From the Sky
by Trevor Dunnigan

I flick my cigarette and the hot ash is taken by the wind. As I sit on the sun-soaked steel beam, I look down at the birds flying far below my throne. I look out, imagining the building completed. Covered in a beautiful skin of metal and glass. I try and picture myself standing on the soon to be completed floor wearing a suit and tie, but I cannot, I can only see myself, sitting on the skeleton of the beautiful building, shirtless, smoking my cigarette.

Sure Thing
by Kathy Pendrill

“Will I see you again?” I ask.
She nods, and smiles a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, those foggy blue eyes obscured by the smoke of a thousand last cigarettes smoked by a thousand Jane Does; eyes that seem covered by the cloud that hangs low in the room whenever I’m alone with her, that feels like breathing in the smoke my father used to blow just below the open window while driving in the front seat so that I, sat in the back seat directly behind him, could quietly choke.
“Sure thing,” she lies. I smile back.

The Tree
by Albert Hughes

A huge tree grew in the garden of his childhood, casting its dark shadow over even his sunnier days. He and his mother had always hated it. When his father died, it was cut down.

Ocean Alchemy
by Celeste Regal

The moon over Louisiana bayous trick the mind into believing in magic. Mist of morning feels poetic, transformational. The shrimpers were romantic for ocean. Rough men. Hard working men. Their lives off shrimp boats produced a great longing. Florescent Mantis shrimp glowed like fairies in the darkness. The force of water bodies, cyan-blackened sky was powerful voodoo. A shrimper called Godzilla because a tattoo of the beast on his back pulling boats while breathing fire, told the tale. It is seasonal work. The mundane jobs taken off season dim the spirit, craving return to watery effusion.

Your Own Norma Desmond
by Jim Doss

From the outside, the house looked like a giant cobweb. Stepping through the front door, you heard the sound of flies buzzing against the windows. The live-in nurse greeted you with the thousand-year-old eyes of a Nile Queen, her fingers imprinted with gossip magazines. Climbing the winding staircase, you entered a twilight bedroom where an old woman lay motionless on the bed barely able to blink. Surrounding her were clocks of various ages, large, small, stopped and still ticking, affirming the countdown of hours in every corner of the world. The wall-mounted TV screen looped endlessly through her home movies.

Boots
by Zack Butovich

Based on the flies, the cows had been dead for two days. That was what Marcello said. Two days. Like a mantra, over and over. He was shaking, his boots too big for his feet, when Mika convinced us to keep hiking past the corpses, which she insisted was just hamburger meat left out too long. Bad burgers, she said, in her poor English, her thick-tongued German accent. “I am from Hamburg, I would know.”
My boots were soggy. I didn’t notice when they splashed in puddles that could have been more than just water.

The Hungarian Underground
by Patricia Quintana Bidar

My neighbor Lisa was a retired member of the Hungarian underground. Her husband, a suspendered attorney, decreed they’d leave New York for the sticks. There, he’d command the locals as a gentleman farmer. Lisa mended socks with staples, lobbed dirty dishes out the window, all in her peignoir and fur puff slippers. From her, I learned to advance my aims through eyeliner and misdirection. Because before long they returned to their penthouse on the upper East Side. As long as Lisa and I kept discreet, her husband was content as a connoisseur of bourbon and collector of handmade neckties.