The skywalk at the Santa Cruz railway station which connects SV Road in the west to the highway in the east was empty that night. He took his time to walk eastward, each slow step was counted so as to not reach shelter too quickly. Sleep was not cheap.

On the eastern end, another man was on the run from the police with a gun in his hand, having outdone the police. The emptiness of the skywalk seemed like the best possible thing. He could make his escape. Only then he saw a well-dressed man walking lethargically on the bridge.

From Guest Contributor Debarun Sarkar

Flamboyant scarlet blossoms arched twisting, winding heirloom English ivy. An

her sleep.

From Guest Contributor Christy Schuld

Her house was situated next to a busy route. A road which connected the city to the southern parts of the suburbs.

The next year the media went gaga over the unaccounted increase in car crashes on that road. She was not on the list of suspects.

From Guest Contributor Debarun Sarkar

Debarun sleeps, eats, reads, smokes, drinks, labors and occasionally writes stories and submits them. Recent works have appeared or are forthcoming in Off the Coast, The Opiate, Aainanagar, Rat’s Ass Review, Cerebration and here at A Story in 100 Words. He can be reached at debarunsarkar.wordpress.com

Am I awake? Had I actually slept? I was fighting the urge to check my watch but the curiosity of what unholy hour this was got the better of me.

Inevitably the unbearable urge won and I was cursed with the answer I sought.

From Guest Contributor Michael Major

Blue is a breeze blowing wisps of hair across my cheek. Red is juice running down my chin as I bite a sun-ripened strawberry. Green, the scent of freshly cut grass, blades rippling and tickling the soles of my feet. Purple is the fading warmth of a summer’s evening. White, a smooth window pane on an icy winter morning.

I feel these things because I was born deaf, and my vision melted away soon after. I sometimes imagine fleeting specks of color from my first glimpses of life, but those memories exist only in the moments between sleep and waking.

From Guest Contributor Megan Cassidy

Megan is an author and English professor currently teaching at Schenectady County Community College. Her first young adult novel, Always, Jessie will be published by Saguaro Books this spring. Megan’s other work has been featured in Pilcrow & Dagger, Wordhaus, and Gilded Serpent Magazine. For free excerpts and deleted scenes of Megan’s work, check out her website or follow her on Twitter

You talk in your sleep. At first I thought it was adorable. I’d lean my ear closer to your head on my chest and catch things like, “Silly penguin doesn’t even know!” or “Better take that milk back to Saturn tomorrow.” I’d laugh and go back to reading and hold you closer. Then things changed, starting with when you arched your back away from me and hissed like a demon cat from hell. I didn’t hold you closer after that, and it’s gotten weirder since. Now I lay awake on my side of the bed, wondering what you’ll do next.

From Guest Contributor Sarah Reddick

Sarah is a writer who spent ten years learning the hard way in Mississippi and she will always be grateful for that state’s ability to give a body the blues. She is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, MO. Her work has previously been published in The Local Voice, Salt Zine, Cattywampus Magazine, and the Mid-Rivers Review.

There was a wound-dresser in the forest, somewhere deep, maybe sleeping in the sticky tree hollow that still sometimes holds nesting dolls and eggs, tiny gifts, talismans, things we know matter, twin feet in this world and the other. So, when you came, under sun, scabs freshly bloomed, populating your back’s nude surface, to announce what the branches had left when you slid their surfaces from canopy to ground, I handed you a ticket for the woods and we left together, closing each door behind, certain that another Carthage burns softer the closer we come to any shore at all.

From Guest Contributor Kelli Allen

Kelli is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has won awards for her poetry, prose, and scholarly work. She served as Managing Editor of Natural Bridge and holds an MFA from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She is the director of the River Styx Hungry Young Poets Series and founded the Graduate Writers Reading Series for UMSL. She is currently a Professor of Humanities and Creative Writing at Lindenwood University. Allen is the author of two chapbooks and one flash fiction collection. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books in 2012 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Liam awoke from a phantasm where puppy-like pigs defecated down his back, their feigned embraces weighing him down so much that he was left behind by his peers as he strove to participate in some great undefined quest.

Hell.

From Guest Contributor Perry McDaid

The headlights shine into the speckled misty darkness and my tires shoosh me along the Interstate, still late and many miles from the warehouse. How many hours have I been on this road?

I roar past the billboard that urges me to arrive safely, before I pass one that tells me to drink and drive. Then comes my favourite: the cute white Nivea girl, her frilly chest lit up like cat’s eyes. I would love to think about that chest as I close my eyes and drift to sleep, but this vague honking will not let me sleep, just sleep

From Guest Contributor, Garreth Keating

They called it the monster that never sleeps. Hundreds had been killed before scientists determined it needed light to survive. The problem being, in a city as modern as Tokyo, there was always light.

All of Tokyo was destroyed.