Nanoism

My girlfriend reads me short stories when I’m napping. She picks authors I detest, those who should have their hands bound.

My sister won’t fly home. She has kids, she says. Loud ones. Yeah, I tell her, I get it. I never hear them yelling. Or asking to say hi.

When I call and say “I’ll miss you,” my mother says, “Can you hear me shrugging?”

When I got busted for the hit-and-run, Dad smacked Mom with a pillow. The next day, he placed himself under house arrest.

Instead of prison, I will walk the Napau Crater. The crunch of black lava may help me forget an old man, his ridiculously turquoise bicycle.

David Erlewine (@daviderlewine) lawyers, writes, edits flash for JMWW, and blogs.

“It’s not your strongest,” said his patron, and he fell into an abyss of dark shadows and rum until rescued by that probiotic yogurt drink.

S. Kay (@blueberrio) enjoys tiny things saturated with flavor.

He wrote the poem out for her carefully and she folded it just as carefully and slid it under the short leg of the table.

Grove Koger is the author of WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD and lives in Idaho.

He sat to watch the world go by. He waited for insights. Instead he found himself, thinking more and more about less and less.

Dorothee Lang edits the BluePrintReview and currently is into skies, collaborations, and miniatures of life.

Her husband said no—that any more than a handful was a waste. She went ahead with it anyway. He seemed to enjoy being a hypocrite.

Steve Calvert is a writer from the UK. His website can be found at http://www.steve-calvert.co.uk.

The Slugger: Slipping the needle into his buttocks didn’t hurt until they asked him to pee in a cup.

Kathleen Gerard is a prize-winning writer who maintains the blog www.kathleengerard.blogspot.com.

She lived in fear of rejecting her new face, the face given to her by a stranger and a team of doctors, the face her attacker daily kissed.

Elaine Isaak‘s (@elaineisaak) next book, The Bastard Queen, is forthcoming January 2010. You do not want to be her hero.

My dad was too busy so I said painting projects with his pop were stupid. He looked at his brush and a drop of red paint fell to the ground.

DannyPoet (@dannypoet) is a writer of fiction and poetry who is currently working on his first novel.

“God offers you paradise after this awful life,” said the prophet, and his people killed themselves. “Better make suicide a sin,” he noted.

Alexander B. Joy is a student of English and Philosophy at UNH Durham.

Our lives were mapped out by the tracks of your tears that followed the tracks on my arms. Both always trying to stop; both always failing.

Jay Faulkner (@thejayphoenix) is a writer, martial artist, sketcher, and dreamer but mostly a husband and father.