Tomorrow It All Changes (by craig robert austin)

"Shiri, take this seal and give it to your brother."

"Father, no!"

"GO! For tomorrow he will replace my rule. They are only after me. Remember, I love you."

She cried, looking up at him for the last time, then let his hand go and disappeared into the forest. His heart eased when he heard hooves galloping away up the path. He turned to the edge of the pagoda and looked out across the lake, at the distant enemy fires. A low mist had sprung up, a pale blanket covering the water. He rested his katana and waited for dawn.

Untitled (by wes eisses)

End of light, noise, relations, and function; this is death. Have you ever seen a dead person? A person you once knew, a person with these things... light, noise, relation and function? Life seems like a quest to make connections with our surroundings and leave our mark in the universe, while deaths quest is to sever those connections held so dear and to smear the mark left by their existence. Relegated to memories of the living, script, and recordings, these once vibrant people fade, to be forever threatened with further death.

Laying immobile and without voice, I see them still.

Musings on Savoir Faire (by colleen berg)

Meet yourself on the sidewalk and test if you have the fortitude to recognize it's you or if you simply shiver and keep going blindly against the high five that never was. Attempts at being brazen require a coined courage, noting that everything leaves a faulty cornerstone trailing into a different point of view, sir. Keep one eye dead straight and kaleidoscope the other as it mingles with variations of crossed-fantasies, deciphering what's already underneath your tread. A crack in the sidewalk won't regret which foot went in front of the other; serving only to struggle against tripping towards sideways.

Stanley (by nick o’malley)

Stanley was a good man, normally. He wrote and counted methodically with an intent purpose. "Will this be good enough?" he muttered as his fingers typed his words.
A faint yet distinct feeling of deceit grew in the back of Stanley’s usually cunning mind. Deceit as dark as the shadow moving behind him. The one he failed to notice. Was he just chasing an elusive carrot on a string? This was his thought as he formed the last sentence that may clench his prize.
There he lies now with a non-prize steak knife stabbed in his back. Damn you Adam.

Top Secret! (by patty amey)

I'm only writing this 'cause I know you all so well and I just needed to get this off my chest. When I was a kid I would hang out in the dirt and try to dig to China. Incredibly, along my journey, I came across a child who was trying to dig to Canada. Instinct took over we fought until death, he lost. Kids are cruel, and I was no exception. I stole his shovel and cut off his pig nose. He wasn't Chinese, I don't know what he was. Dead, that's all I know. He wasn't the first.

Untitled (by heather faulkner)

He told me once that if he died before me, make sure he was buried deep because he would come back and kill me if he could. He thought that posthumously, he could get away with murder.
I can still see him standing over me, sneering. That was the closest he came to killing me. I do not miss him.
He didn’t see me coming. I came in through the window and burned our house down. I don’t know if he survived or not. I just know that my cancer has set me free.

It’s peaceful here, real-

Who’s there??

Song of Lament (by doris cheung)

She saw something fall from the tree and she shrieked. The other diners shot her glances of curiosity and irritation.
“Oh my god, it’s a little baby bird,” she screamed and ran out the entrance and onto the sidewalk.
She knelt down to inspect it, her nose almost touching the beak. The bird squirmed and wiggled but otherwise seemed okay.
“What are we supposed to do?” she sobbed as an older gentleman walked past. He looked at the bird and then at the tree and continued to walk. The mother bird flew in circles overhead, crying her own sad lament.

It's a Metaphor, Stupid (by adam cummins)

I got off the bus too early. It was dark outside, the windows were all fogged up and I didn’t want to miss my stop. I rang the bell; I thought it was the right place. But I was wrong. The bus stopped and I hoped someone else would stand up, get off the bus so that I didn’t have to. But no one did. So I got off the bus and walked the rest of the way home in the rain. Because it was better than admitting to a bus load of people that I had made a mistake.

How it Ends (by adam cummins)

“Might actually be warm this winter,” he murmured as he wiped the sweat from his brow with a liver-spotted hand and finished lining his basement walls with the last of the dead cats. He lurched up the steps and into the kitchen, matted fur crusted to the bottoms of his bare feet and under claw-like toenails that tap-tapped on the linoleum. “Cup of tea?” he bellowed at an ancient woman swaying gently in a dusty, wooden rocker. She looked up at him with sunken, misty eyes, and, grinning a toothless grin, started stamping her orthopaedic shoes and making vroom-vroom noises.

The Destruction of an Ice Cave (by darren l mcquaid)

There was a knock on the window, the night Mary died. I had been washing up the supper dishes when I heard the tiny, percussive noise. Enroute to investigate I tripped on a plastic mystery man left out by one of the kids. By the time I made it to the window the knocking had ceased. That's when I noticed it. Poor old Mary lying dead on the white, encrusted newspaper, her cage still rocking from the force of her fall.
I couldn't help but smile just then, light reflecting in Mary's glazed eye. I'm a dick, that's my way.

Tai Pó Pó (by doris cheung)

She lay asleep in her tiny bed. Her old, tired face still and peaceful. I walked up to her and whispered "Tai Pó pó" great grandmother. She slept on.

I asked the nurse "What is wrong with her." She replied, "She is old."

"She is tired and has stopped eating."

I saw the IV trailing out of her hand from underneath her blanket.

She looked so fragile.

I caressed her arm. She slept on.

I tell her who I am. "Tai Pó pó, I am your great granddaughter."

The tube fed her.

I kissed her forehead.

"Good-bye, Tai Pó pó"

She slept on.

Your Mother Runs With The Bulls (by nicholas a hayes)

There she is, panini in hand, too-small yellow tracksuit barely fitting her pentagonal frame: Your mother... before the bulls.

"Let 'em loose" she cries. Half eaten panini flinging into the air. She wants to run with the bulls. Well, she could use the exercise.

Your father? "He's a bum," she bellows. Ouch, the truth hurts... or is that heartburn? Better wash the pain away with a diet coke-

THEY'RE OFF!!...

They smell her candied sweat. People say yellow is a calming colour. Not to these bulls. Red; yellow; red; yellow and red: like a sunset running down a storm drain.

An easy error... (by stuart w j tompson)

I awoke abruptly, mind racing. Was it finally tomorrow? A calm wave spread through me, easing away that cold taunt feeling of dread. It had ended. Yesterday was a different tale. It lasted ceaselessly, but began so effortlessly. I had wandered into an unknown area. People gathered to
manipulate words and discuss thoughts. It all seemed so peaceful. How could I have been so wrong?! My blind ambling brought me further into the midst of an invisible danger. The door slammed shut. The bolts fastened securely. I was entombed with tomes. Trapped in a hybrid realm of make-believe and reality...

Today (by neil j hart)

This story applies today. Whether you’re reading it on the today it was written i.e. today or on it’s first birthday [again: today]. Never forgot that today is today, right now, in the moment. A today to do nothing. A today to do everything. A today to turn it all around. To begin again. To complete. To start. To make a difference. For we die a little every today so be aware of your mortality today. For today is another today like all the today’s of your life. Be undeniably sure that one today will be your last ever today.

That Night (by adam cummins)

The last syllable of his chant still echoed through the thick fog into the night as he lit the final candle and placed it on the ground. Almost immediately there was a deep rumbling below his feet, he stepped back knocking over a candle which extinguished itself on the dew laden grass. With further rumblings the freshly laid soil started to move and two fingers wiggled their way to the surface like worms after a storm. “Oh,” he said, pulling back the hood of his cloak and revealing his surprise to the moonlight. “I really didn’t expect that to work.”

Delirium, Said The Frog (by darren l mcquaid)

Hardy had just discovered the incredible news that his father had actually been a monkey. The morning sun was just beginning to break through the jungles thick canopy in shafts and already the humidity was unbearable. The blue frog that had informed him of his father's simian origins shifted his weight and leaned back. Hardy was speechless. He could hardly believe what he was hearing.

"That's right, a big old, knuckle draggin', banana eater," continued the frog.

"And my mother? What of my mother?"

"Oh, your mother? Well, she wore army boots," the frog cackled, and fell from the log.

Men at Work (by adam cummins)

He was naked. He stepped into the booth and attached the tubular suction device to the end of his penis, then he lifted the two electrodes and affixed one to each temple. His eyes glazed over and almost immediately his penis started to fill with blood.

He left the booth, moving into the concrete, fluorescent lit hallway that reminded him of an underground bunker, perhaps that’s exactly what it was. He headed back to his cell; it was three hours until his next shift. That it had come to this, the few of them that remained, nothing more than cattle.

Nativity (by darren l mcquaid)

This darkness, this thick, inky blackness encompasses all. I am
amorphous, I float in a soundless night, a thought in anticipation
of form. Deep from somewhere else some other thing stirs. A
voice, but not a voice, more intimate even than the omnipresent
shade that has been my everything, urges me and I am helpless
to do anything but follow. I push. Painful, burning light swallows
me. Horrible, bloated creatures assault me with desperate sirens.
I mimic their noise and push again, this time further into the stinging
white, away from the monsters. And even as I run, I hunger.

Awake, Alone (by adam cummins)

He watched her as she lay there, her eyes closed, face unencumbered by the expressions of the wakeful. It was in this state that he could still see the girl he fell in love with, the years had passed yet she remained, in his eyes, as beautiful as she had on their wedding day. At this moment he could remember none of the arguments, only the laughter, he loved her more deeply than he had thought himself capable. He rested his arm on the edge of the coffin, lay down his head and wished he had told her more often.

In Repose (by darren l mcquaid)

Once when we were young, my wife and I would steal kisses underneath her father’s cypress; shafts of moonlight bathing our nubile forms in cyan luminescence. Then, when we were a bit older, after being married in an orange grove, after our children were grown and gone my wife became ill. While everything else in our life had gone in a blink, her illness seemed to drag on. Until, inevitably, she passed. Now, I live alone in a tiny brownstone and wait patiently until the day when I can once more kiss my beautiful wife underneath that old cypress tree.

Closure (by adam cummins)

The washroom was small and damp, the smell was intense but not unusual, considering. He pushed again, his body becoming a mass of muscle concentrated for a single purpose. It had been a nice dinner, expensive, the break-up the only down point in an excellent meal. He despised public washrooms with a passion but this was something that had suddenly seemed urgent. With a final push that sent a pain ripping through his head his insides seemingly exploded into the waiting bowl. And it was done. His last connection to the woman who had made his life miserable was gone.

Oops! (by darren l mcquaid)

The delicate flesh of her feminine folds submitted to the gentle caressing of Felina’s tongue; opening like petals on a periwinkle flower under a late summer sun in the morning. Argent tried to mutter something dirty but could only manage the sound of air escaping a bicycle seat. The scent of ripe kiwis permeated the already heady atmosphere. Felina carefully inserted two fingers into her lover’s dripping orifice, moving them with a deliberate, come hither motion. Argent’s breathless sighing increased causing Felina’s coital manipulations to become more fervent, her own sounds echoing her lover’s. “Oh god, Sabine.” Moaned Argent, carelessly.

Dilemma (by adam cummins)

Pictures of mutilated corpses were scattered across his desk, the work of the most vicious criminal mind the city had yet encountered. It was the dream case for a newly promoted detective and he was dizzy with the implications of being given such an assignment. Though it seemed bizarre to him that he would be given this kind of responsibility so early on, perhaps he was being set up for a fall. But the truth was that this case, for him, was laughably simple to crack, but therein was the dilemma, he was hardly likely to go and arrest himself.

Closing Time (by darren l mcquaid)

Thought, frozen and languid, leaks from a rusted containment unit. The spot where Jones had once been is now just an empty chair covered in ash. Through the port side window I can see it. The earth. Soiled and reddened by its children’s hate, it floats lifeless and hollow in cold, dark orbit. Precious fluid spilling from me as I move, I crawl over to where Kneely had stashed his bottle. I’m hesitant to move at all considering the time but do anyway because I refuse to go out sober. I guzzle the acrid spirit as the world simply ends.

Something in the Air (by adam cummins)

He had woken up late. Again. There was no time to shower or shave, he just began frantically pulling on clothes. I will be on time today, he thought, as he ran out the door.

He made it all the way to the sidewalk before keeling over and grabbing at his throat. His eyes began to bulge and blood started to trickle from his nose and ears as he gasped for breath. People walked hurriedly past him, it was too late, there was nothing they could do even if they had wanted to. How could anyone forget their gas mask?

Silence is Crimson (by darren l mcquaid)

The music oozing from his speakers was undoubtedly beginning to annoy him. He stomped over to the stereo as if he were about to smash it and angrily cut its power. The rage he had previously been in the thrall of was still lingering and for a second he considered throwing the damn thing out the window. But no, he had more important things to focus on.

As the residual rage continued to subside and clarity returned he grabbed for his packet of cigarillos and lit one. ‘Now’, he thought, ‘the fuck am I going to do with this body?’

Priorities (by adam cummins)

The flames were taller than any of the surrounding buildings and every few minutes there was another explosion. The voice over claimed that thirteen people had been trapped inside and that the fire department couldn’t even get close. It was then that she turned from the tv, tears streaming down her face. “You could have saved them, you could have saved all of them,” she screamed.

He looked over at her from his seat in front of the computer, his face calm. “I’m done with all that,” he explained. “We agreed, remember? I am going to be an accountant now.”