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PETRIFIED SLUMBER
by Johanna DeBiase She had been asleep beside the silver tree so long that plants grew where her hair had been and her legs turned to knotty roots. Clover covered over her skin and she soon disappeared within the earth, a petrified slumber. By the time he came along, he had stopped looking, practically forgot what he was looking for to begin with, just the kind of person that might come to this tree. He laid down on the ground beside her and began to doze off when he felt the slightest grace, the rustle of soft crab grass on the inside of his elbow nook. Looking closer, he found a pink fingernail and closer still, a finger, until he tore back the weeds to discover the full length of her beneath. He untangled her hair and yanked her from the vines, stones raining around her. Holding her close, he put his ear to her heart and suddenly remembered what he was looking for. |
MOKELUMNE MORNING by Anita Scharf |
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CHECK, PLEASE
by James Lee Jobe Let me tell you something, my friend; this is my last existence. I have had enough. I am not coming back. Not as a new child, not as a wildflower in the pasture, not as a duck, or a dog, and not as a winter wind blowing cold down this big valley. I have gone around this wheel too damn many times already. I am ready now for the quiet darkness that does not end. The stillness of dirt. Solitude. The silence of the endless void. The great, vast nothing surrounding that which is alive, living, just beyond sight. |
HALLOWEEN NIGHTMARE by Myles Boisen |
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EVEN DOGS DIE MISERABLE
by Dane Cobain They were walking the dog when the train came. Off its lead, it chased the metal giant as it pitter-pattered through suburbia. At the crossing, dog stopped looking confused and she waited as well, unsure — if she moved, she died. The moving metal hammered on and at that last second the dog jumped under the train like a suicide, only inhuman. Meanwhile, unaware of the shattered bone and bloody wreck beneath them, two hundred commuters worried about rent dinner death tomorrow. The dog didn't die immediately, it just lost its paws and sprayed blood like a pierced artery. She screamed, 'oh my god oh my god oh my god,' and cradled the dying animal — it stared vacant and unseeing at its mistress, licked feebly at her tears. They took it to the vet in the back of a once-white van, now red, dirty and deathly — they put it out of its misery. It took her two days to wash away the blood, and she still hears him barking in the night-time. |
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