The Town Werewolf

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Basketball playing Werewolf in Iowa??

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…people of Dew, Iowa, had long known about the town werewolf. No one knew for sure who she or he was in human form. On full moon nights the wolf could be heard crying out from the corn fields. The next morning some poor bleeting or mooing animal would be found mostly eaten. The local sheriff would look for the remains by the carrion birds circling in the sky.

None of this was known to a road-trip weary traveller by the name of Ginger and her cat, Thelma. They had been traveling down the…


By Alex Almeida

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Enigma

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This piece was written in frustration at the ways in which many people, including significantly, those in my workplace, treat suicide and grief.

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…many words are said. So many tears are shed. Relentless rumours beat their dark wings – an unkindness of ravens. Speculation, stage-whispered behind closed doors and thin office walls is painful. Platitudes stick in the throat. They peck at the bereaved. Workplace groups batten down in reproach. The grieving are unfriended, deleted. Work becomes a battleground; a fight to be heard; to still do one’s job with the squeeze of grief shaping a new…

By Lynda Scott Araya

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The Fish Doesn't Have To Be Real

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Reflection of an earlier time, in fiction form.

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…Whitworth had not failed in life. He’d retired from the U.S. Marine Corps as a brigadier general (although he’d only been given the rank as a retirement sendoff gift, and never really served holding the rank at all). Retirement pay was not that significant when it came to supporting his wife, repaying educational loans for his children and dealing with the real costs of owning a home on Wing Point. Whitworth needed a job. He’d found a job as part of a local crew fishing the Sound, but the skipper…

By James Strauss

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The Train from Tucumcari

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…had been to Clayton, New Mexico many times by car and stayed at the Eklund hotel often. This time, perhaps his last, he came on the train from Tucumcari.

They met because they had been the sole occupants of the passenger car on the train other than two women conversing in German in the front seats. The old man and young girl were now the only customers for breakfast in the dining room of the Eklund Hotel in Clayton, New Mexico. According to the frost-encrusted thermometer just outside the window, it was fourteen degrees and howling wind pushed swirls of…

By John Green

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Rain Song

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Dreams and ghosts. Memories and midnight. Was I lonely or alone?

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…cheap night.

It was always the same thing. A dirty street, across from a muddy park, down from a polluted river.

She would sit on the bench at the transit stop with her brown bag poison. Sometimes she would hold it up to the sky, as an offering; sometimes she would just drink it.

After a few choked back slugs she would begin to sing. A throat warble, really, but she tried.

Songs about heaven and songs about horses.

One night as I was watching her party for one…


By Shauna Woodbury

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Idolatria (Prologue and Chapter 1)

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How do we percieve the unknown when it walks before us? And how far do we reach out to it? (The introduction to a work in progress)

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…didn't know him.

I think that's what stuck out to me the most, more than the mane of dark hair that fell around his shoulders, more than the tall boots, or the careworn jacket of black leather, or the chains that criss-crossed its lapel. These things certainly stood out to most people who passed him, surely, so prominent against the muted background of the church pew. But the fact that I had no…


By Matteo Polk

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A Manic Meditation on the Bipolar Blues

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As a manic-depressive, my manias would have the curious ability to bend, twist and warp my perception of reality and self to usually pathological and detrimental extremes that have easily landed me in a mental hospital more than once when I was a youth. Today, older and much wiser, I am medication-compliant and therefore stable where I can function and spend my time reading; ennobling and edifying my mind; and composing poetry (for my own enjoyment and self-therapy).

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…with unbounded energy tonight,

I eschew my med's until I can hear

the frightful voices trumpet in my ear,

now haunting me into…


By Ngoc Nguyen

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The Dark Lovers

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This is the poem I earned the moniker “Dark Dr. Seuss”

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…stood upon a hill two trees that closely intertwined and passersby that glanced upon felt darkness undefined. For on some nights laughing heard come down from that black hill and on some night it traveled here upon my window sill. It was then my mind tripped upon a vision the laughing told, of two dark lovers, their joy and pain, began itself unfold. 

Dark boy, dark girl, the story began, a love that time can't touch and in their story, their dark love grew, perhaps some much too…


By RayFed

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