The audience sat, rapt, as the medium paced the stage before them, one finely-manicured hand cupped to his ear. “I’m picking up a name.” The crowd ooo-ed. “Does anyone here know a…sorry, can’t quite catch it.” He frowned in concentration. “Kuh- two…?” An impressed murmur swept the auditorium. “Too…too…Lou?” He scrunched his eyes up. A dimness began to beset the cheaper seats in the balcony. “Kuh-too-lou. Does anyone here, ladies and gents, have a loved one of that name who-” A rushing wind drowned his last words. The lights went out. Someone, or some thing, screamed.

From Guest Contributor Matt Thompson

The neighbor came over and knocked on my door. The rain fell in torrents.

He walked away. Only the wind replied.

From Guest Contributor Dave Lignell

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

The whispers tickled her ears as if carried on the wind. She’d turn around, looking for the source, but everyone would be facing lockers or huddled in small groups. Whoever it was, he wanted her to suffer.

It is this kind of insidious behavior that makes ghosts so frightening.

I am the wind that yesterday lifted your hair against the orange sky, cooling your skin. Now, I have arrived to collect respect. I bang on your door. Scream through your trees. You ignore me? I carried the seeds that became these trees that brush the sky. I exhale against the oak standing rigid against my gale, refusing to bend. He groans and snaps before my fury. And you, you who hide in your pretty squares constructed of his branches, think that you are protected from my force. Hear the glass that breaks as I announce that I am more.

From Guest Contributor, Karen Burton

Karen is an MFA student at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, MO.

For eons, stones have found their existence tedious at best, cursed by their lack of mobility and sensory organs. Why have a soul if they were doomed to suffer without ever experiencing anything but their own actuality? Their only solace was that they had been blessed with two nemeses, wind and water, against whom they could battle relentlessly.

Of course rocks had no way of understanding the change. Still, at least they have a purpose now.

You hear the droning, a high-pitched whistle that keeps interrupting your sleep. It’s your anthropology professor, bombinating about some god awful theory of ethnography that can’t possibly be as interesting as the dream you’re having.

And then you understand that life was all an illusion, that the reality may be that you are spending your last living moments in the Arctic on a scientific expedition, and as you die of exposure, the 100-mile-per-hour winds whistle in your ear.

Before the stroke, Malcolm was obsessed with football.

Malcolm held the keys to the universe inside his injured brain. His new obsession was the destruction of God.

She sniffed the air. Their stink was everywhere, making it hard for her to pinpoint a direction. But the wind was blowing from the south, so she would start in that direction.

After all, hunting your own species is always the most dangerous. And the most satisfying.

When the wind began, we expected a black and thunderous storm riding down from the North on its top. That was three months ago. No rain. No clouds. Nothing but the wind.

Now, we are all lashed round trees and stakes to stop us from blowing away. There is no siren song, lilting in our ears. Just the wind, wearing away at our souls.