“I never really knew what rock bottom felt like before…but now I do.”
“That bad?”
Michaela shook her head. “You have no idea.”
“Well, tell me about it, honey.”
Michaela looked up at the red-haired waitress.
The name tag on the pink apron said Eileen and the pot of coffee in her hand sent up hazy tendrils.
Michaela forced a smile of thanks. “You wouldn’t want to hear it.”
“Sure, I would.” Eileen sat down in the booth across the table, Continue reading “Fount of Every Blessing”
Their footfalls fell noiselessly upon the concrete as they passed between the marble pillars that lined the front of the brick building.
Students milled down the paved pathways to and from classes, jogged out of dorm halls and hurried to a lecture about to begin.
The humans passed by them, walked through them, unknowing.
Argider glanced at a girl alone on a bench. Continue reading “Footsteps of the Angels”
She felt the blood trickle down her leg and the scent of raw earth whispered in her face. Pine needles pricked at her hands and agonizing pain shot through her knee.
Racing through the dark woods at breakneck speed with tears raining down her cheeks, Lana hadn’t seen the patch of rocks.
Trip, fall, and she smashed her knee on one of the jagged boulders.
A sob escaped her lips, followed by a primal scream that rose up from her gut and rang through the air, muffled in the forest like a wild thing trapped in a cage. Continue reading “How Far the Light”
Sold: one soul to the devil, he thought as he leaned back in his chair and stared at the final word on the page.
It had taken seven months of his life to write.
It was the raunchiest thing he’d ever read or written.
He hated every page.
It was nothing but trash…and it would sell millions of copies. Continue reading “Stolen Soul”
“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?”
“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”
(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”
Whitney L. Schwartz 