Too small, too tough, the forever stuff. Five millimeters to a nanometer, all recycle cheaters. Polyethylene is not green. Debris in the sea, in the sand, on the land, in the air. The minuscule plastic molecule – drink it, breathe it, absorb it. 200 thousand microplastic molecules in you every year. Perfect hair, revolutionary skincare – just vain dreams ruining streams. All the sales promotions on lotions and potions, laundry soap, shopping bags, and tags. So much trash; it’s the sin of the bin. It’s hard to be a container abstainer, a nature campaigner. This is the mess we’re in.

From Guest Contributor K Mayer

As far back as anyone can remember, Lulumak stole. When he was young, the elders told Lulumak’s parents that this was a sign of intelligence but once he matured into warriorhood, the elders warned Lulumak that he would be punished if he stole again. A day after Lulumak was warned, Chinoon caught him stealing fish from Yellow Hair’s net. The next day a few elders told Lulumak they discovered a rich fishing area and invited him to fish with them. When the elders returned without Lulumak, they told the tribe that Nanal, the monster, had eaten Lulumak for his sin.

From Guest Contributor Dave Harper

Dave, a recovering software developer, now finds himself addicted to writing fiction.

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.

There had been a theory, more of a folk tale really, that hummingbirds were angels come down to Earth. They flitted about madly and we were attracted to their beauty and awed by their delicate nature.

The hummingbirds are still among us. Each one is a single sin manifest and they are growing more numerous every day.

The fever spread through the village so quickly, everyone was sick before the first child died. The wise one said they’d been forsaken by the gods. No one listened. They were too busy dying.

In an earlier age, the epidemic, though tragic, would have passed quietly. The village would have been swallowed by the forest and forgotten. But these days, the village sat next to a gold mine, and many of the workers had come to the village for sex, then carried the fever back to the city. Soon the entire world was infected. Sin can no longer be contained.

He believed he had the crowd in the palm of his hand, teasing them, provoking them, then hitting them with the punchline when they least expected. He heard their laughter. They were his.

She was the awful one but he was the one they took outside and shot in the head.

Peter scanned the document, making note of the many black marks against the latest supplicant.

“Yes, it’s true, God is an American. But when it comes to your final judgement, your nationality is only a small percentage of the evaluation.”

They were calling it the biggest mass migration in human history.

All because the Pope, as part of the onset of his dementia, declared that daily rain cleanses the soul of sin.