Nine candles, one for each decade, danced against his clouded flat eyes. He blew them out when told and asked again, “Whose birthday is it?”
Jeffrey Ballard currently lives in the Texas Hill Country. A fact his Yankee family never lets go.
Under her wedding dress sweat stings her thigh, where the groom’s father has left a cut with his wedding ring which he wears fastidiously.
Henry Lu is a computer programmer by day, a painter and writer by night.
Please don’t cry; we all have to go sometime. I’m sorry about the mess. The will is in the safe. I can never see you again.
J.R. Johnson lives north of the border and likes it.
“Tell me about Annie,” I urge him, and his gaze softens. But before he can speak, the guard says our time is up, and he is gone again.
JJ Sheffer (@bustedjj) lives near York County Prison in York, PA, and often wonders what they’re up to in there.
She invests for nine months to afford the elf’s services. She gives birth, then pays the going market rate for happily ever after.
Sean Vivier is a teacher and a writer from central Connecticut.
Chris pointed his fingers in the shape of a gun and said, “Bang!” That was the last time we saw him in class.
Justin Merchant does not live under one rock, but many.
Perhaps they would have felt differently had they known the lone photo she carried around was the same one that had come with the wallet.
Bruce Harris enjoys relaxing with a Marxman.
Votive candles, plush rabbits and old photos lined the porch steps, outside the police tape. Cars drove slowly by. The mailman didn’t stop.
Joseph S. Pete (@j5p1) has been published in Dogzplot, Yankee Pot Roast, and elsewhere.
Nipples are a sin to look at unless you’re the husband, he said, or unless it’s by accident and only for a couple of seconds, 6 at the most.
James McManus’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, and Paris Review.
The philosopher’s stone brought perfect order to chaos. The alchemist had but a moment of joy before the stone stilled his every atom.
Sean Vivier is a writer and a teacher.