The Kiss of Death

Consciousness hits as you’re fighting suffocation. Face down in a basement room of Dante’s Inferno, you’re flattened against a sea of bodies caught trying to roll over. You feel your lips press against the hollow below Yannick’s left ear. His good side.

 

Morgan’s 100-Proof Excuse

The pirates came, like every Tuesday. You know how they’d kidnap me, hie me away to some dive out on Rte. 128 and dump me on the lawn by the hydrangea in the morning. So I unlocked the liquor cabinet: shoot me.

101 Fiction: Entanglement

It's March, and there's a new issue of 101Fiction with thirteen stories on the theme of green.

"A tiny quantum of green fiction," says editor John Xero about mine.

101 Fiction: Entanglement

History Lesson: Schrödinger's Light

You all think you’d know what to do, when to do it. I’d like to see you try. Try not to see that nothing is illuminated, that no one’s walking up the path. You try leaving it on all night. Every night.

Did not make this week's grid, but in exchange was given a cooler title. Thanks Rowan!

They Didn’t Match My Jacket

When it finally occurred to me to glance up from my perfect crouch, the pole was headed straight at me. I leaned hard to the right, and there was the snow bank. Obviously, the rental guy gave me the wrong color boots.

Always Doesn’t Seem Like Such a Long Time, After All

His beard, grown as camouflage for a dove,

curves around the smile that widened just for me.

Gentle fingers squeeze hard between my ribs

for the photo, pull me in tight, make me gasp.

Taken, poof, in a rainbow-bursting flash of sunlight.

Names Blown Past

Really, there’s no need for light. Better to leave the curtain tangled. If that bulge in the middle seems to ripple, call it the wind. If the wind calls, listen. When it skulks by tinged in frost, it cries Mary. Screams Mary.

Honored to be chosen Editor's Pick by Rowan for this challenge : )