The Place Which Never Existed

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…enormous, at least two-metre thick, concrete double door slides open, and a dark and cool throat of the mountain is almost sucking me in. My jaw has dropped. No…I’m not reading you an excerpt from some horror or thriller novel, and my name is not James Bond.

I’m standing on the doorstep of the once top-secret facility on the Black Sea coast and now the Naval Museum Complex Balaklava on the south-east of Crimean peninsula, just a stone-throw away from the city of…

By L. Salt

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Avoiding Depression

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…ages between 24 and 35, many people try to live against what's expected of them. The pressure of the desire to have a grand wedding just because a friend had it needs a second thought. Sometimes people rely on huge loans to settle the one day event. Who told you that maybe the resources were borrowed to facilitate the…

By Lucy Boen Chepng'eno

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Let Us Talk And Walk Writing Different Types Of Sentences

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It is a piece of satire

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1. Declarative Sentences

…cat carries an unknown blue rag around in her mouth and throws it into a bowl of fresh milk. She likes taking and flaunting objects on walks around the house and yard. She eats her food by taking it out of the bowl with her paw, and putting it either on my unimpressed foot or on the innocent carpet. The good thing perhaps is that she gifts me…

By Ndaba Sibanda

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Becoming Italian

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Urge to Rome

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…stood in the kitchen with the five other mothers of the settima classe—the seventh grade. Curious to visit an Italian home since our arrival in Rome, here I finally was, one of le ragazze, the girls. There was nothing exotic about the room: modern counters, appliances, wall phone with an extra-long cord. A window looked onto a back yard where a yapping collie blend wrestled with a pink rubber ball. I could have been in New York. Ohio. Anywhere in America. Only the clouds of cigarette smoke, the undecipherable staccato banter and the Moka pot on…


By Kyra Robinov

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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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