The audience sat, rapt, as the medium paced the stage before them, one finely-manicured hand cupped to his ear. “I’m picking up a name.” The crowd ooo-ed. “Does anyone here know a…sorry, can’t quite catch it.” He frowned in concentration. “Kuh- two…?” An impressed murmur swept the auditorium. “Too…too…Lou?” He scrunched his eyes up. A dimness began to beset the cheaper seats in the balcony. “Kuh-too-lou. Does anyone here, ladies and gents, have a loved one of that name who-” A rushing wind drowned his last words. The lights went out. Someone, or some thing, screamed.

From Guest Contributor Matt Thompson

The light was dim and in the blue to purple spectrum, but he could barely keep his hands from shaking. There between trembling fingers, was the first synthetic bioluminescent bulb.

Then he noticed a reddish glow from one of the beakers on the bench: one containing a slightly different formula. The scientist chased the child.

From Guest Contributor Perry McDaid

The realtor pushed the door open. “Will your wife be joining us?”

He toed the dirt floor and it gave way under his boot. “Sold.”

From Guest Contributor Darci McIntyre

She hasn’t unpacked yet. The clothes still smell of Paris. No, not of butter and cigarettes. Of that indescribable smell that is the smell of the City of Light.

They didn’t tell her that you can carry a smell across 7,000 kilometers but there’s simply nothing you can do to make it stay.

From Guest Contributor Sheena Arora

They called it the monster that never sleeps. Hundreds had been killed before scientists determined it needed light to survive. The problem being, in a city as modern as Tokyo, there was always light.

All of Tokyo was destroyed.

You remember: a blurry red light darting across the sky; the glossy road and its skewed mirror of your forehead; flashes of light into the eyes of a man in a hat, crossing the street. He remembers: two tons of steel collapsing from a rooftop, crushing his best friend flat. All that was left were two blue fingers and the smell of dust. The building remembers: the bones and bricks who made it strong, the lightning and rain licking its sides; burst out windows, a fire devouring from within like a disease. The fire remembers being the thing that burned.

From Guest Contributor, Jeremy S. Griffin

Shadows stretch through yellow light, grabbing at her moving outline on the sidewalk. Quickly now, quickly. In her pocket, she slips her middle finger through the ring of her keychain, the metal spines porcupine out from between the knuckles of her tightening fist. Quickly now, quickly. The time between the taps of her heels on the pavement shortens with her breath. Quickly now, quickly. Her ears swim in an ocean of rushing blood. Quickly now, quickly. Behind her, footsteps. Quickly now, quickly. She is almost there. Quickly, now, quickly. She stumbles, falls. Quickly, now, quickly. It is too late.

From Guest Contributor, Laura Fitch

Laura is a writer and a reader of a whole bunch of things. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in print and online, but she’s not about to tell you where. She likes fat cats and wine.

In the urban underbelly of the city, an entire population of unfortunates spent their entire lives in the blackness of the sewers. For generations, they’d had nothing but rats and each other for food, until Earl began cultivating rows and rows of crops in the light-deprived tunnels, where not even electricity reached. He made himself into the richest man in the world, yet no surface dwellers had ever heard of him.

When asked how he grew food without light, Earl claimed his crops were nourished on the clarity of his conviction. In reality, he was smuggling sunlight from above ground.

The majority of his days were spent in darkness, so he was startled by the flickering of light in the distance. The illumination grew stronger as it approached. He thought of running. He could only imagine that the sudden shadows cast on the wall were those of danger approaching.

“Man, you scared me. I’ve been working in the cave gift shop for ten months, and you’re the first customer I’ve seen.”