Brainard Bullion: Creative Consultant

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This is an ekphrasis fiction collaboration between myself and photographer Dario Saraceno

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…do I look like to you? Don’t be shy. Do you find me attractive? Repulsive? Charming? Scary? How about determined?  

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brainard Bullion and I am a certifiable creativity coach, a conduit to the sacred hermaphroditical muse, CYN.  I reside in a Long Beach, New York rental unit that offers a partial oceanfront view. My passions include somersaulting in the nude and doing…


By Mark Blickley

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The Woman Who Wore A Mask

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We all wear masks...

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…head Doctors told me I was cured. At least my urges to spy through people's windows was gone. That was until I saw the woman who moved in next store a few weeks later. That's when those urges and feelings that I spent hundreds of hours trying to work through and eliminate returned.

Dusk came and the sun bade farewell to the world surely as if it had been slain in one glorious black swallow of darkness that left its remains to dry themselves on the earth. Shadows lengthened and devoured the…

By RayFed

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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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Chameleon

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…regret the day I said hello to him and letting him walk me to my car because there were thugs out on the street at that time of the night. He was a friend of a friend. She talked him up to the point that I just had to meet him. His face was pleasant, his teeth straight and white. He had to have worn braces as a child. I kept thinking as we talked. The conversation flowed smoothly between us. We had a few things in common, but enough differences to keep it interesting. So, when he asked me…

By Dawn DeBraal

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The Room

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Reality an illusion? ..Or illusions that are a reality?

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…alling beads of water momentarily caught the street lamp's dull glow as they continued their suicide plunge from the clouds to the wanting street below. Some cautiously lingered in the cascade of the languid yellow beam before slithering down the creased, worn paths formed in the air by their predecessors. Travis lie spreadeagled on the pavement seeping into the crevices waiting for his wet splattering companions to be weighed down by their own watery mass and accompany him on his journey to the furthermost cracks in the pavement. The raindrops seemingly…


By RayFed

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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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Nothing To See Here

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Grady Pearson saw something in his cornfield that would forever change the way he viewed his life.

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…heard a squawk—kind of like the goose call that comes out of a police cruiser. Blinking red and blue lights danced on the window shade, so I figured they must have nabbed somebody. The trouble was, they were behind my house, in my cornfield.

I peeled back the shade, and what did I see but a crap-load of state police parked sort of in a big circle. The ground mist was so thick, I barely made…


By Arthur M. Doweyko

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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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Waking

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A short story about a devastation of a broken heart, and the unexpected. I hope it reminds you of that searing pain that we have all experianced, and fills you with the courage to move through it

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…way your pillow has quietly scrunched itself up to match the shape of your face, the curve of your nose. The quiet rustling of sheets, clean and fresh. Early light creeping in through your windows smuggling a perfume of cherry blossoms.

That wonderful smell. They smell like the dawn. Like spring time. Like life.

But then, The Remembering comes to you. Whispering of…

By Gordon Palmer

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The Legend of Erhart

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Do not judge by appearances. Sometimes those that are different have their places.

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…was growing every minute near the hen house. The egg the boy from the big house placed in the nest belonging to Sally Hen, the prettiest chicken on the farm, moved! Yes, it moved. All of the animals near the hen house said it was a prank.

”Eggs cannot move,” they said.

“Yes they can,” Sally said. She had watched many eggs hatch into plump little chicks. Each time the egg moved just before a tiny hole appeared in the shell. Eventually a large enough opening would…

By Robert L. Scarry

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