I slip through alleys to get to the resistance and relay the information I have learned. The black out starts and the only sound is the rustling of my dress.

See you soon, Papa.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

I killed the crew of the Wandering Star, humanity’s last hope.

I wept when I realized why I’d been led here. The leviathan declaring the end of humanity.

From Guest Contributor Rick Ansell Pearson

Rick lives and works in central Mexico. His fiction can be found forthcoming in Year Five: Dark Moments and Patreons, published by Black Hare Press.

Sounds become muffled. All she hears is an echo bouncing off the walls. For an infinitesimal moment her soul levitates, detaching from the present. She looks at the doctor’s face as words grow inaudible. A silent scream explodes from her lungs into an invisible body spasm. A voice in her head continues unrestrained: ‘She’ll be alone” but her mind allows her to compose herself as she kisses minuscule freckles on her daughter’s face. As chubby little fingers wipe off her tears, she peers into the eyes of Innocence, so intrinsic, untainted.

The headstone inscribes: ‘RIP Innocence. Your life starts anew.’

From Guest Contributor Andrea Damic

Amateur photographer and author of micro and flash fiction, Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives in Sydney, Australia. Her words have been published or are forthcoming in 50-Word Stories, Friday Flash Fiction, Microfiction Monday Magazine, Paragraph Planet, 100 Word Project & TDDR with her art featuring or forthcoming in Rejection Letters, Door Is A Jar Magazine, and Fusion Art’s Exhibitions. One day she hopes to finish and publish her novel. You can find her on TW @DamicAndrea, Facebook or Instagram.

Rachel pulled her hat covering her face and walked. Curfew was about to begin, and the gestapo would be patrolling. She had an important piece of information tucked inside her left shoe and she had to get back to the safe house.

Soon Rachel would realize it was a trap.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

I knew about the tarpaper roof torn in the shape of the mountains she had just left, the shape of her youth spent in birthing a dozen children. I did not know she sang only to the sons, who arrived looking like wrinkled old men. When I asked her why she wouldn’t sing to her daughters, I already knew the answer: the girls would just leave her for strangers.

I saved my voice for prayer. The light flinched under the lie, but it was only my shadow. That light came from some distance, she said. You really shouldn’t impede it.

From Guest Contributor Cheryl Snell

Cheryl is a classically trained pianist who writes by ear. Author of several collections of poetry, she has also written a series of novels called Bombay Trilogy; and been published in hundreds of literary journals and anthologies, including a Best of the Net. Look her up on Facebook.

A woman’s voice beneath the ash and rubble signals me. I tell her to keep talking and follow the sound, digging, my hands and arms aching.

I take the shovel and begin digging for the next victim.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

You are not bound by gravity, my son.

But we are not bound by gravity.

From Guest Contributor Tirzah Blazis

Tirzah is a high school senior who takes dual enrollment classes at Pikes Peak Community College.

The medical assistant asked in a flat, toneless bureaucratic voice how I would describe the pain. Stabbing? Aching? Sharp? Dull? She entered my answer on the form, but without showing any actual concern. A philosopher once said – or should have – that a society is only as just as its treatment of its most vulnerable members: the old, the sick, the poor, the institutionalized. Using a dropper, I strategically place .50 milliliters of Triple M tincture under my tongue. I wait fifteen, twenty minutes, and then gray-clad troops burst from the treeline with a rebel yell. The tongue is all muscle.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022.

The greatroom was full to bursting, ghosts everywhere: playing charades, talking, resting, dancing, darting between clusters of spirits engaged in various means of whiling away time.

Just one, the young ghost said, voice wavering: “When do they notice you’re gone?”

From Guest Contributor Melissa Ridley Elmes

Melissa is a Virginia native currently living in Missouri in an apartment that delightfully approximates a hobbit-hole. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Reunion; The Dallas Review Online, Eye to the Telescope, Star*Line, Gyroscope, In Parentheses, and other print and web venues, and her first book of poetry, Arthurian Things: A Collection of Poems, was published by Dark Myth Publications in 2020. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @MRidleyElmes

CONTEST SUBMISSION:

Kevin propped himself up on a patio chair and peered inside. Sprawled on the floor was the lifeless body of their neighbor.

From Guest Contributor Krystyna Fedosejevs

Krystyna is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She resides in Edmonton, Canada.