Hunting Earthworms

by K. Mark Schofer

With my Dad on a night darker than expected, much darker as lightning bugs flicker. He dug. I held the flashlight. He shoveled. I was sleepy, almost sad as I never liked fishing, and put worms in a day old tin can which we used to lure a fish to its ultimate death, the worm forgotten until the next day. My Dad would forget the unused worms in the back seat of the car, baked by the sun. That smell lives forever, it lingers, and the memory of the fish that we killed. I remember its one eye staring back at me with its last breath.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
His friends observe Mark as wired a little differently. Perhaps it’s more likely that noticing little things often missed by others is a relic of a quieter, simpler time. He has a way with words, which he refuses to let be hindered by sub-par typing skills. People have great stories to tell if you sit and listen. A belief dear to Mark is that there is certain beauty in the world. You simply have to look for it.

 

Albatross

by Huina Zheng

Her finger hovered above the workbook. The pencil tip tapped where the final stroke of 飞 (fly) was missing.

“You forgot a dot,” she said, surprised by the rasp in her voice. Only then did she realize—since dashing out of the office at five, braving the subway crowds to pick up her daughter, then stir-frying that plate of spicy cabbage—she hadn’t even had a sip of water.

She wrote the correct character. The pencil carved deep lines into the page, like the claw marks an albatross might leave skidding across Antarctic ice.

She thought of the documentary they’d watched last week. “Look, Mama!” her daughter had cried, pointing at the screen. A white albatross soared across the wind, graceful as a ballerina. The narrator said they could fly for months without eating, crossing the entire Pacific.

She looked at the torn paper and thought: even the most elegant fliers crash hard when they land.

The door slammed open.

“Babe!” Her husband staggered in and collapsed on the couch. “I’m home!” he called, mumbling more words she didn’t catch. “Babe!”

She sighed. “Mama’s going to check on Daddy,” she told her daughter. “Keep writing.”

In the living room, he beamed at her. “Old Wang got promoted today…” he slurred, his voice sticky with drink. He smelled like grilled meat and someone else’s perfume.

She straightened his shoes. “I’m tired,” she said, setting an overturned cup upright. “Hope always lets you down.”

He reached for her. She stepped back, pressing against the damp balcony door.

“You feel so far away,” he murmured.

On TV, couples kissed in staged rain. Outside, real rain lashed the balcony. Wind-whipped drops burst on the tiles, pooling into dark stains.

“TV lies,” she said.

“What’s real, then?” His eyelids drooped.

She returned to her daughter’s room and glanced at the deep grooves on the page. Was she now like an albatross too—wings heavy, but still forced to take off?

“Mama, I finished 飞 (fly). Is it right?”

She paused, then stroked her daughter’s hair. “Mama’s just about to take off.”

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Huina Zheng, a Distinction M.A. in English Studies holder, works as a college essay coach. Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and others. Her work has received nominations three times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her family.

 

After

by Jenny Morelli

Since that November, civilized discussions have failed and all there’s left to do is eat ice cream, watch Lifetime movies, and shower in the stillness of our house among the hills where we absconded after that fateful day.

We’ve escaped what once was and still is for those who steered right and not left, but sometimes, when the air feels cold and thin and clear, I’m compelled to yell from the hilltops ‘Doesn’t this hate and blame and paranoia ring a bell?’ or wander back to that place that was once ours because she was certain, that friend I once had, that things wouldn’t change, but back then, they couldn’t see, those most delusional, who are now watching through their binoculars, paranoia perched on their shoulders.

They’re watching, I’m sure, and waiting for us, although we’ve never returned; haven’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t be a return. What we left is gone, and what remains was left behind by us, who’ve been left behind by them.

So here we sit, nestled safely between the indifferent hills where the pages from our stories have been blown wide open, eagerly inviting us to write our own future, one where we can live in peace and tolerance, acceptance and uniqueness, because we remain the enlightened ones, and our future, despite our precipitous present, will need to know that we were the brave ones who left so we could write.

We are the ones diminished from the deaths of those who fell for simply being who they were. We are the ones who embrace mankind.

We are the ones for whom the bell tolls, not the cowards who stayed and prayed and slayed, and we are the ones who’ll live on long after our demise, so that others can learn.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Jenny Morelli is a NJ high school English teacher who lives with her husband, cat, and myriad yard pets. She seeks inspiration in everything, including her nightmares. She’s published in several literary magazines including Spillwords, Red Rose Thorns, Scars tv, Bottlecap Press and Bookleaf Press for four poetry chapbooks. Website: JennyMorelliWrites.com

 

Fingers Crossed

by Marie Anderson

I was looking through Mom’s binoculars at the cute neighbor boy mowing his lawn wearing only shorts when something in my own yard caught my eye. Near Mom’s rose bushes, a red tail hawk was feasting on a dead raccoon, pulling out and devouring red strands of guts. The raccoon’s sweet face was facing me, and then its eyes blinked.

What the? How could it be alive?

And then my bedroom door crashed open, and Ursula (aka The Evil Stepmother) burst in.

“Nora!” she screeched. “I thought I’d find you here, ogling the boy next door. You’re gonna wind up in prison if you don’t stop this Peeping Tom path you’re on.”

I suspect she knew it had been me peeping at her going at it in a parked car at our neighborhood park. I’d been walking the dog under a bright full moon close to midnight, and the curly-haired man all over her wasn’t my dad. That was three days ago. Dad was out of town on business, not due back until next week, and I still hadn’t decided whether to tell him. I knew he was still lusting for her and might not believe me. After all, he’d dismissed my suspicions that Ursula, Mom’s visiting nurse at the time, was overdosing Mom on pain meds, hastening her passing.

Now I faced The Evil Stepmother and muttered 66613, my zip code for Hell which is where all Evil Ones belong.

“I wasn’t looking at the neighbor, Urs, I was looking at that hawk eating a raccoon by Mom’s rose bushes.”

Ursula marched to the window, looked out. “What hawk? What raccoon?”

“You blind?” I looked back out the window and saw . . .nothing. No hawk. No raccoon.

What the?

The next morning, I glanced out my bedroom window and saw a red tail hawk attacking a raccoon by Mom’s rose bushes. The raccoon was nearly a goner. Only its eyes had life, blinking once, twice, then closing for good. Ursula suddenly appeared on the scene, shooing the hawk away. “Stupid,” I muttered. “Can’t condemn a bird for eating.” I grabbed the binoculars and looked through the lenses. But what I saw was no longer Ursula in the yard, but Ursula engulfed by flames strapped in a car next to a man not Dad.

The car was a silver Cadillac.

What the?

My mind spun with theories. Were Mom’s binoculars a portal to the future? Was her spirit from beyond behind this second sight?

Later that day, I was watching the latest season of The Crown when Ursula grabbed the remote and shut the TV off. “Nora. Pay attention please. I’m Ubering out right now for a spa weekend in Lake Geneva. Don’t forget to walk the damn dog, Nora!” And away she went, rolling her suitcase over the beige carpet that now covered the oak floors Mom had loved.

I hurried to the window and watched a curly-haired man place Ursula’s suitcase into the back seat and then open the front passenger side door. Ursula slid into the front seat. The man hurried around to the driver’s side, got behind the wheel, and the car purred off.

The car was a silver Cadillac.

I smiled. “Fingers crossed,” I whispered, and ambled back to resume watching The Crown.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Marie Anderson is a Chicago area married mother of three millennials. Her stories have appeared in dozens of publications, most recently (2025) in The Meadow, Raven's Muse, Bloomin' Onion, Kismet Magazine, and Fiction on the Web. Since 2009 she has led and learned from a writing critique group who meets at a local public library.

 

A Precautionary Tale of Late Night Studies

by Amelia Weissman

It was no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence when I first noticed it. I thought it was just a stray pencil mark, an impression of graphite left from one of the countless incidents in which I had chucked my writing utensil across the room in frustration. Studying for any amount of college final exams leaves most students in such a frazzled state that there should be an Olympic event for whomever accomplishes the most amount of physical damage to property thanks to the sadistic whims of their professors.

I most certainly would have been a finalist on that podium, so the mark on my wall wasn’t exactly remarkable - until it started to grow. Amid the constellation of other javelin-thrown pen and pencil spots, that one was the only one that changed.

Distracted from the microbiology text I was supposed to be reviewing but didn’t feel particularly inclined to at the moment, I licked the tip of my finger and scrubbed at the dingy wall to take the spot out. But it wouldn’t budge.

The smudge reminded me of mold, and I began to wonder if maybe this decrepit old building finally was falling apart at the seams. Then I witnessed an impossibility that made me start to question the wisdom of too many late nights mixed with copious amounts of coffee. The blemish, as big as my pinky nail, pulsed.

Like a gruesome heartbeat or the labored breathing of an undead creature, it was blatantly apparent that the spot on my wall was animated.

I turned away from the blasted thing to refresh my sight with something not quite so alien, but an insane physical itch commenced in my brain. Not a psychological manifestation, I could actually feel the gray matter in my cerebellum twitch in irritation as if a mosquito had injected its bothersome venom straight through my bony skullcap.

I whipped around to stare accusatorily at the damned black mark on my wall because I knew it had done this to me. The size of my fist now, the inky depths of its hateful pulsations seemed to laugh at my ire.

For as much as the thing repulsed me to the point of nausea, invisible tendrils of magnetic attraction pulled me closer to it. My legs walked robotically toward the wall until my toes were kissing the baseboard.

Being in such proximity to the thing, now the approximate size of an open textbook, I saw that it was not real but it was also more real than the dorm room trappings around me and the impending misery of tomorrow’s microbiology final. An insane urge to embrace the blackness while simultaneously feeling the chemical overload of cortisol and adrenaline screaming at my body to run trapped me at this infinite threshold.

The spot was not patient, however, and yawned open wide like a massive set of jaws until – well, let’s just say I didn’t have to worry about that test anymore.

While my disappearance left many baffled, eventually the novelty of the case died away.

Now it is a new semester though and there is a new inhabitant of my old room. She seems very studious, and I haven’t noticed too many of her friends coming over to visit. By the looks of her textbooks, she’s most likely a chemistry major which means a lot of late-night studying and paper writing which is good because I’m getting more than a little hungry.

I can’t wait until finals.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Amelia Weissman is a mom of six with her Master's in marine biology. She has been published as a scientific writer in research journals and as a fiction writer in Starward Shadows Quarterly ezine, Black Hare Press Anthology Year Four, and SpecPoVerse.

 

The School Board Calls for Reductions

by James B. Nicola

Last November we learned how the original Americans saved the surviving Pilgrims’ lives by feeding them and teaching them how to farm in salty, sandy soil, and then invited them to join them—join their tribe, not just settle nearby lands. It seems they were natural Christians and already knew that all peoples were really one Great Tribe beneath the Sky. Eventually the originals were massacred by their guests, who founded a church so they could live with themselves, perhaps, or at least slay in the name of a Prince of Peace. Nathan P. showed us all this in a book. We confirmed it on the Internet. But now the book, those websites, and Nathan P. are gone. The School Board’s keeping its promise to reduce class size.

Later we learned of Wilmington and Tulsa from Freddie D. and now he too is gone. The Daily News reported how the School Board keeps its promises.

Last week we learned that lynchings spread as far north as New York and Minnesota. And sheriffs looked the other way for over a hundred years, sheriffs that people kept voting for, who called themselves Good People. Eventually even cops, with the squeeze of knees instead of nooses, and kids with thirsty guns, got in the act. Cops and kids and courts—some, though not all. Nomey C. and Sammy C. told us all this. We confirmed it on the Internet; there were no books to find. But now those sites and Sammy C. and Nomey C. are gone.

Yesterday we learned of Nazis and the Holocaust and swastikas, and that on January 6, a lynch mob at our Capitol not only boasted a noose, but also swastikas and battle flags of treason. Quickly we confirmed this with photos on the Internet and saw the noose, the swastikas, and battle flags of treason, and that some mobsters had guns, the day that five were slain. Howie Z. told us this. Today, though, all those sites are down and Howie Z. is gone.

The School Board, up for re-election, reminds us of their great success in reducing class size.

We miss our friends and meet to discuss remembering them in a book, but on second thought perhaps a fictive poem or flashy fiction would better contain the truth, lest we, too, help quench the School Board, thirsty as kids’ guns, and, so like you, begin to disappear. ###
in honor of Nathaniel Philbrick, Frederick Douglass, Noam Chomsky, Samuel Clemens, and Howard Zinn

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
James B. Nicola is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest being Fires of Heaven, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award. He has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, and eleven Pushcart nominations.

Credit: Originally published in South Shore Review, 2022