The remembrance of time not yet passed pulls her under as she laments the loss of her youth. She picks at her cuticles and scrolls down her Twitter, keening for the moments in the days before. And the coldness of the people makes her angry, and she mouths mutely to those frosted life forms, Do You Not Know How You Behave, can you not melt out your hearts, please give back to the world the empathy it has lost… her hollow howl, again and again and againagainagain, hastening the thud and flickering the eyelid, and she’s swallowed whole, hole holee holeee, falling down into it, Alice before she’s met the Mad Hatter, the Mad Hatter before he’s accepted his bipolar disorder, sinking lower together, sipping their tea and eating their crumpets, all the time asking the world to find some balance, to breathe hard into the plastic tube while squeezing with thumb and index finger — please, follow the instructions — puffing and wheezing, each attempt sucking air out of the lukewarm night, driving her dizzy, dizzy like the lecherous lilt of the world as she slides sideways down her seat, lamenting the mornings where problems were contended, where the following of white rabbits ended in triumph over red queens.
Monika McGreal Viola’s work has appeared in Hermeneutic Chaos, AZURE, Icarus, Thirteen Ways Magazine, PennUnion, and Common Ties. Her poetry also has been twice shortlisted for the Fish Anthology Poetry Prize. Find her at www.monikamcgrealviola.com
They’re fucking watching me I know it. Through their windows with their brilliant arrogant eyes that reek of the judgement I know they’ll try and bring. But I see the way colours flow through the days of August, and how the trees talk casually in the wind. Jealous. Hateful. Spiteful people. Just leave me alone. Alone. But the lamp looks bright in the corner and it’s making my head spin. Stop knocking. Stop leaving letters. I want to be left alone. In the dark with a canvas onto which I can spill my lifeblood and leave my final mark.
It would be magical.
But they can’t let you be wrong in a world full of rights can they? Arms getting prickly at the mere thought of you out there on the loose. Wild. Free. I’d run without clothes, you think we’re born with these? Because I see through your lies you bring nothing but judgement to my door.
I don’t need judgement though.
I need support, kindness, and a soft shoulder to lean on when it all gets too hard.
Nicholas Antoniak is an 18 year old emerging Australian writer. He writes both creative fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry. In July he will commence a bachelor of arts majoring in philosophy and sociology and hopes one day to become an author/poet/philosopher.
I joined the Bureau to find the next great civilization; another planet to join us here among the stars. So far, it’s been one disappointment after another. Fifty worlds examined, fifty Class I civilizations.
I really thought this would be it. The readings from deep space looked good. I rehearsed the ‘first contact’ speech. I even let my mother know I might be on to something.
But no, the final readings are conclusive. It’s just another hope-dashing Class I world. The regulations are clear; catalogue the findings, submit the report, and depart without contact. I hate knowing that when a follow-up team checks back in a thousand years this planet will most probably have devolved to the point where there is no civilization left and any beings still alive will be barely sentient.
It seems like something could be done, something to nudge these creatures in the right direction. Minimal contact, of course; just enough to keep them from self-destructing.
And so I wonder. Suppose my shields were to ‘fail’—just for a moment—as I engage the star engine. Suppose these half-advanced bipeds on the blue and white world were to catch a glimpse of my departure. Would that be so bad?
More to the point, would it be enough?
Simon Hole lives in rural Rhode Island where he taught fourth grade for 35 years, publishing essays and co-authoring a book focused on life in the classroom. Since retirement he has been playing poker, gardening, and writing short fiction. Some of his work can be found on-line at 101Words.com and in upcoming issues of The Zodiac Review and Bewildering Stories.
Fireworks boom and crackle as they soar through the night sky. A kaleidoscope of colors rain down until my view is blocked by the old church steeple; the mounted cross tinted green with rust. Children race through the streets with sparklers in hand while adults gather around grilles and drink cheap beer. I bring the pilfered cigarette up to my split lips for one last drag, the tip burning red in the darkened room; the smoke fading in the humid air.Â
My husband would be furious if he caught me smoking his precious menthols. That fat, lazy hypocrite. Tossing the used cigarette out the window I walk toward the kitchen, stepping over the broken lamp still spitting sparks across the dirty hardwood floor. The pool of blood had congealed into a tacky mess while I was watching the vibrant explosions in the sky. In a way I’m grateful for the noise. Any interruptions to the TV would have once heralded screams and fists much stronger than my own. Now, the thundering fireworks had covered his pleas for help as I stabbed him with a carving knife.Â
Looking down on his motionless body, a smile curls my lips for the first time since our wedding day. Happy Independence Day to me.
Tasha Teets is the Customer Service Representative for Gerber Collision. She also assists with managerial duties to run day to day operations. Over the past 3 years, she has worked with various Maryland locations to improve productivity and sales. Tasha Teets has taken classes at Anne Arundel Community College and plans to transfer  to Bowie State University. She resides in Bowie, Maryland with her family and one spoiled rotten dog.
Runner Up
Happy Independence
by Eliza Redwood
Alicia hadn’t wanted to attend her brother’s stupid barbecue. Just because she didn’t have plans for the Fourth of July didn’t mean that she was a social pariah! It was only because she loved “wasting” her life exploring. Not getting tied down with roots anywhere was part of the gig. Â
But she was in town, so she had to go to her brother’s stupid barbecue.
As host, he was obligated to slave by the grill, flipping burgers and chattering with friendly-faced strangers. (All strangers to Alicia but important people in his life, she was sure.)
Mauro Luna via Creative Commons
So she hovered alone by the dusty piano on the porch.
“Do you play?” a grinning man, a half-drunk beer bottle in hand, asked.
“Not anymore,” she said, inspecting the instrument for dust. “It’s beautiful though.”
“Allow me.” And soon his fingers danced over the ivory, spinning a simple tune that reminded Alicia of home. When it was over, she clapped, taking pleasure in his flushed cheeks. Â
“Could you teach me?” she asked.
“Sure, but it takes time.” Fireworks boomed in the background, underscored by the delighted laughter of nearby children.
“I love fireworks,” he said, his boyish grin beaming towards her. “Happy Independence Day.”
Alicia leaned in close, “I think independence is a little over-rated.”
Eliza Redwood is a budding twenty-something writer with a mathematics degree that’s been gathering dust and a passion for military history. When she’s not writing, you’ll likely find her on her computer playing solitaire or on her phone playing solitaire. (She just really likes solitaire.) Find her on twitter @ElizaRedwood.
Runner Up
The Machine
by Yohan Luechtefeld
Consider for a moment and compare The differences and similarities. Perhaps you’ll chuckle with me At the glaring hilarity.
Martin Howard via Creative Commons
The free world minimum security The unfortunate in super-max. Varying in degree of suffering Quality of life and purity.
In a free world you can do what you want Cough, Within reason. To expose the mighty machine Well ‘That’s just treason!’
You’ll eat what WE give you No you cannot grow your own. Water your grass and flowers instead Or risk the wrath history has shown.
You’ll drink the water WE provide Nevermind what is in it. Don’t you worry about that Plant next door WE watch it every minute. Now the very air we breathe Chemtrails in the sky? Hit you from every angle Hoping soon you’ll die.
You’ll pay more than your share of taxes Never you mind the rich. You’ll pay your taxes in prison Or you’ll end up someones bitch.
Marijuana has been outlawed Inspite of the benefits you see. The honey bee being exterminated ‘Can’t have a cure for free!’
When so many examples made visible ‘Well what to do?’ Stand on a corner with a sign? Hell they’ll come for you its true.
MY suggestion the 4th AND 5th of July Everyone stay at home too. Show those in power The many outweigh the few.
“I think that was the point,” said his daughter, Cecily. “They’ve grown up. They have to find their own way. And there have been tales that our army has behaved rather badly sometimes – “
“None of that!” His fist crashed onto the table. “The British Army is the finest in the world!”
I expect every nation believes their own is best, thought Cecily.
“It’s the king,” her father went on. “He isn’t himself. Everything’s ending…”
“No!” cried Cecily. “It isn’t the end. Perhaps it’s a new beginning!”
Sean via Creative Commons
Her father seemed a little comforted, and after a while she left him to catch up with her correspondence. There was a particular letter that she wanted to write, to an American boy she had known. They had both been eighteen and – and she could not bear to think that he might not love her any more. He had written secret, passionate letters to her that she treasured.
“Dearest, good luck in your country’s new adventure,” she wrote. “Please forgive us. Then love us, as we love you. Be happy – but don’t forget me!”
She held her head so that her tears did not fall on the letter.
Cathy Bryant worked as a life model, civil servant and childminder before becoming a professional writer. She has won 24 literary awards, including the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize and the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, and her work has appeared in over 250 publications. Cathy’s books are ‘Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature’ and ‘Look at All the Women’ (poetry), and ‘How to Win Writing Competitions’ (nonfiction). See her listings for cash-strapped writers at www.compsandcalls.com, updated on the first of every month. Cathy lives in Cheshire, UK.
Not a soul heard my mournful keening. As I swept across the foggy moors, the banshee’s cries swirled in my mouth. Her pitchless shrieks overpowered my own voice. I was merely silent wind, carrying another’s sound.
Moon after moon I labored, bearing the harbinger of death to huddled mortals. “Ayyyeee!” the banshee howled.
At last I could withstand this shame no more. “You are not my better,” I warned the noisy spirit. “My moans are as frightening as yours.”
“No,” she argued. “Wind is my servant. My shrieks foretell death. You carry me, nothing more.”
“Behold,” I said. I blew a roaring gale and cracked homes in half. Swinging off to sea, I pushed the swollen waves ashore, drowning a village. When my anger subsided, people wept and buried their unexpected dead.
“Where was your warning cry?” I asked the banshee. “All these deaths, and no sound from you.”
The banshee lowered her hell-black eyes. “You are right, wind,” she said. “I depend on you to be heard.”
Now we cry together, the banshee and I. When you walk the moors, you’ll hear our wails, high and low, twisting around each other. And you’ll know death is near.
Anne E. Johnson lives in Brooklyn. Her short speculative fiction has appeared in Alternate Hilarities, Urban Fantasy Magazine, FrostFire Worlds, Shelter of Daylight, The Future Fire, Liquid Imagination, and elsewhere. Her series of humorous science fiction novels, The Webrid Chronicles, has been described as a cross between Douglas Adams and Raymond Chandler. Her most recent books are the YA adventure novel, Space Surfers, and a collection of children’s stories, Things from Other Worlds. Learn more on her website, http://anneejohnson.com. Follow her on Twitter @AnneEJohnson.
She drinks almond milk and grows her own vegetables in a backyard garden. When she was little, she wanted to be a ballerina and wear pretty clothes in front of an audience. Later, she wandered into literature and politics and spent more and more time alone. By night she studied Yeats and Blake and Dickinson and the Brontë sisters. By day she plotted how to make the world better. She wrote love poems in the high attic with the single-eye window that looked out on the romance of the land. She built clocks in the basement of her mother’s house in the country with the petite and precise fingers of an olde German clock-maker. She is my sister. The sweet girl who raised me when our drunk mother was out chasing men every night. The 13 year old girl who went without supper so her eight year old brother could eat. The sister who has always protected me, and still does, by never making contact with me. The FBI follow me everywhere I go. My mail is read. My computer hacked. My wife left, and took the kids. How do I know my sister drinks almond milk? How do I know she grows her own vegetables? Go fuck yourself, that’s how.
Joseph Musso lives on the east coast with his best friend Jack—a most soulful Chocolate Lab. His books include I WAS NEVER COOL, RED SOMEHOW, and APARTMENT BUILDING.
or, The Inability to Communicate in an Ironic World
by Soren James
EyeMindSoul via Creative Commons
“I’m campaigning against irony.”
“I never know when you actors are being serious.”
“That’s why I’m against irony. I want to be taken at face value—be seen for what I am.”
“And this is not an ironic stance you’ve taken?”
“Are you winding me up?”
“I’m just being thorough—it’s my job.”
“You’re not filming one of those spoof comedy programs?”
“No, I’m a serious journalist. I’m genuinely interested.”
“In a satirical way?”
“In the normal, reportage way.”
“You’re not just playing the character of a journalist?”
“Are you winding me up?”
“Are you winding me up?”
“Was that sarcastic?”
“Are you out to trick me? To make a fool of me?”
“Is there a level of meaning I’m not getting here?”
“That T-shirt you’re wearing—what does it mean?”
“Exactly what it says: ‘An ironic crisis is worthless; a crisis in irony is ignorable.’ It’s self explanatory, isn’t it?”
“What do the two faces represent?”
“A communication paradox. But we should get off the subject of irony. I understand you have a new film out—a satirical comedy. Was it difficult playing a delusional actor who has to feign artificial-intelligence in a virtual-reality environment based on an imagined world of an insane entertainer?”
“I feel empty and confused sometimes.”
Soren James is a writer and visual artist who recreates himself on a daily basis from the materials at his disposal, continuing to do so in an upbeat manner until one day he will sumptuously throw his drained materials aside and resume stillness without asking why. More of his work can be seen here: http://sorenjames.moonfruit.com/.
This is a piece of flash fiction written in an Indiana hotel room on 2 hours of sleep.Â
In it there’s a protagonist – probably male, probably angry. Male because the author finds cheap, male rage easy to tap into. Angry because dramatic engines don’t grow on trees.Â
He’s in hate with someone he loves, and flits between the axes with all the grace of a drunken gymnast with inner ear disease. Melodrama masquerades as conflict, every tear spilled in service of word count.Â
The author holds back the target of our man’s love addled ravings, both because he’s convinced you’ll never see it coming, and because if he didn’t, he’d have dangerously little plot to pull a real ending out of.Â
Not to worry, our hero says something edgy and becomes an anti-hero in the span of a paragraph – we love him even more now because he’s suddenly as complex as we’ve always believed we were. We pray that he can fix in 200 words what our lives haven’t in twenty years.Â
It all ends with a lesson, something trite and universal that makes us feel literate, while at the same time giving lie to the fact that we’ve absorbed, into our immortal souls, the spiritual equivalent of a double cheeseburger.Â
And in case you were wondering, our man was in love with a robot, and you never saw it coming.
Writer of words, lover of fiction, dabbler in data, builder of web things—Steve also helps companies sell stuff. At the beginning of 2016, he promised himself to write one short story every weekday for a year, we’ll see how that goes.
I nod; everyone in Barrio Viejo knows where to find the wishing shrine.
“The sun will set soon. Go for your Mama.”
“Poppa said she’s going to be fine.”
“Pay attention, Lucia. You only get one wish, don’t waste it.” Nana hands me a paper and pen. “Write it down, neat as you can. Fold it tight, but don’t lose it.” As I write, she places a candle—St. Jude—and a matchbook into a bag. “When you get to the shrine light the wick and say a prayer for the sinners. Slip your wish between the cracks of bricks. Don’t put the candle on the altar. Place it in the corner away from the wind, it has to stay lit all night or the wish won’t come true. Do you understand mi hija?”
I nod again and Nana kisses my forehead.
In the morning, Poppa is pale faced. Nana crosses herself and whispers that the flame must have gone out.
It hadn’t though. I knew when Poppa handed me a box with the patent leather shoes I’d wished for. He’d bought them for me to wear with my funeral dress.
L.L. Madrid (@LLMadridWriter) lives in Tucson where she can smell the rain before it falls. She resides with her four-year-old daughter, an antisocial cat, and on occasion, a scorpion or two. Her favorite word is glossolalia.
It wasn’t a glamorous way to die, but he’d never liked attention. Not like Scott McKenna, who drove his Pontiac off the 496 overpass when the Grand River plant closed. Scott had style and an axe to grind, and everybody knew it. The State Journal had a field day.
For him, no bangs, no whimpers. Just drink expanding to fill the space available, doubles doubled double-time, until his liver pink-slipped the whole mortal coil.
❦
Ray Wewerka via Creative Commons
He glares at the granite angel praying on his headstone. Praying. He wonders what for. If he had his say, a recliner, an IPA, and the Tigers on real quiet in the background.
More likely, world peace. Angel stuff.
He kicks the headstone. It doesn’t connect. Obviously.
“Fuck you,” he says.
The angel doesn’t reply.
❦
When she comes, she’s wearing the peacoat he bought her, the one she never wore. She’d skipped the funeral, of course.
He’d been so long about dying. Rude, really.
He hopes some of him will catch her eye. An elbow, or a scruff of beard. She could tell him from a beard, sure. She’d always hated that beard.
She stands a minute, not more. Then she smiles, off-center.
“Rest in peace, you sonofabitch,” she says, and turns.
The angel prays on, just to spite him.
Allison Epstein is a twenty-something writer, editor, proofreader, marketer, feminist, and amateur Shakespearian living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Huffington Post, Adios Barbie, and Ugly Sapling. Find her on her blog, on Twitter @AllisonEpstein2, or wherever heated debates about em dashes are underway.
Monika McGreal Viola’s work has appeared in Hermeneutic Chaos, AZURE, Icarus, Thirteen Ways Magazine, PennUnion, and Common Ties. Her poetry also has been twice shortlisted for the Fish Anthology Poetry Prize. Find her at www.monikamcgrealviola.com
Eliza Redwood is a budding twenty-something writer with a mathematics degree that’s been gathering dust and a passion for military history. When she’s not writing, you’ll likely find her on her computer playing solitaire or on her phone playing solitaire. (She just really likes solitaire.) Find her on twitter 
Anne E. Johnson lives in Brooklyn. Her short speculative fiction has appeared in Alternate Hilarities, Urban Fantasy Magazine, FrostFire Worlds, Shelter of Daylight, The Future Fire, Liquid Imagination, and elsewhere. Her series of humorous science fiction novels, The Webrid Chronicles, has been described as a cross between Douglas Adams and Raymond Chandler. Her most recent books are the YA adventure novel, Space Surfers, and a collection of children’s stories, Things from Other Worlds. Learn more on her website, 
Joseph Musso lives on the east coast with his best friend Jack—a most soulful Chocolate Lab. 
Writer of words, lover of fiction, dabbler in data, builder of web things—Steve also helps companies sell stuff. At the beginning of 2016, he promised himself to write one short story every weekday for a year, we’ll see how that goes.
L.L. Madrid