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...

The Casual Thinker Many consider Samantha to be my best girlfriend since we’ve known each other for at least five years and, most weekends in Los Angeles, we are...

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...

In Rotation Aria caught the city bus as the sky donned a pinkish glow before the day’s final gasp. Her daughter Millie sat on her lap, gripping her wrinkled hospital scrubs — the ones with...

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...

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...

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...

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...

River Run Thighs burned. Cold air stung his throat. Beneath his knee caps, buried inside the knotof ligaments, muscle and bone, something clunked rhythmically with each step. Reachingdown, he...