“Are you blind, man? You’re life is falling apart around you and you can’t even see it!” Matt yelled.
“I’ve got it under control!” Mike shouted back, knuckles turning white as his grip tightened around the bottle of beer in his hand.
“Yeah, like you had it under control when you almost killed yourself driving drunk or when you hit your wife and broke her jaw—”
“Shut up,” Continue reading “How Free the Truth”
I raised my hands up above my head as I stared down the business end of the .45.
Come on. Are you kidding me? I just wanted to make a deposit!
The hand that held it trembled and I looked up into the kid’s eyes, the only part of his face that showed through the black ski mask he wore.
What I saw there wasn’t what I would have expected to see in the eyes of an armed bank robber. Continue reading “Do You Believe?”
It was August when I started seeing them. At first it scared the living daylights out of me. I thought I was losing my mind. I told my friends about it. They thought so too. So I stopped telling them about it.
The first time I saw one was just after midnight, three weeks ago Friday.
I was in bed reading Tolkien on my Kindle when a movement in my periphery drew my attention.
I glanced to the right. My heart rammed into the walls of my chest and tingles shot through my body. There it was—or he—or she—I don’t know, but there it was, standing by my dresser. Continue reading “The Mysterious Ones”
“What do ya say? Should we give it a shot?” Andy asked.
Kris sighed and shrugged, “I don’t know.”
Andy stared at his son for several moments and nodded.
Nothing he did seemed to meet with approval from the sixteen-year-old. He’d thought finding a car for him would make him happy. Getting a clunker would be affordable and they could spend time together restoring it. However, it seemed even this idea was falling flat.
Kris cocked his head to the side as he looked at the beat-up old Camaro. Continue reading “Beautiful, In Its Time”
“It was June of 1941,” said Walter Cross, looking at his grandson through the steam rising from his coffee, “I hadn’t been in the army more than a few months when I was captured by the Nazis. They sent me to a POW labor camp. They worked us all day and didn’t feed us enough to keep a kitten alive. Half the men I came in with never came out.”
Matt looked intently at his grandfather.
World War II, Nazis, and labor camps were only things he’d ever read about or seen in movies. His grandfather had lived it.
“What was it like?” Matt asked. Continue reading “In the Presence of my Enemies”
(Winner of CFW Event #18)
Taking that first drink when he was seventeen. That was the first major mistake of his life. One drink had led to another and then… he was hooked.
Stopping by the side of the road to help Jenny Garman change a flat tire. That was one of the good choices he’d made. They’d known each other vaguely before then. Seen each other as they walked through the halls of Dearbrook High, but after he’d helped her that day it had spurred a friendship. He never really understood it, at least on her part. She must have seen something good in him. Maybe she saw what he could be. Continue reading “Ten Things”
(Runner Up in CFW Event #16)
“You’re worthless.”
Charlie stared at the reflection in the mirror that had thrown the words at him with such hate he felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
The reflection was ugly in the chipped and broken mirror, the glass dusty and rust-patched.
“You’re trash,” the reflection spat, “You always have been and you always will be.” Continue reading “The Man in the Mirror”
(Second Place Finisher in CFW Event #15)
Rissa watched the stream trickle to nothing more than a thin thread of water meandering over the rocks. Then a little further down it disappeared altogether. As she walked on, she found herself entering a desert, stretching out endlessly in a sun-beaten, desiccated expanse of sand. Heat-lines rose up like a mirage in the distance where the sand met the sky. Continue reading “Like a River”
(As seen in CFW Event #14)
The world where I was born is the same as yours. It’s just made of different stuff – the kind of stuff that makes dreams and myths and legends. You can’t see my world and my people can’t see yours, with the exception of brief glimpses now and then. I, however, can see both, for I am fated to walk the empty space between the worlds until the end of time. It is the sentence that I must pay for my crime. In your world it was Adam and Eve who brought the curse upon humanity. In my world…it was me. Continue reading “The Forbidden Box”
(As seen in CFW Event #13)
It was the second step up to the podium that sent Marc lurching forward. He landed on a little plastic tree that had stood beside the pulpit for nine years without being attacked by a clumsy young pastor.
Deacon Barrett gave Marc a hand up and set the tree to rights before slipping back to his seat.
Marc nodded and murmured “thank you,” as he stepped to the pulpit.
He cleared his throat and pulled the microphone closer. Continue reading “Quarter-Sized Love”
Whitney L. Schwartz 