Worthing Flash

Doctor Harris murmured: ‘Good lord, extraordinary thing,’ when he found a dove inserted in the anus of young Gwendoline, and, as he pulled it out, he dislodged three feathers, which fluttered and swooped down to the crimson rug beside the bed. He had been summoned to certify her death after she was found in her bed that morning cold and rigid, with horror in her wild, wide-eyed stare. The contorted posture of the body led him to investigate further. Bruising indicated to him that force had been used in a vicious assault on the poor girl. * The night before, when Gwendoline went to bed, she pulled back the bedclothes to find spread out before her a human heart, a glistening coil of entrails and several unidentifiable organs and lumps of flesh. She gasped, and then the stench of blood and excrement reached her and heaved bile up into the back of her throat. Suddenly a figure with a maimed face rose up in front of her, gripped her hand and shouted. She fainted and fell to th

Flight of Fancy We were once the Sparrows, a pair of ordinary birds engrossed in our daily rituals of courtship dances, nest upkeep, and caring for our young. Our tranquil existence took an unexpected turn when you all of a sudden, declared yourself a penguin, adopting a comical waddle, craving fish suppers, and insisting on us being addressed as Mr and Mrs P. "Darling, what on earth has gotten into you?" I asked one day as I watched you flop around in your strange gait-a -go. "I just feel like I belong with them," you replied with a determined look in your eyes. "Them? Who are 'them' exactly?" "Penguins! Don't you see? They're my true family!" You exclaimed, flapping your wings in an excited manner. Your family tree seemed to be a breeding ground for avian identity crises; there was that eccentric uncle convinced he was a peacock trying to woo the peahens, and some distant relative who believed he was part duck until

Now that you've gone, a storm rips my apartment apart, letters scattered everywhere. I weigh down plates too late, spoons soon disappear, cups fly up and away through windows smashed by wind, walls all gone, stairs open to the stars. But I'm most worried about my hearth, my empty shelf. Tim Love

A couple of days after his marriage, Ratan, an employee of BoB, Bhutan left with his divinely innocent wife. In those days he would travel to Bhutan by The Royal Government of Bhutan bus. The luxurious bus would set off from Esplanade at 7 p.m. and was supposed to reach Phuentsholing, the border town, by 10 in the morning. After the relatives coming to see the couple off, had hugged them and said their final "goodbyes" at the bus station in Esplanade, Ratan turned to his wife in the semi-darkness inside the bus and thought to himself that he was lucky to have her in his life. Ratan, talked nonstop on the way. He was possibly too excited to be married finally at 39 to take note of how preoccupied his wife was. He remembered the bus stopping near the Petrol Station and him getting off the bus to see if he could get some coffee or tea for his newly-wed wife. There was no tea-stall in sight. As he kept talking to his wife from below the window, his wife just said o

 Togetherness by Roberta Beach Jacobson After midnight, the voices in my head enter my stories. Is this why they exist? They whisper their way into dialogue, and I allow it. At times, I’ve encouraged it. Writer’s block has never been an issue for me, because the voices intervene. We cooperate fully, creating paragraphs and pages together, although I take all the credit.

I didn’t want the apricot toy poodle, but Dad insisted. I thought she would spend her days on a satin pillow, muzzle in the air, grooming her well-manicured curls. But she was a real puppy, and lost no time tugging the ribbon loose from her ear and clawing the baby blanket we’d brought her home in. Still, it wasn’t until she almost fell into her water dish because her head was too heavy that I saw why Dad picked her: She’d teach me how not to fall in, no matter how deep the water, or how long he’d been gone.  Cheryl Snell