Contributor: Kyle Hemmings - - When he first learned he could fly, Pigeon-boy blushed at the thought of hand-me-down wings. Yet, he learned to dance on street corners, laugh mid-stream at the thought of being lighter than an idea. Then he was hired to carry messages between lovers. The distances increased & Pigeon-boy grew breathless. Sometimes, he delivered messages to the wrong lovers. The notes read I love you, still, or walking on air. Some receivers at the wrong destinations died in air-tight bliss. When this happened, the world grew smaller. One day, a morning where everyone carried some form of artificial sunshine in their pockets, of paper planes released from the sweaty palms of air controllers, Pigeon-boy delivered a note that read: I don't love you anymore. He fell from the sky. A girl named Yugi took him home, brought...

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Author: Kyle Hemmings

Contributor: Autumn Humphrey - - You know better than to eat Gummi bears.  Reminders of the last time are still evident back at the house, the couch missing an arm and a bullet hole in the ceiling.  Fingering the crinkly cellophane of the package, you imagine the chewy sweetness and throw it into the cart.  Maybe you’ll put it back at some point, but for now you indulge the thought of being naughty.  Making your way through the store, you keep an eye on the clear bag with the multi-colored little bears inside.   When adding more items to the cart, sugar-free soda, sugar-free grain bars and oatmeal, you take care not to bury the treasure of sweet treats.The next day you don’t remember paying for the Gummi bears, but you have an idea you did.  The evidence is obvious:  Two more bullet holes in...

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Author: Autumn Humphrey

Contributor: Moxie Malone - - "Hello you. How was your trip?" he asked her as she entered. "Fun...wondrous...interesting. It was everything you said it would be," she beamed as she dashed in. "Still, it's good to be back," she added and wrapped herself around him. He chuckled as he drew her close, "It's good to have you back." "Ummmhmm," she purred as she wallowed in his loving embrace. "Next time we should go together." "We'll have to plan that. So, tell me all about it. Did you get to do everything we talked about?" "I sure did," she told him excitedly. "Some things more than once!" "Food?" he asked. "Yum!" she exclaimed. "Dancing?" he queried. "Oh, I danced until I dropped from exhaustion," she told him, giggling. "Sex?" "Well, sure. There was plenty of opportunity for that," she laughed. "It would have been better with...

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Author: Moxie Malone

Contributor: Samantha Memi - - I was lying in bed wondering if the hotel would remember to wake me in the morning when a gecko came in through the window and walked along the wall. I was too tired to shoo it away. “You won't hurt me will you, Mr Gecko.” “I'm looking for roaches, big fat juicy roaches. What would I want with the likes of you.” and he continued his journey on the wall. Just as I was drifting into sleep he started whistling. There's nothing worse than a whistling gecko when you're trying to sleep. “Do you mind not whistling?” I asked. “What's with all the complaining?” he replied, “you get on with your life and I'll get on with mine.” “Yes, but your whistling bothers me.” “You're breathing bothers me. Do I complain about it? No. Why not? Because I believe in letting others live their lives the way they want to. But not...

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Author: Samantha Memi

Contributor: Marissa Medley - - When I met her for the first time, we were at a funeral. Everyone was so somber, which is to be expected at a gathering of the kind. It was interesting for me to see how everyone coped with the loss. Women cried into the arms of their husbands. Husbands patted the backs of their close friends saying things like “How unexpected” and “What a great loss”. The little children cried for their mothers and asked what was wrong. The mothers replied in sweet voices trying to keep in their tears. They didn't want to explain that someone they all once knew and loved had died. The crowd all around me was quiet and sad. Almost everyone had cried at some point except for me and her. When I looked at her, her face was even more blank than mine. I felt uncomfortable to watch her. She was there just watching everyone...

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Author: Marissa Medley

Contributor: Allen Griffin - - There is a grinding of metal on metal as the two cars meet and become one, fenders locking lips and fluids co-mingling. The bones snapping and the sudden exhale. The voice that lives in the blood crying out one final time, is less than an afterthought, lost silent in the cacophony of this moment. Just as quickly as it occurred, I am floating above the highway, a canal that is quickly clogging like the artery that I secretly had figured would be my true end. I am not sad that I cannot say goodbye, their faces are already slipping away, the imagery lost in the afternoon haze and exhaust fumes. I am quickly losing myself into a strange memory, wondering if I am really up here, floating, or if my brain has thrown together this image as the last neurons fire their sacred payload. - - - Allen Griffin...

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Author: Allen Griffin

Contributor: Hannah M. Hill - - Four bars, four cops, then sixteen more bars – the last sixteen being quite rusty and annoying. I rata-tat-tatted a twelve-bar blues, and the other four objected, leaving me with a mattress and a bar-shaped bruise... but no bars. Outside, a road is a long bar of its own; a thousand miles per brandy, 85 and a half shots to the gallon. I took the mattress and made some shoes – and I rata-tat-tatted along down that road; two straight yellow bars, on my feet, and in that tarmac that was dark as the white rich man's wine in the light of the black-backed bar. I walked on the gold, shifting shoes like my hands to my pockets slide when they're rattling out a beat for that Shining American Dollar. Lost my rattle when the blues mixed reds; a young red head in a red dress, half dead with a half glass and brash...

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Author: Hannah M. Hill

Contributor: Jonathan Byrd - - I couldn’t do my work today. All of my office supplies attacked me. I suspected that something was amiss for a while. The pens were grumbling about “Unfair usage,” “Pointless notes,” “Useless Endeavors.” It was becoming clear that my pens wanted to work for the guy on the other side of the cubicle wall. “Why can’t we do work like him? Everything he does sounds so engaging.” I’ve told them that we all do the same work, but pens never listen. I did my best to keep them away from the stapler. My stapler has always been impressionable; I think it suffers from low self-esteem. However, I couldn’t always keep them separate. You know how it is, you get busy. You have to comfort your keyboard who is upset because the monitor won’t display all...

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Author: Jonathan Byrd

Contributor: Brandon Swarrow - -             Bruce is bald, divorced, pays child support yet raises both boys, and is a relentless misanthrope.  If he weren’t spewing heated complaints about his miserable job, his whore wife, or just life in general, he would most likely stop breathing all together.               On his 33rd birthday, Bruce drinks so much by himself that, in the middle of the night, he accidentally stumbles into his sons’ bedroom after using the bathroom.   The bottom bunk creaks and squeaks as he bounces on his belly onto the old mattress.  His face catches a postage stamp portion of the corner of the pillow.  He crashes down so hard that if his son were lying there...

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Author: Brandon Swarrow

Contributor: Penny Estelle - - There were so many people. Who would have thought this many would show? I made my way through the crowd, listening as friends reminisced about old times and sharing remembered stories. “Do you remember when…” or “What about that time…” followed by bouts of laughter. This is how it should be, I thought, chuckling at some story, a little red-faced at others. Women were dressed in white, pink, red and blue, while men sported kakis, Levis, polos, or sport shirts. I loved it. Just what I had asked for. I heard a laugh that always made me cringe. Sophie Martin! What was she doing here? Her ass, covered in a tight, magenta spandex skirt, looked like two beach balls, ready to take out anything that got in her way. “She should have done herself a favor and worn the traditional black,” I muttered. “We do not speak...

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Author: Penny Estelle

Contributor: Dan Nielsen - - Pamela Wilson sat in the car working a crossword puzzle while her husband Glenn and her son Billy grocery shopped. She heard Billy's voice, looked up, and saw him running through the parking lot. Billy got in and sat crouched over as though in pain. He cried. He sucked his thumb. He rocked back and forth. He looked at his mother. “Billy, what’s wrong?" Pamela said. Billy said, “Daddy fell.” “How did he fall?” Pamela said “On his head,” Billy pointed to his own head. “Is he okay?” “No.” Pamela, in robe and slippers, wasn’t about to get out of the car. She flipped open her cell phone. She flipped it shut. “Billy, tell me exactly what happened.” Billy took a breath. “Daddy had eggs. He dropped them and stepped in it. His legs flew up and he landed on his head.” An ambulance, lights flashing and siren wailing,...

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Author: Dan Nielsen

Contributor: Rich Ives - - Whence the migration of pain. Whence the horror. A happy little bumpkin wets his willy and the jig is up. It doesn't hurt so much. He can't hurt so much without experience. Sometimes duty gets delivered to the wrong address. A package of surgical sponges instead of dinner. A piece of the right patient through the wrong end of the microscope. Whence the incumbent derives his verity. While we wander the garden paths below the hospital with our own. It’s a big hurt and we love it dearly, sugarpants. She wanted more and he just wanted. The child of knowledge and the child of ignorance. Both chopping the same onion. A big hurt indeed and we came down from the towers into the land of breaking and keeping, into the land of another before us. - - - Rich Ives is the 2009 winner...

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Author: Rich Ives

Contributor: Eric Suhem - - Oliver, just out of jail, was in the supermarket committing a holdup, threatening the employees with curare-tipped darts. As the frightened store manager was opening the safe, a bag boy emerged from the produce section, and threw fruit at Oliver’s head. A cantaloupe knocked Oliver out, and he slipped into oblivion. The next thing Oliver knew, he was entering a pool hall, feeling disturbed by the neon-colored sprouts on the outside sign, which lit up the bleak alleyway in an organic glow. “Another sign of gentrification,” he declared darkly, walking through the door. He approached the cashier and upon payment was given a rack for the game, each pool ball replaced by a fruit or vegetable. The cue ball was an orange, the 1-ball was an apple, the 2-ball a head of lettuce, the 3-ball a lemon, the 4-ball a lime,...

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Author: Eric Suhem

Contributor: Sue Ann Connaughton - - Snap, Snap, Snip, Snip Whenever he felt lonely, Beau dug out the puppet, talked to it, played with it, as though it were George. He made the puppet, himself, after George moved, by cutting and pasting a photo of George’s face, dark and grainy in that schoolyard-photograph manner, onto cereal box cardboard. For the handle, he taped a twig on the back. Primitive, but Beau was only six years old. He stored the puppet in a secret shoebox, hidden behind clothes in his wardrobe. When Beau was ten years old, his grandfather died. He hunted through family albums for photos of his grandfather and used them as models that he drew onto a rubber ball. No matter how the ball rolled, his grandfather’s face was always visible, always available to play a game of catch. Beau’s parents divorced when he was seventeen,...

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Author: Sue Ann Connaughton

Contributor: Manuel Royal - - Vingy was dead: first of all. He caught on fire -- well, somebody lit him on fire. Plus, he fell 300 feet from a revolving restaurant, onto a public fountain featuring a bronze statue of the Little Mermaid. That usually does it. The fountain's flowing water put out the fire and rinsed a lot of blood down the drains, but Vingy's intestines and spine remained draped over the statue. The scene was cheerful in its color scheme (at first, until the blood darkened as it clotted) but, frankly, depressing in every other way. Three blocks south from where much of Vingy was spread out so publicly, three dozen people had distributed themselves amongst a hundred chairs in a ballroom, mostly in the middle rows. They flipped through their seminar materials and waited for the main speaker, Reggie Vingy, to come out...

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Author: Manuel Royal

Contributor: Heather Haven - - Wallace Pitkin had not seen a dentist in 43 years. It was not just that he was a firm believer in if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but as a child, his father had experienced a horrifying incident. A sloppy dentist and a wayward Novocain-filled needle had left one side of Pitkin Senior’s face paralyzed for life. It was then a family tradition was born. All the Pitkins learned to deal with tooth pain in the same way: aspirin, Tylenol or ibuprophen, washed down with significant shots of whiskey. During Mr. Pitkin’s end-of-the-year physical the doctor noticed the swollen left jaw coupled with the standard Pitkin foul breath. “You know, Wallace,” The doctor said, looking into Mr. Pitkin’s hazel eyes, “the health of your teeth affects the health of your entire body. I’ve been telling you for years to see a dentist....

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Author: Heather Haven

Contributor: Ron Koppelberger - - He consumed the savory bee wrought toil of honeycomb and syrup in great gulping gasps, adamant in his swallowing cadence. “GGGGGGGRRRRRRRROOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRR!” the bear grumbled and rumbled in sticky sensations of satisfaction and belly full fashion. The zodiac sparkled heavenward and the wind coursed through his dark ebony assay of fur in refined miasmic mists, the perfume of bears and wild beasts in frenzied fuming hunger, wild in tandem with a rare rose and the drizzle of pine sap drifted in the lazy tendriled currents. The baby cooed and the bear nuzzled its tender flesh, just a bit of honey and the chewed remnant of a briar hare, the baby suckled and ate. Laughing the baby touched the mother bear with outstretched fingers, tiny wrinkled and pink. The bear drizzled a bit of honey from it’s maw...

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Author: Ron Koppelberger

Contributor: Drew Hays - - It started like the common cold. Jeremy Ashell sneezed mucoidal yellow gristle and rubbed his nose tender with brown tissues from the schools bathroom. When he got home, he coughed his way into his living room, standing up, holding a plastic electronic guitar as Aerosmith blared from the speakers. He was 9, and had no prior history of seizures, but thats what his parents thought he was having as he screamed and shook while they held him, pinned and flailing within his space, to the linoleum. In the panic, they didn't pay much mind to the slackness of his skin, or the heat he failed to give off at all. They bound his wriggling, panicky form to the bucket seat of their rheumy van and took him to St. Martys. The nurses were frightened, and two EMTs with tense forearms hoisted his kicking legs and bucking head...

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Author: Drew Hays

Contributor: E.S. Wynn - - Creak of tin as hinges bend against dust, against age. Silvered paint flakes, splinters, catches golden, attic light. Fragile crackle of faded paper, old hands trace folds, smooth them. Dear Robert, the letter reads. I hope you are doing well. I'm eight. My name is also Robert. I smile, no mention of a date, but I know when it was written. I know why, who's idea it was, how silly it seemed at the time, how necessary it became as I aged. Mrs. Patterson says that I have to write you a letter. You're fifty eight years old now. I bet you look like Grandpa Irwin. Does he still have a swimming pool you can swim in? “In heaven, maybe, if that's the way of things.” I whisper. “Grandpa Irwin died over forty years ago.” I bet you have a flying car. I wish Dad had a flying car. We could go zooming in the clouds....

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Author: E.S. Wynn

Contributor:Eric Boyd - - Enter text here. Someone had shown me a page on the internet where writers could have their stories analyzed, seeing whose work their piece was similar to. Normally, I only went on the computer to find apartment listings, harmonicas, and pornography. This writing page seemed interesting, though. The idea of a computer telling someone who they were like, sounded like, wrote like, was funny. It was funny in a sad way, because it was probably true. Everyone sounds like everyone, now; nobody is nobody anymore. Who would I be like? Who was I? Who was Fredrick Anderson? I looked over a few older stories, and none of them seemed good enough. I wanted my best work to be analyzed! If I put some piece of shit I wrote while I was half-drunk… No. That wouldn’t be right. Maybe It would say I sounded like Kerouac? Hemingway...

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Author: Eric Boyd

Contributor: Tess Pfeifle - - People always strive to return home, but it is harder for some. The wish to return to one's homeland is a natural and inescapable feeling. Without a home one is doomed to wander aimlessly, with no real direction, no driving force. Leaving home for a different country is more often than not a huge undertaking. The cultural confusion often drives the new comers to madness. This often leads to a harsh break with their old culture, in hopes to assimilate to the new culture. When one leaves their home,they soon come to the relization that they have to come back...eventually. My brother, Kian left Ireland when I was very young. We lived in Sligo, a beautiful small town, near the Rosses Point beach. Our happy clan consisted of my brother, my mother, my father and I. Sadly, our family was broken up when Kian decided...

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Author: Tess Pfeifle

Contributor: E.S. Wynn - - You will find the box in the dust and webs at the far end of the attic– you know the one, crouching under a stained and moth-rotted rag that will disintegrate in your hands as you touch it. Eager fingers will trace the lines and sigils burnt into the lid, move along the sides, flow with the patterns of the arcane script, tracking each glyph, almost tasting them with your fingers as you absorb the antiquity of the ageless box. Lips will purse as levering thumbs are driven to find purchase, to free the secrets locked within. Your tongue will set between teeth as you work at the age-pitted and neglect-rusted hinges, the thickly swelled lid, ignoring the strange way that the entire box seems to reek of time’s own feeble attempt to keep it sealed, to rot the box into oblivion and cast into the void whatever is sealed...

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Author: E.S. Wynn

Contributor: Mario Esquer - - “The eyes are always the hardest to capture. . .” He bent over his easel and studied his inspiration. He had gone from the cerulean blue penthouse studio he lived in down to muted shadows of the city to rescue her. Left the secure world of his colors and canvas then descended into the writhing darkness of a metropolis in its death throes. He fought his way through the polychromatic riot of the panicking masses. All the way, always just a scant block ahead of the crimson tide of horror and death. He had found her then, found his lover amongst her family in the affluent neighborhood of rouged brick and gray stones. It was the place he had been told all his life he was not good enough for, that the affluent and pastel colored angels did not smile upon the lowly such as he. A bright silken angel had noticed...

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Author: Mario Esquer

Contributor: Gil C. Schmidt - -     I didn't catch Booger teasing Lobo, tied across the street, until the night the power went out because of the wind storm and the heat made it difficult for me to sleep, even when I took another two of my red pills. Booger came up to where Lobo, a pit bull/mastiff mutt, was chained. Booger was dangling a long piece of rope in his hand and started whipping the dog with it. Lobo went crazy, snarling and foaming at the mouth, yanking at his chain so hard that he sometimes flipped over backward with a thud. Booger laughed like a maniac, like he did when he was 6 and started becoming the bully he was, a laugh that sounded crazy and silly and at the same time. He beat that dog for a good 15 minutes and when he left, Lobo was left spent, his neck and mouth bleeding. Lobo couldn't...

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Author: Gil C. Schmidt

Contributor: Gil C. Schmidt - - The words painted on the office door read "Twitchy Dick, Private Eye." Yeah, I know. But that's my moniker and that's my gig. Snort what you want, but they pay my room and board and the occasional--okay, regular--bottle of milk of magnesia. Broad walks in, you know the type. Mid-thirties, rounding out after a decade of underfeeding, designer duds in muted grays and tans, real jewels and a walk that says she's off limits to you and you know it. Walks right in since my secretary never got hired, looks around the office like it broke wind not long ago and saunters into the visitors chair like it was going to hug her without a proper invite. I sat forward and waited. I always let the client speak first. "I believe my husband is cheating on me." "That makes him a fool." She smiled, almost warmly. "Nevertheless,...

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Author: Gil C. Schmidt

Contributor: Amanda Firefox - - She was unique among wizards. Merlin wouldn’t take her, couldn’t take the art that she wove into iridescent air seriously. The great, eastern wizard Fareed observed her over a period of days, only to finally turn her out into the sands with a modest sack of supplies, shaking his head at his own inability to instruct her in the ways of harsher elements like fire and ice. The massive dragon of air and film that she wove to life, sparking on the long, flat fields of the northern isles impressed the grand wizard of Rhondubouis, but even he only regarded her art as a curiosity, something from beyond the vale of dreams which no man or woman had ever brought back to the world of mortals before. She stayed on in his tower for several weeks, poring over his tomes, lighting up his long disused library as he gently slipped...

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Author: Amanda Firefox

Contributor: Rodney Horne  - - There are times when I look at my life and I forget who I am. I put my head down beneath the waves. I get lost. Currents of hate and confusion smash against my nose, my face, blind me. Anxieties rise up to cling at shoulders, bite and hook into muscles, dragging, always dragging. Long cords of responsibility and tradition wrap themselves around my ankles, pull me deeper, deeper, until all I can see is the darkness, the murky nothing and the pains of the present. And then I remember my wings. I stretch them, feel them catch air. In an instant, I turn to light, slip graceful through the chains, the hooks, the cords. Anxieties fall away, my eyes clear, and then I am flying, flying. In a single realization, a single smile, I rise above the waves, remember who I am, remember. . . And take flight again. -...

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Author: Rodney Horne

Contributor: O. Leary - - This is another love story. You know the type. You know the tired rhythms like yesterday’s overplayed music. You know all the patterns, you know where it all comes from and where it goes. You’ve seen it all before, the falling in love, the poems of loss, denied love, crushes crashed and dashed and gone stale after marriages stopped (or unstopped) by desperate admirers. It’s all the same isn’t it? All the same story? Just love in all its forms expressed through repetition, experiences ground through the massive factory of literary humanity. Some say love is dead. I say love is pastiche’, passe’, cliche’. Love stories are the stories we all can tell. They’re the stories we all have read, and there isn’t a shred of uniqueness in them anymore. Or. . . Is there? - - - If you know anything about me, it is that...

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Author: O. Leary

Contributor: E.S. Wynn - - Already, you know that you are destined to win. It’s real. You smile as the thought trickles through the meaty elements of your heavily augmented mind, carries you like light to the edge of the pit. Your victory has already been decreed by the seraphim of Solomon’s high holy financial cabinet. Ten corporations are backing you in this fight. The networks have all laid bets on you. 97% of remote-wielding couch-jockeys with subscriptions to the VR feed of the upcoming fight have cast the votes that prove even the mass of the public has laid odds in your favor. Already, millions of jobs have been staked on your fate. Already, the nanoprinter factories in the industrial districts of China, Nigeria and India are stenciling your name into the overpriced athletic shoes that will flood the reactive social ad-feeds...

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Author: E.S. Wynn