Matinee

by G.J. Williams

The film talked and the leading man died. The tinny note had been struck and there was no getting away from it. News came from all sides. The face was no longer enough. The narrowed gaze in close-up required a timbre of command. Our hero tried and tried, his voice a thin man’s question. He took up whisky: it didn’t help; and harsher brands of cigarette caused only coughing. Eyes, cheekbones, lips: what they’d always been. The mirror, like the camera, lied. He was face down, floor strewn with torn reel. There were no suspicious circumstances. There’d been no guests.

Optimal Delusions

by David M Wallace

At first he saw an octopus. A grey octopus slumbering under a white picket fence. But it turned out to be tree roots. Decades of secret squirming out of his neighbour’s backyard.

And those mottled whales breaching the surface of a sloping sea. Imperfections in the concrete retaining wall along the railway underpass.

Verdant islands of the South Pacific? Or clumps of moss in the rain drenched alley?

These little visual anomalies visited more frequently each day. Until the edges of certainty blurred and everything became like everything else. Just another possibility.

Downtown Park

by Tim Boiteau

He liked the square park downtown best.
A tree, a bench, yellow-smelling grass.
He liked to circle the cracked fountain where water used to shimmer in the sun. A retirement home placed across the street kept the bench restocked with an old man. A different one or the same one each day, he couldn’t say for sure, they looked so interchangeable to him: hoary-headed, bent, droop-skinned. Within each window a creamy-eyed and shrunken face glaucoma-gazed at his circumambulations.
At the square park downtown all eyes projected his spry, youthful ghost beside a spraying fountain that still shimmered in the sun.

Martha and George

by Joshua Michael Stewart

Martha brings a martini to her lips to begin each day. A black wind howls past the tombstones inside George’s mouth when he speaks. Martha’s a woman who’d latch onto your crotch like a vise grip and tell you it’s a new way of gettin’ right with Jesus. You’d drop to your knees, beg to be saved. George pushes a grocery cart down an aisle of empty shelves to end each day. Broken eggshells in the dairy case. Martha likes to watch the rooster she keeps for a pet scratch for grubs in the dirt. The rooster’s also named George.

Treasures

by Matthew Shepherd

The shape of the face, the song-like quality of the voice, the calming scent. All had incrementally evaporated from Carter’s memory until only the small, unexpected trinkets of Sophie remained. The swirls on her silver heart earrings, the time an inappropriate laugh was stifled, the trio of freckles which blemished her forearm. Each became more precious with every passing day. Carter considered these traces to be the very essence of love: the unhealed scars left behind once happiness has gone. Treasures that even Sophie’s illness could not steal.