Fiction - Year V - Number 39 - August 2020

LOVE AND REBIRTH The bell was ringing. They heard it! It was grand! Three times it rung! Each time it rung louder than the last. Gong! Gong! Goooooong! “Another one has died!” Bibi whispered, as...

Cerebral and Contemptuous By Mike Hickman Cerebral sidled up to Contemptuous, eyed up his suit and his batwing glasses and then lifted his sherry. ‘Chin-chin, old chap,’ he said. Contemptuous raised a shaggy eyebrow. ‘And you are?’ ‘Just...

Pleasantness by Pete Able I took my wife out on the town. It was the same old town but a new restaurant we hadn’t been to before. An experience that I hoped would slightly expand our...

Playing Frog Justin wanted to get up from the floor board, but the game wasn’t over. He was still the turtle, and until Maggie called “frog” he had to stay there or he wouldn’t get...

Bar the Door By Carolyn R. Russell I received the emailed query just before my nightly rounds: lock up the front door, turn off the house lights, check the thermostat, bar the rear slider door...

Still Love By Jennifer A Swallow We were in the kitchen when it happened. Mitchell was sautéing some shrimp to put on a salad while I was looking through the wine fridge for the perfect bottle...

Since her death six months earlier, all sanity for Graham has been compressed within the contours of challenges, bright, tightly bordered oases of purpose and achievement in a world, flat and grey and devoid...

Intimate “I wanted to intimate something and not to be intimate,” I explained with a bitter grin. He always boasted about his excellent command of English but that sex-charged adjective that resembled a verb he had...

NUCLEAR GEOPOLITICS AND PLATO  in a Bunker thirty feet below ground,  100 years in the future By Gracjan Kraszewski Trends in Consumerism, Capitalism, and Need-Creation in the Affluent Peoples of the Euro-American West (CCCP) October 9th of Hans’ Year IV...

Ella by T. M. Boughnou “What?” the man heard the mother demand sharply and emphatically of her young daughter. “Tell me—where did you get that from? Who told you that?” She...