On night three of a four-day meeting, four of us drank in a bar. I played up to Jim, who was 20 years older, the boss, and buying.

“She shanghaied me,” Jim said, “to dance with her mother.”

From Guest Contributor Tom Snethen

Tom is an Oregonian writing about the scoundrels he met in the chemical industry and being alone and scared as a widower at fifty.

I didn’t know you were dying until I saw what your grown daughter posted on Facebook under your name. For a minute, I wondered if I should “Like” the post as a way to convey my sympathy. Probably not, right? It was the sort of dilemma that once would have had you shaking your head in amused despair at me. Your daughter says that now you mostly just sleep. Where I am, some 1,900 miles from you, yellow daisy-like flowers that shut at night as though sleeping or even dead open at the touch of morning, bodies exploding from coffins.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).

I wake up to the sound of volcanoes and people screaming.

Pele sits up and kisses me. Her tongue, velvet lava, melts everything away.

From Guest Contributor Andrei Șișman

Andrei is a fiction author and memoirist from Bucharest, Romania. He is currently wading through a forest of banalities in search of the perfect Tweet. By trade a lawyer, his literary work has appeared or is forthcoming in Every Day Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, and other places. Andrei can be found at andrei-sisman.carrd.co and on Twitter at @sisman_andrew.

Olivia’s heart is broken since her husband Stan’s death. His cancer so brutal, she’d weep alone in the bathroom. Her spirits lift slightly when her son, his wife, and their daughter visit, but when they leave it’s difficult to be alone. One morning Olivia is awakened by stomping on the stairs. She regrets giving her son the spare key. The bedroom door bursts open and her granddaughter Molly is holding a white and brown spotted purring kitten. “Grandma, this is your new husband,” little Molly says. “Can you name him Stan like grandpa,” she asks. Some hearts can be mended.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Other residents would cradle baby dolls, designed to match the heft of a newborn. But for Grandpa, who’d been one of America’s top reporters, only a typewriter would do. It didn’t even need paper; as the nurses discovered, simply sitting at the antique Olivetti was enough to quell his nightmares. Though his mind was gone, his fingers retained echoes of his memories, shaping them into the staccato sound of clacking keys.

He would sit there, morning to night, at his little utilitarian desk. And while he never produced a single page, we still cherished each and every word he wrote.

From Guest Contributor Keshe Chow

He’d become accustomed to his trifocals and dentures; took his half-dozen morning pills religiously; prayed for just one more upright day, another day to deal with his rapidly advancing age.

His grandson’s youngest daughter (almost half-way through her troubled, rebellious teens) said, “Don’t worry, Pop-Pop; I can fix you up real good,” and before he knew it they had matching blue hair.

From Guest Contributor Ron. Lavalette

Ron’s many published works, including his debut chapbook, Fallen Away, can be found HERE.

Every morning there were dumpsters full of newborn babies. Every evening there was one brown shoe at the side of the road – with, some said, a foot still in it, tapping. I developed a theory that we were all just the debris of a distant explosion. By then I knew no one was coming to save me. Even the letter carrier would regularly ask for proof I was who I was before handing me my mail. As I took my driver’s license out of my wallet, little white spiders would fall from somewhere and melt like snowflakes in her hair.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest full-length poetry collection, Gun Metal Sky, is due in early 2021 from Thirty West Publishing.

Suddenly aware that he might at any moment glance down at her waist and thereby notice the steely tip of the long-handled knife that was peeking out of her shoulder bag, not truly obtrusive, but visible enough nonetheless, with its dark, coagulated blood and a few long strands of blond hair clinging stubbornly to the blade, she deftly angled her lithe body so that the sheriff’s green eyes bore rather unmistakably into the depths of her cleavage, swaying and full of promise, beneath the silky crimson blouse she had tossed on in the morning as a now greatly appreciated afterthought.

From Guest Contributor Jody Hart Lehrer

NATURE SUBMISSION:

The morning after the storm, the man woke up and planted a tree.

From Guest Contributor Cissy Lee

It’s like a post-apocalyptic movie. A usually bustling city is eerily vacant. Essential supplies have come to include liquor, guns, and toilet paper. Who isn’t secretly embarrassed? Around midnight I take a puzzle apart just for the hell of it. The next morning my department holds a Zoom session on how to prevent cheating in online classes. Other professors mention they also have been having strange dreams. In mine, I’m eating Crown Fried Chicken on a bench while eyeballs the size of boulders roll across the grass and dirt, and a woman I recognize from TV weeps into her hands.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.