They say my garden is wild, Platero, as is my hair – Martha would be ashamed if she saw this garden.
Don’t they know this garden is an ode to Martha?

That’s why this garden is an ode to Martha: because I’m lost without her and not just in the garden.

From Guest Contributor Hervé Suys

Hervé (°1968 – Ronse, Belgium) started writing short stories whilst recovering from a sports injury and he hasn’t stopped since. Generally he writes them hatless and barefooted.

At that late hour, the streets were deserted. I wandered the dirty sidewalks in a kind of amnesic daze. Somehow I had gotten lost in a part of town I thought I knew well. Familiar landmarks had simply disappeared. I didn’t recognize the faces of buildings or the signs on storefronts. My own footfalls sounded weirdly detached from me. After only twenty minutes of this, I felt as though I had been running, falling, flying, floating, crawling half the night. I sat down on the curb exhausted. Clouds shaped like vague suspicions of vast conspiracies were just starting to pinken.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest poetry book is The Horses Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press.

“I’m packing tire chains in the boys’ luggage. Just wrap them around the tires,” the father of my two nephews advised.

“Please! You are an angel. Thanks.”

From Guest Contributor Deborah Shrimplin

I’d been here before, but I was lost. Confusion, desperation took residence in my bones, my breath, my very being. Everything had changed.

“But what does that mean?” I asked.

From Guest Contributor Stacy Gorse

Gareth and Melissa knew they were lost when they reached the gas station. It seemed abandoned, with the rusted pump and the crooked sign and the station house that had collapsed years previously.

The station pump was well over 3 meters tall. They couldn’t be sure when it had happened, but sometime during the night they had crossed over into the land of giants.

I’m in a hurry so this story needs to be fast, because in the twenty-three years I’ve worked as a city bus driver, I’ve never been late, not counting of course the day my wife went into labor, but this morning as I was leaving the station a little girl was standing in front of the bus–I figured she was probably ten years old, and that would have been how old…well you can’t expect me to talk about that–forcing me to slam on the brakes and I was certain I’d run her over but when I hurried round to the front she was unharmed, though she was crying pretty hard and said that she was lost and needed my help so I followed her across the street to the city park, down a path I can’t remember ever having seen before into a place that was dark with ancient trees and cold and I was starting to get worried but she said this was the way home and she couldn’t get there by herself, so I took her by the hand and we walked together and even though she said she’d never been here before she was the one leading me through the darkness until we finally came to a warm, bright clearing where she stopped and said goodbye and I didn’t want to leave but she said that I had to go back and drive the bus and finally she told me her name was Hannah and that’s when I understood and today was the first day I’ve cried in ten years and now that I think about it I don’t really mind if for once I’m late to work.

Here’s another one sentence story. Enjoy!

Her most prized possession, what she cared for more than anything she had ever owned, more than her own person, was forever lost.

Of course, she knew that it was all imagined, that her Dad was still alive, but the fantasy was more important than reality. She wanted this other life, and so she would keep looking for it.

Most people looked at my behavior with quiet condescension.

Even today, I would trade twenty years of marriage to have Higgins back.