By: Ruth Deming Thirty years and I am finally retired from teaching.                 Finally!                  I won’t go on about the years flying by unnoticed – but of course it was true.                 All I really wanted…

By Tom Zompakos The plague days made hermits of us all. It was a lesser challenge by orders of magnitude than Civil Rights or the Great Depression, the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, settling or anything like that, yet all…

By Patrick Eades             We were in the garage by Christmas. The temperature refused to drop from 35 degrees at nine in the evening, our stomachs stuffed with prawns, ham, fruit cake and beer. John was half cut and I…

By: Jean Rover “Madge says I’m boring,” Chuck confided to Max. “I think she’s going to leave me.” The old dog looked up with his one good eye. The other was swollen and sightless, destroyed by a cataract and glaucoma….

By Ronita Sinha      The day I brought you home Campari, is the day I fell in love with you. I christened you Campari after a wine-coloured lipstick that I adored at the time. You were, of course, black and white…

By Claudia Spiridon Stark silence embraces the picture of the two figures, shadows driving along the space between them. A pair of eyes tries to find the other, but the search is fruitless – unbothered gazes pass them over and…

By: Michal Reiben Gnome school days are long and finish at half-past four. As well as all the usual subjects, they are also taught special tricks to fight against goblinoids, how to dodge giants, and also to do magic feats….

By: James Glass Detective Gail Summers arrived at the residence of 65 Ocean Drive. The spacious beach house overlooked the Gulf of Mexico as waves rolled onto the shore. From the bedroom door, Gail examined the room from top to…

By Gaither Stewart                                                             1.           “You know, you have the best hands in the world,” Matthew said, nuzzling her enticing bare shoulder lifting and moving rhythmically up and down, up and down, as she stroked the romantic high keys…

By: R.E. Hengsterman Animals howl, humans cry out in pain or hunger. But because of the uniqueness of the boy’s condition, he offered neither. Instead, it was his heart that triggered the high-pitched alarm and the lurid red light that…