Eric was an artist so he noticed details. Like yellow poppies growing outside the window of the restaurant where he sat. And the bright green shampoo bottle sitting on a ledge inside a window–probably a shower–of the condominium next door.

When the slender blond sat at the table next to him, Eric noticed the far-away look in her blue eyes. The novel under her arm said she was there to eat and read. Period.

Eric recognized the book, one he’d read.

Next morning, Eric thought Sonya’s hair smelled so fresh after she’d used the shampoo in the green bottle.

–Mark S. Bacon

Hector and Barney sat overlooking a dusty Southeast country lane one lazy summer afternoon. Soon, one of them noticed a small object.

“Hey, Barney, see that?”

“See what?”

“On the road there. Looks like a tiny lizard.”

“Ain’t no lizard,” Barney said, “It’s an insect.”

“I tell you it’s a lizard,” Hector said. “You’re getting old.”

“No I ain’t,” he said. And with a flap of his wings Barney swooped down, scooped up the skittering object in his beak and landed gracefully back on the telephone wire.

“Well, was it a lizard?”

“No,” mumbled Barney the blackbird, swallowing. “A roach. Yum.”

–Mark S. Bacon

The lost boy sleeps peacefully under a blanket of autumn leaves. The search party’s cries do not wake him, nor do the searchers see him, though they pass within four feet of where he sleeps. The maple tree, which covered the sleeping boy with leaves to protect him from the cold, has inadvertently hidden him from his would-be rescuers. The maple wishes it could call out to the searchers, or wake the boy, but, being a tree, it can do nothing to repair its mistake.
The boy awakens hours later, in darkness, to falling snow, and the distant howling of wolves.

–Tristan MacKinlay

It would not be long before he was caught. He’d have to work fast if he wanted to finish his work without leaving traces of his dealings here. He was in a small wooded area, at the base of a heavily rooted tree. Digging through the damp soil, he congratulated himself on this spot, easy to remember and camouflage. Once the hole seemed deep enough, he dropped the evidence in, pushed the dirt back into the hole, covered the hole with forest litter. His girl was calling in the yard. He ran to her, his tongue lolling. She would never know.

-Amy Dryman

They were buying their way into the history books. At least that’s how the media was spinning the whole thing. Once life was detected beneath the icy surface of that mysterious faraway moon entrepreneurs across the planet sprang into action to provide the rich the opportunity of the millennium; to be the first to interact with an alien species. Thirty-two of the world’s richest men and their wives boarded that rocket aimed at the stars. Sure, the security outfit was sparse but so was time.

In just two weeks an unsurprised world would watch billionaires get eaten alive some 400,000,000 miles away.

–Robert Poole

Albert Einstein woke from a dream of dogs ripping at his flesh. With the moon’s ghostly photons streaming through the blinds, he sat in his bed and rubbed his legs. He looked at the faded picture of Roosevelt on the nightstand, his Nobel Peace Prize, and thought about the children of Hiroshima: in the late summer heat, with the sound of the aircraft droning overhead, did they look to their kimonoed mothers and ask why? He told himself Bohr would have signed the letter to Roosevelt anyway. But still, he wondered if it hurt, in that last moment before they burned.

Kip lives in Tucson, where he wastes time blogging about unimportant things at http://misterass.com. He writes to keep the flying monkeys away.

Jack walked down the sidewalk on his way to work like he had done every weekday for twenty years. From his plain white house to his plain brown office; nothing really changed, except him getting slower. About to walk through the office door, a thought hit Jack, and he smiled. Today he would change his routine. So he did not walk into the office; he boarded the bus at the corner. He went to the airport. He tossed his brief case in the trash. He looked at a map of the world, bought a ticket to Belize, and never looked back.

–Bob Hartnett

Deep in the bowels of the Capitol Building, hidden in a shadowy maze of archives rooms and utility closets, there is a locked door. Most the Senators have never even dreamed of its existence. It is an undisclosed location.

Behind this locked door, a dragon sleeps. She is a decrepit old wyrm, fully withdrawn from the world of humanity. She is the mother of evil. She remembers the dawn of the world the way we remember breakfast.

Every six months, in this room, Dick Cheney comes to die. And every six months, in this room, a new Dick Cheney is born.

My existence began as two entities; one sperm and one egg. They met in
clandestine passion, conspired secretly to create a life, and I became a
zygote. Then, not so soon after, I was an embryo. And then, after laboring
for 33 hours, 2 minutes and 27 seconds, I was expelled from my mothers’
cavernous belly into this world.

It seems only fitting that I am dying much the same way I was brought into
the world; with my head and neck firmly lodged inside of a woman’s vagina.

Fuck, I’m never going to hear the end of this in Heaven.

–Johnson Nebraska

Nothing hurt more than silence from somewhere in Houston when she asked if he still loved her. Breath in. Breath out. Nothing more. It hadn’t been her intention to take it this far, but it had consumed her all too quickly. One day they had been friendly acquaintances and now this. Now he was in Houston not knowing if he still loved her. It was crumbling around her and she felt it fall piece by piece as she placed the phone back on its cradle. Neither of them wanted her. She wrapped her arms around herself. Rejected twice in one night.

–Megan Carter