The booth in the back right corner at Emilio’s is mine. The hostess knows just to nod at me as I walk in – no, I won’t be eating. The bright colored fairy lights that trim the bar really do it for me. It reminds me of how I used to do the living room for Christmas with the boys, except Emilio’s keeps them up all year. Dominic works Mondays and Wednesdays, Brady works Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Lacy gets the weekend shifts. They all know my order, although Brady does it the best. Dominic keeps giving me lemons instead of limes, no matter how many times I remind him. He’s like my oldest, Jackson – kindhearted, but things don’t really stick with him. Sometimes I swear, I’ll need to tell Jackson to put his laundry away thirteen, fourteen times before he does it. He gets that from his father. His mind is just somewhere else.
No Escape by Claire Schön
I dim the headlights before the approach. No other vehicle has passed in the last ten minutes. The rain is all but a splutter now; the wipers cease their tormenting drag and slide. The wet gravel sinks silently under the tread of the tyres: perfect conditions.
The windows glow at opposite corners above. I navigate to the very back of the car park and pull in under an unkempt bush. Sliding out, I walk towards the building, satisfied that the car is out of sight. The back entrance is clear. I ease off my boots and pad up the stone steps in Lycra-soled feet, reaching the doorway of the flat I have been familiarising myself with for a fortnight now. Carefully easing down the handle, no need for a key and hence no jingle, I sink to my knees and enter on all fours. The deep scent of wood smoke emanates from the rugs, raising recent memories. I feel for the sofa, the one between two windows, benefitting from the join of the wall to evade prying eyes. Retrieving the flashlight from my bag, I am finally ready to digest the passages I began over two weeks ago.
Useless Werewolf by Naaz Frederick
Being a werewolf is horrible. Being a useless werewolf is worse. At night you are crazy and unstable. Why did you let this happen? You wouldn’t be a werewolf if you said just said no. Why didn’t you deny it? You don’t remember being asked. You didn’t want this. Why are you complaining? Everyone nowadays claimed to be turned, you are not special. You are nothing. You hear your mother on the phone earlier, you heard it too clearly with your trained ears.
“These fake werewolves are destroying the lives of who turned them, why would you expose if someone was turning people? That’ll cost them their lives.” Your mother hates the new trend, as she calls it, of involuntary werewolves calling out those turned them.
A Warehouse, A Blonde Man by Sage Pantony
My alarm goes off.
I feel groggy
Because I was awake at 6 am again.
I get up and make myself a sweet coffee
Then walk down to a warehouse to ask for a job.
This one’s only 29 minutes away,
18 by bus.
They hire me on the spot.
Sui Generis by Ken Wetherington
The experts said life would return to normal. They were wrong simply because, for most, a weary stasis had set in. Like pretty much everyone, my job had come to occupy nearly all my waking hours. But on that day, an inexplicable impulse propelled me to take a radical action. I went for a walk.
In the warmth of a summer afternoon, light sweat broke across my forehead and collected in my armpits, despite the shady, tree-lined street. Large, well-kept houses held silent vigil, shielding their unseen occupants from the outside world. After a couple of blocks, a woman walking her dog appeared on the opposite sidewalk. She kept her head down, though her little dog yapped at me. A little farther along, a landscaper snipped diligently at a hedge. He never looked up.
Spirit of Curiosity by David Clémenceau
About the time when Perseverance landed on Big Red, the board of directors of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had reached the rather unspectacular general consensus that their initial hopes for the Curiosity Mars rover to function for at least one Martian year, or 687 Earth days, had been amply satisfied. The data sent back to Earth so far was judged invaluable.
Emboldened by these results, the board decided, still unspectacularly, to send another rover on a complementary mission to Mars, but covertly. Unlike its older twin, Spirit of Curiosity, or Soc, would conduct the exploration of the Red Planet’s surface through mathematical deduction based on data fed into its memory banks. An autonomous robot with an open-ended AI on Mars was then ruled spectacular enough to keep it secret. If anything went wrong and word got out, they could still say it was all about the original rover.
Packing up the shit by Lucy Goldring
Whip the plastic net off the counter, your other hand snatching small blunt scissors from the drawer. Chew the bright orange mesh into wildlife-friendly pieces and lob them into the kitchen bin as you flip the lid with a perfectly timed toe-pump. Attack task after task like a TV ninja fending off waves of frenzied assailants.
From the fridge – that meekly-lit synthetic void – rescue a tub of vegan spread, half a mature cheddar and some ripped open ham that won’t survive five hours of stuffy car. Sprint up to the campsite at the other end of the grounds. Think about this being the final leg of the pig’s miserable journey as you palm off the sweaty goods on nonplussed relatives. Sprint back. Strip the bed according to the property’s ‘Covid-safe’ instructions: mattress protectors in the red bag, sheets and duvet covers in the green, towels made into a damp pyramid in the bathtub. Tackle the washing up mound for the third time in as many hours. Sweep the floor and return the dustpan to the musty cupboard. Discover tumbleweeds of dog hair and dead leaves amongst the jumble of your shoes. Silently weep. Clap each pair together, sending allergens whirling, and bundle in the IKEA carrier you never wanted. Sweep again.
Marrowbone Creek by D.W. Davis
We set up camp by the creek. As I was stoking a fire, the sheriff told us the name. “Not sure why it’s called that,” he said. “The name just stuck once, the way they do sometimes.”
There were five of us, an uncomfortably large number. Normally it was just Wilcox and myself, which could be uncomfortable all its own, depending on his mood. He normally kept to himself, hidden behind his beard and grizzly frame, a hulking man who kept his Winchester carbine closer than most mothers did their children. The others in our party were Sheriff John Walken, a man of indeterminate age but whose way of carrying himself suggested he’d seen plenty of action, perhaps on both sides of the law; Nadine Effins, a thin waif of a young woman whom Wilcox and I had been hired by the sheriff to rescue; and Miles Myerscough, the man who’d kidnapped her. That Myerscough still breathed surprised me; Wilcox had a tendency to kill men like that without hesitation, either through some flawed moral principle or, just as likely, enjoyment.
My Name is Jennifer, and I Don’t Have a Legal Middle Name, Either by Jennifer Jeanne McArdle
When my mom was pregnant with me, they asked my older sister what she thought about her sibling still growing in the womb.
“It’s a girl, and her name is Jennifer,” she insisted a few times.
Jennifer is a very common name for girls born in the 70s or 80s. Even in the 90s we had two, sometimes three, Jennifers in my class most years.
But my parents didn’t know where my sister had heard the name. There were no Jennifers on her favorite shows or in her class. Her best friend at the time was a “Valentina”.
Picked it up on the tail-end of its zeitgeist, maybe.
My parents couldn’t consider any other name after I was born.
Idle Ink 