Some of us are birthed rigid, leather left too long in the sun, so carefully struck dense beneath hands. Everyone and everything’s hands. Shaped into whatever it is we play at long before your shadow cooled me. You knit something soft overtop, fingers of catgut dancing like satin ribbon and for a time there is a concealing, something less than painful looming in the mirror. And though we both knew I would ravel and tear with so many seams under the strain of your weight, I knew the taste of skin on your throat, and we made the world spin.

Nick Christian is a poet and fiction writer who currently studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

I sat on the large stone in the middle of the picnic field. I had my notebook out and was busy scribbling away. There were couples and families and dogs and blankets. There was food and sport and laughter and a few tears. The more life unfurled around me, the faster my pencil lurched across the page.

But life is lived whether we laugh and love our way to death or record others doing it.

Janine squeezed the sweat from her shirt into a glass, carefully safeguarding every drop. It was a hot day and, after the exercise routine she’d just gone through, she was really in a lather.

She ran to the mirror. For the moment, she didn’t look any younger.

The Resistance, with patience and guile, communicated only through a secret symbolic code, made unbreakable because of the need to use a mirror to make sense of it. After several decades of quietly accepting the tyrannical rule of the state, this evening would mark the beginning of the revolution.

It was only later that they learned about the hidden cameras inside the mirrors.

Raymond stared across the horizon. Where Denver once stood, there was just a huge crater lake beneath a shimmering mist. The black water reflected the sunlight like a dark twisted mirror. There was no sigh of any survivors.

The elevator doors close with a ding. Alone inside, she hums and checks the mirror. The speck on her cheek looks unsightly, like a coal mine bent forward and kissed her.

The elevator doors open.

From Guest Contributor, Indu Pillai

Indu is a commercial writer based in Bangalore. Her fiction has appeared in Mash Stories and 50-Word Stories. She delights in all kinds of stories, written and unwritten. Twitter: @InduPillai01

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

Rebecca hurried from the office. She jumped into the front seat of her car, tossed her bag down next to her, threw the key in the ignition, then suddenly paused.

When she finally pulled into her garage, Rebecca grabbed her bag and hurried into the house. She hoped the man would be gone by the morning.

When they went urban spelunking in the abandoned tunnels of the city’s old subway system, they were prepared for anything and everything: forgotten homeless, horrible mutants, over-sized rats. But they were not prepared for what they actually found.

Mark liked that he was now rich but life as a black woman was hard even when you had money.