Eighty-five year old Betsy lies on the bed where she will soon expire. She’s lived a full and fascinating life to say the least. Family and friends surround her. More gather throughout the house. Outside, hundreds. They are there not only to …
When you die an angel reads out your statistics and fun facts. Seven men loved you (you knew of one and only suspected two). Forty fantasized of you. You died owing debts to nineteen people, mostly borrowed loonies from childhood. The …
For their prothalamium,
the doe and dodo would
do-si-do toe-to-toe.
Ken Gosse prefers writing light verse with meter and rhyme. First published in FLR–East in 2016 and since then by Pure Slush, Spillwords, The Ekphrastic Review, Potato Soup Journal, and …
My mother is dying.
I say these words to myself as I peel then halve the onions for my extremely simple version of a guk soup. My husband, who is white, wants to celebrate my Korean ancestry today, even though …
Turning off the stove, Jan took the large pot by the metal handles quickly, nearly dropping it when her hands realized they’d forgotten their oven mitts. Breathing out slowly through her teeth, she ran cold water over her hands until …
For the past hour, the kitchen had been expelling hot and spicy smells. Alex sneaked inside to investigate, but Eleanor noticed and pushed him out. “It’s a surprise,” she said.
It was something healthy, he’d wager. His wife had …
He’s a used car salesman, and I bought a lemon.
Dawn DeBraal has published over 500 short stories, poems and drabbles.…
Clock. Timer. Sixty minutes. Start.
I think the recommended amount of time is fifteen minutes, but I’ve always been an overachiever. Maybe that’s part of the problem.
Half a minute. Maybe it’s not fifteen minutes either. That’s still such a …
The trees are screaming in the most incredible way: cicadas released. The ground rumbles with frogs, who are the only ones happy about the flooding in our county.
We’re isolated here with the bugs and the frogs and the flood. …
An art teacher once called me retarded. She was criticizing my drawing, but I took the adjective personally.
To be fair, this was in the late 1980s, long before political correctness disallowed that pejorative term for the developmentally disabled. Back …