his fists, showing us the proper form of a barbell press, his big forearms and biceps flexing and twisting slowly as his muscles contracted, then extended.

From Guest Contributor Parker Wilson

Instagram:@parkerreviewsbooks

I woke up early and went for a jog. As I followed the path through the park, I listened to nature. The sounds of the birds singing, and the squirrels running up trees were a sign of early spring. It was an unusually hot day in March, so the park benches were filled with people. I had water in my pouch and took a sip. It felt good going down into the pit of my stomach.

My first novel was accepted for publication.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

“Stay,” I commanded, my palm facing him.

Four years tougher, I returned. There, just as I left him, was Julian. Emaciated and still. The most loyal gimp I ever did have.

From Guest Contributor Liam Kerry

We hugged our children when they stepped off the bus, but they looked at us with vacant eyes, and when they spoke, the music was missing. They didn’t know who we were, or what they were doing on this street where they’d grown up. We brought out the brownies they loved, but they said no, our precious fifth graders, and stacked their suitcases up like a funeral pyre, as if to set fire to their childhood. The bus driver stood on the corner, a new god, calling them back to their new life, while we were left to wave goodbye.

From Guest Contributor Linda Lowe

With your failures your fears your wrong body your clutter your stains your dirty mind and the night you can’t take back and what you shouldn’t have said out loud and what you should’ve said but couldn’t didn’t because you were afraid selfish angry shy and the thing they said that you can’t forget and maybe it is true and the wreck the ruins so much wasted time and you didn’t even call and the way you looked at her even though you knew even after even now and even with those horrible Crocs

you are fine as you are.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook (she/her) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won or placed in the top two in contests at Loud Coffee Press, A Story in 100 Words, and most recently, the Pikes Peak Library District 2023 fiction contest. It has been published in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, The Alien Buddha Goes Pop, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal and a professor of creative writing Read her work and learn more about Only Flying at https://brook-bhagat.com/.

Kathy’s headstone was weather beaten. I hadn’t been to the grave site in years and the memory of her death hit me all over again.

A sudden warmth ran up and down my spine.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Queenie was a friend of mine. I went to visit one weekend. Her husband was there but I didn’t get to see him much because he was “busy working on the boat.”

When we heard that the boat had sunk on its first voyage, there was a certain amount of hilarity. He had escaped with his life. The devil looks after his own.

From Guest Contributor Derek McMillan

Derek is the writer of “Murder from Beyond the Grave” available on eBay.