Nanoism

Gregory Sherl misses the tenderness that made him feel home on your skin. He is sick of eating alone. He drunk dials like a champion.

Gregory Sherl loves with his fingertips the most.

Hindu gods grant Indira’s wish to be reincarnated near me so we can marry yet again. This time, I ask to be reborn a goat. Cycle broken.

Karl Kudrej is a TV news photographer turned fiction writer. He believes TV news is fiction. His photography appeared on CBS News.

At eight, it started to rain. He should have been off at five, but then, by his accounting, he should have been a lot of things by now.

Elizabeth Gallenberg lives in Wisconsin, where she gets hopeless crushes on literary characters and sings to her cats.

Happy in her ivory wedding gown and veil, how could she guess that she would love only him, and he would love only the children she bore.

K.M.A. Sullivan would like fewer children and more tire swings.

Adam, now Eve-less, stood before his most exquisite Bonsai, wallowing in the miseries of youth.

Seth is S.H. Gall in Word Riot, SmokeLong Issues 1 and 27, and Five Star Literary Stories.

He writes the perfect tweet. Nails it. It’s Hemingwayesque. The Shakespeare of all tweets! One tiny problem, though. It has 141 characters.

Bruce Harris enjoys relaxing with a Marxman.

Here is a list of Nanoism’s 2009 nominations for Best of the Net, Best of the Web, and The Micro Award. A big New Year’s thank you to the writers who have given us the honor of reading their work. And as always, thank you for reading.

Sundress Best of the Net 2009

• “Dakar 1989” by J.S. Graustein
• 8 (“Machine”) by Mari Ness

Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web

• 3 (“Wearing purple shorts…”) by Lauren Becker
• 20 (“His parents had told him…”) by Steve Calvert
• 36 (“She works cleaning”) by Jennifer Tatroe

The Micro Award

• 96 (“She hadn’t wanted one”) by Marcelle Heath
• “Can You Hear?” by David Erlewine

When he and his brother played doctor, it was tests and equipment and bureaucrats and complications. Always complications.

Once he told a girlfriend that the scars on his neck were from bites. His timing was good, and they snuggled for the rest of the movie.

He hinted to some guys in a locker room that there’d been a climbing accident, but they got technical, and he had to back off.

His mother says only that he had a central line when he was a baby. If he gets home late or coughs a certain way, it cues her watchfulness.

He takes three pills a day and gets a flu shot—not the mist—every year. He phones his mother to tell her he’s well. He’s lucky, really.

Ann Marie Gamble (@amgamble) likes finding inspiration for poems and thrillers and space operas in her soccer mom life.

She doesn’t talk to people like she should. Right now she’s talking to the sidewalk. Her mother leans out the window just to hear her voice.

She missed the bus again. Didn’t care. She was busy listening to the beating heart under the sidewalk.

He gave her flowers, and she cried. Horrid dead things ripped up by their hair. He returned with a paper heart. She taped it to her ceiling.

He’s not surprised she doesn’t cry, but the doctor wonders. “Don’t you understand, Ma’am? You can’t have children.”

He’s gone now, and she’s too weak to take his paper heart off the ceiling. She goes outside to watch the children climb on the school bus.

Ruby Welsh is an artist and writer who wants to create books for very strange children.

O darling, my precious one, love of my life, you’re making way too big a deal out of this.

Heart of my heart, mate of my soul. Honey: Don’t you think you’re being a little paranoid?

Sweetness. Gorgeous. Woman. Of. My. Dreams—how about you just calm down and put that thing down.

O my Angel, beautiful as the day we met…if we don’t open that door, they’re going to break it down.

Even through this milky plexiglas, you are so beautiful, even under these fluorescent lights, you in those orange scrubs.

Dale Wisely is a proponent of economy of language. He edits Right Hand Pointing and a new ezine for 1st person true stories, Left Hand Waving.