Shawn ran from the confessional like the Devil might grab him by the collar and drag him back down to Hell.

I didn’t know what excommunicated meant but I felt I’d been unjustly served until my Pop said that Father Flannery obeyed only one dictate: cleanliness was next to Godliness. Violations were treated as a mortal sin.

It was Christmas. I saw a 7- or 8-year-old boy wearing a man’s overcoat that covered him from neck to toe. The sleeves of the coat were cut short haphazardly to match the boy’s arm length. I went to the nearby shop. As I had a son of the same age, I knew the size. I bought a nice pair of clothes, with a matching overcoat. Wearing Santa’s hat, I went back and gave new clothes to the boy. The unexpected joy on his face thrilled me. Unplanned charity brings a strange sense of contentment that money can never buy.

From Guest Contributor Thriveni C. Mysore.

I stared at my client, debating internally how to respond. It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked to perform a questionable task in my line of work. Normally I would refuse, but she was offering 50,000 dollars.

She was bluffing. The fact that she was asking me to murder her husband said that she didn’t have anywhere else to turn. But then again, where else was I going to make 50,000 dollars as a gardener?

He hadn’t meant to glance up. It was just the sudden noise had involuntarily caused a slight eye motion. It was not a mistake he made often. He was just unlucky that today he found himself staring into her eyes.

The blow to the side of his head came suddenly. “I did not pay good money to the slave dealer only to be eye-raped by a human.”

Stephen had a conversation with the voice every day. It tended to be an incessant dialogue until one or the other of them fell asleep. The voice cajoled and upbraided and urged him to do the worst things.

What made the whole thing even more perverted was the voice sounded just like his third grade teacher, Miss Boggs.

From a young age, Megan enjoyed the feel of new money against her skin. She would save her pennies, ride her bike to the corner bank, and trade them in for brand new dollars. Her mom would frequently find her naked in her bedroom, rolling around on her newly-acquired currency.

But when the treasury secretary succumbed to the latest bird virus, the president could find no better choice to assume the vacant cabinet position.

Her car broke down on the longest stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere. Selena popped the hood and even her rudimentary knowledge was enough to diagnose an overheated engine. It had been hours since she’d seen another vehicle.

As the black Cadillac pulled up beside her, she wondered if she could trade the water and money for just a pinch of good fortune.

Part One

I was fifteen the year information came alive. Before that, we had a vague sense that information was becoming more dangerous, that there was a potential for catastrophe, but everyone was too busy making money to worry much about the ramifications.

It’s still an open question which is more powerful. But either way, the days of humanity dominating the Earth are long over.

“Roses or Lilies?”

Eight months and a few days and he would be able to put faces to the voices he’d been hearing.

From Guest Contributor Shruti Verma

Her hair had never been cut. In a way that was totally dissimilar to Rapunzel, she was a prisoner, trapped by whatever strange mixture of fate and circumstance that determined what we are to become in this life.

If she had been born a Buddha, perhaps she’d have lived many lives and enjoyed all manner of fashionable hairstyles. Instead, she was stillborn with a full head of hair. She was buried with that same tussock, tied together with a bright pink ribbon her mother had tried to purchase from the local notions shop only to find her money was refused.