Summer holidays meant wagon rides and a delicious break from school.

Standing on the desolate bank, I glance at the familiar walnut blooms at Johnson’s. I wonder how we never discovered the weak spot in life.

From Guest Contributor Swatilekha Roy

Joseph peered out his bedroom window, the summer sun beating on his old tired face. At ninety-five, he didn’t care. He enjoyed watching the children play hopscotch, giggling and waiting for the bells of the ice cream truck. Every time, the girls would drop their chalk and run to the sound. In the background birds flew from tree to tree. Joseph remembered those summer days as if it were yesterday.

Joseph turned in his wheelchair and took his medication. He knew any day he’d never see those children play again.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

“Hello, sir!” she exclaimed as she and two friends got out of their old car.

My back no longer hurt.

From Guest Contributor Gerald E. Greene

It’s seven in the morning. I’m supposed to be at Songshan Church in Taipei teaching a small Sabbath-School group at nine. But I’m sitting in my kitchen hot boxing a cigarette. Mitigating the queasiness from last night’s escape: a single malt Speyside scotch accompanied by Mozart’s Requiem.

A two-hour train ride later and I find myself up in front of all of the congregants. Ambushed into leading out in song service. The sweat oozes and I wonder if they know.

From Guest Contributor Robert Vogt

Robert worked as a custodian for a number of years until switching to EFL educator after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. Changing from manual laborer to educator caused Vogt much regret though he has reaped manifold benefits from the career change. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Degenerate Literature, Horror, Sleaze and Trash, Outlaw Poetry, and Unlost Journal. Vogt is chief editor at White Liquor.

That summer when everything in his life seemed to be going just right, he finally contemplated cutting his hair. It had been over a decade now, and the summer heat showed no sign of dying down.

As the heat soared he finally cut his hair off, and both the women suddenly disappeared from his life.

From Guest Contributor Debarun Sarkar

Debarun sleeps, eats, reads, smokes, drinks, labors and occasionally writes stories and submits them. He can be reached at debarunsarkar.wordpress.com

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

I once thought I heard my father listening to Santana on our back patio. He never listened to music. The only soundtrack to his workaday life was the eight cylinders rumbling at his foot’s command. A kick drum reverberating in his chest that echoed his life. A violent explosion shrouded by modernity, reduced to a drone. I eased through the sliding glass door and found him staring at the beyond the lower pasture in silence. “Be still,” he said. His words hung thick in the mid-summer air. I still don’t know if I wanted the music for him or myself.

From Guest Contributor J. Andrew Goss

God had bleached everything. The shattering sky. Erin’s face. Even our baby’s perfect hands were white.

Erin clutches her abdomen, lingering reflex, and whispers the name I refuse to remember. The name we picked when the world was warmer and life infinite summer.

From Guest Contributor Sierra Donahue

My grandfather liked to paint lead miniatures, redcoat British riflemen and coal-colored Zulu warriors with brilliant spears. He would wax poetic about square formations and Michael Caine, talk about each individual figure as though they led deeply introverted lives. On hot summer mornings I’d wake with my child’s eyes and see: all those soldiers shifted from their positions, playing out an historical drama that only my grandfather knew. Grandfather survived the brutality of the Pacific Theater. Now he lays forever asleep, something inanimate, molded by ancestral pressures unknown, moved with care, another lead actor in some endless recursive performance.

From Guest Contributor John K. Webb

His heart was in the right place, Mama would say. To explain away anything Kurt did. Like it was about location, his heart, being where it should be. He meant well. I nod like I agree. But on good days when Timmy takes a nap after lunch, I go out on the front porch, close the door behind me. Think about how I’d pack just a few things, wear a white summer dress. I stand there on the porch alone, and it’s like I’m riding in a fancy car with the top down. Letting the sun and wind hit me.

From Guest Contributor Beth Mead