Author: Sarah Fitzgerald

Widower, 29, seeks S/DF. I’m losing my hair, I smoke non-filtered Camels by the carton, I prefer to spend most Sundays trashing the NFL, and lately no one has mistaken me for Ryan Reynolds. That much said, I had been a loving husband, I like babies and animals, I can hook up a DVR, and I rank fairly high on the food chain.

Justin looked over the Internet message he had typed onto his IBM’s monitor, aware that self-deprecation tended to lose its charm once a woman sensed how well deserved it was. He really sucked at this, and one reading convinced him the ad reeked of defensiveness masked behind a strained attempt at cleverness. Worse, because of what it did not say the personal ad’s content was not entirely honest.

He hit ‘delete, ’and started over.

Widower, 29, physically challenged, seeks S/DF. You don’t have to be centerfold material or even attractive. You can be downright ugly. In fact, I prefer you to be ugly. I don’t de-serve anything better than a hag.

DAMN! DAMN!! DAMN!!!

White hot rage seemed the only emotion Justin felt capable of any more, and the moment got away from him again. He felt tempted to send the rewritten message as it stood but managed to pull himself back. Launched into cyberspace a personal ad this sick might attract the kind of woman who ate her young, but little else. Outbursts happened a lot with him lately, and the time had arrived for a reality check.

He hit ‘delete ’again, muttering while he ran his fingers through wispy strands of sandy hair. Pushing his wheelchair from the keyboard he reached for the photo album on the bookshelf. This daily ritual had become both self-defeating and painful, but he was a junkie addicted to memories of his past. Although his legs were as useless as pine logs, Justin’s hands had developed a will of their own.

He flipped through the photo album again and focused on one of the hundreds of snapshots he had taken with Sheila during the three years of their life together. The photo showed Justin and his young wife on a windy Long Island beach two summers ago. With arms entwined around one another like the newlyweds they were, they seemed the quintessential yin and yang in swimsuits. She was everything he was not, the beauty to his beast, the classic argument for the attraction of opposites. Justin could never fully understand just what Sheila had seen in him, but whatever it was he felt certain it had died the same day she had.

He studied the photo as if he held a Renoir in his hands. His young wife had been a knockout in that hot pink hint of a bikini she liked to wear. On that August afternoon he had been in such a feverish rush to make love to her that Sheila’s bikini bottom remained wrapped around her ankles the whole time.

Justin closed his eyes, and for a brief moment Sheila was there. He could even smell the wild honey scent of her hair. If he reached out she might stand before him, wanting him the way she had during the warm August afternoon captured in the photograph.

As always another memory forced its way into his head, the unwanted and uninvited remembering that chewed into his reflections like a voracious rat whenever his thoughts turned to Sheila. The memory remained inside Justin’s brain, a blood smeared freeze frame slowly churning itself into motion, exposing each torturous second of the last moments of Sheila’s life.

. . . The present collides with the past. Headlights of the oncoming eighteen wheeler come at him in an ambush of white light as the Toyota enters the rain swept Hartford ramp of Interstate 95. Sheila turns to look at him. She is like a confused child, unable to comprehend the enormity of the macabre moment they have entered into together. Ten tons of diesel truck bear down on them, and the small Toyota spins wildly, slamming the guard rail. The door on the passenger side shreds off in grotesque slow motion, and she is torn from her car seat. Thrown from the vehicle Sheila seems suspended in midair like a tossed rag doll. Her body skids upon the medial rail that promptly severs her upper torso from her lower, scattering the sections of her dissected flesh and gashed bone fifty feet apart.

Ten tons of metal effectively slammed what remained of Sheila into her grave and made match wood of the bones inside Justin’s legs.

Enter ‘delete ’and everything disappears. It was that simple.

Disabled Widower, 29, seeks anyone who can make the past disappear.

DamnDamnDamn…

He lit a cigarette, secretly hoping that his lungs might soon turn into ash and end the empty charade that had become his life. Of course, the punchline was that even the tiest life had to go on regardless of the uncertainty he felt about how that could happen.

The monitor of Justin’s computer remained empty. He returned to the keyboard willing himself to write something, anything.

Pitiful paraplegic, 29, more emotionally than physically challenged, desires any morsel of pity a woman might show toward a man who is incapable of getting over the death of the only woman who ever had the poor judgment to fall in love with him.

Succinct and to the point. More important, it was honest.

Who reads this sort of drivel anyway? he wondered.

Only the thousands of agoraphobes who had no lives of their own. Only those pathetic recluses who spent so much time at their computer terminals there seemed no world beyond their door that did not have the ‘cyber ’prefix attached to it. People who, if given the chance, might delete their entire lives.

Maybe he would deliver his personal ad unedited right now. Maybe he would send it out into the vast outreaches of cyberspace just to see what sort of excuse for a woman might respond, what sort of mirror image of himself was as desperate and alone.

The cigarette suddenly burned Justin’s lip, and pulling it from his mouth he realized he had smoked the Camel to a nub.

When he looked back at the computer’s monitor he discovered the screen read ‘message sent’. Some internal demon lurking within the darker chambers of his psyche had delivered the personal ad for him. Or, maybe his hands had operated independently of his brain again, just as they had done with Sheila’s photos in the album. In either case, the IBM’s monitor indicated the message had somehow irretrievably gone out courtesy of the Internet into the furthest regions of cyberland.

Gone. Departed like his legs and what used to be his life. Fading and disseminating out there somewhere in time or space along with Sheila and the scent of her hair during an afternoon on Long Island. All of it evaporating into mist except for the blinding lights of an eighteen wheeler tearing a crevice through the darkness of a rainy night.

It took a moment for the image to register, and at first it seemed his eyes had lost their focus along with his brain. He could see the blurred letters of the keyboard through his hands as if he were staring at them through smoked glass. He held his hand to the light. He might just as well have been staring through gauze.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, Justin almost smiled at the sinister absurdity of his circumstances. Everything was gone, yet at the same time nothing was. Try as he might he could not delete the ghosts. But the ghosts were not what he really wanted to make disappear. Some things were so ludicrous you almost had to laugh just to keep from screaming.

He knew he might remain right where he sat, there at the keyboard for the rest of the day waiting for a response that would never come. That was not the answer. But he knew what was. He typed a single sentence.

Not really seeking anyone, not any more.

Justin smiled again as he watched his hand continue to fade. Considering for a moment, he added another sentence.

Just want to erase it all.

He hit ‘delete ’and kept pressing down on the key, barely able to see the flesh of his own knuck-les.

His smile disappeared last.

—

Ken Goldman, former Philadelphia teacher of English and Film Studies, is an Active member of the Horror Writers Association. He has homes on the Main Line in Pennsylvania and at the Jersey shore. His stories have  appeared in over 970 independent press publications in the U.S., Canada,  the UK,  and Australia with over twenty due for publication in 2023-24. Ken’s tales have received seven honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He has written six books : three anthologies of short stories, YOU HAD ME AT ARRGH!! (Sam’s Dot Publishers), DONNY DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (A/A Productions) and STAR-CROSSED (Vampires 2); and a novella, DESIREE,  (Damnation Books). His first novel OF A FEATHER (Horrific Tales Publishing) was released in January 2014. SINKHOLE, his second novel, was published by Bloodshot Books August 2017.

My dead mom’s house overflowed. Potted strawberry plants hung from the ceiling. The
walls curved strangely. Buckets of potatoes and dirt sat under every window. Mom had gotten weird in the end; we’d stopped connecting, so I’d stopped coming around. Last time I’d been here…it hadn’t been like this at all.

In our phone call from this past winter, I remembered her mentioning hiring someone to
help renovate her “hobbit hole,” but I’d been tuned out and had never asked what she’d meant.
This was what she’d meant.
I strolled over to the kitchen, where things only got worse. Mom had always loved to
make food for the two of us. She’d taught me from a young age how to bake bread and dice
various vegetables. She’d said she liked to have a “kitchen buddy.” That was before she’d gone
crazy.

Countless shelves lined the walls. More potted food plants hung and stacked everywhere.
A circular window like out of Pinterest centered the kitchen, showing off…the brick wall behind
it. Overgrown fresh thyme and basil trailed over the countertops and down the shelves. Every
plant’s container was adorned in…I guess you could call it art. Mom had never been good at
finger painting, but she’d finger painted. One of the pots boasted a blotty blue…flower? Another
had what I thought was a dog. Some of them I generously ascribed the category of abstract trees.
No pot lay empty, though. Give her that, she never was one for waste–

And a thought occurred to me.

I counted back the days that had passed, the time it’d taken to arrange her demanded
green burial and funeral “celebration,” and I realized. All of these plants should have been dead.
My gaze slowly spun around the crowded, small house. I eyed every odd vine and dwarf tree.
And I noticed. Everything was green. Not a shrivel or wilt in sight.

My skin broke into gooseflesh. I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.
“Psshh, they’re just resilient. Or she asked a neighbor to water them…”
Except she had no neighbors. She had insisted on living in the forest in the middle of
nowhere like a “goofy little woods witch.” And abruptly the thought of being utterly alone for
miles in this house scared the crap out of me. My heart began thumping despite my perfect
stillness.

What was I doing? Everything was fine. This was probably some complex grief thing, me
seeing nothing out of something because the person who’d raised me had died. Me searching for
answers, answers as to why a mentally ill but otherwise fairly healthy woman in her early fifties
would suddenly die in her sleep. Maybe even further back than that, perhaps searching for the
reason why my once light-hearted hippie mother had started growing erratic, refusing to leave
her house, singing to herself in gibberish words when she thought no one could hear her.

I started moving at a snail’s pace through the house, placing one foot in front of the other
again. The logical half of my brain told me I would search the house, find nothing, and it would
appease my terrified lizard brain. The other half…was looking for something, something I
instinctually knew had to be there.

I found myself in the basement. Tears pricked in my eyes, building with my anticipation.
Rounding the last dusty wooden step, I poked my head out into the damp darkness. I recalled
from when we’d gone house shopping for her post-retirement that the previous owner had used
the basement as a cellar for fancy wines, filled the place with dehumidifiers to keep up with the
moisture. Mom had never bothered, it seemed. The smell of old mold drifted up to meet my
nose.

And some primal intuition whispered in my ear something I’d never been told, “This is
where your Mamma keeps her mushrooms.”
A cold sweat broke out over my forehead. My breathing swiftly turned into panting. But
it was nothing. It had to be. My imagination was running wild, but my legs moved without my
control, and suddenly I was fully in the basement, eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I saw…the mushrooms.

—

Brynn Lietuvnikas is a graduating student of Hagerstown Community College under its Early College Degree Program, and she is a lifelong Creative Writer. Although she once thought she had retired her novelist cap, she is giving it another go with a personal romantasy project now reaching over one hundred and fifty pages. Brynn did not want to give up her short story practice either, however. She admits that she has written an unusually high number of short stories surrounding faerie circles, but she’s not about to stop now. 

I smile and nod for her to continue, while wishing she’d just shut up. Her hands flair in the air and I hate it. I hate how passionate she is, how much life she breathes into every word.

This is the same way she used to tell me bedtime stories. There were times that I was so scared to fall asleep that she’d be stuck there with me until the early hours of the morning. She never got frustrated or stern with me. No, my older sister, perfect person that she is, that she has always been, would only smile and start another one of her made up adventures. They usually featured two little girls surviving in a world where they could only trust each other.

They had always made me feel better. Somehow lessening the sting that no one else cared for us. She always knew the right things to say.

I try to hold onto those memories, to help ease the embarrassment that I feel when we’re in public together.

I struggle to keep the smile on my face as her hands land on the table a bit too loudly, before picking up the wrong fork.

I discreetly look around, already knowing what I’ll see: old money bitches having entire mocking conversations about us with nothing more than a few shared looks.

I hate them. I hate them more than I could ever hate my sister.

Years ago, I had been excited to marry into this life. It was a fairytale come to life. I had felt special when my husband would tell me that I was a breath of fresh air, someone more genuine than the people that ran in his usual circles, his family’s circle.

It had taken me months to figure out that the compliments my mother-in-law gave me were actually insults. Sharp, cunning, and cutting deeper than any other confrontation I’ve ever had.

Honestly, I hate my husband a little bit too. Him pulling me into this world, where I am surrounded by people who judge and judge until I hate myself more than I ever could them, it feels like a betrayal.

Finally, I can see our waitress making her way over. I have been ready for the check since she brought the food out. She smiles and goes to speak, but all that comes out is an obnoxious blaring sound.

Confused, she snaps her mouth shut, clears her throat, and tries again. The same thing happens, but this time I don’t feel as if I am sitting at the table. It feels like I am floating somewhere above it.

I try to hold onto the dream, to push the sounds of my alarm out of my mind.

As I open my eyes I push back the urge to cry.

I would give anything for just one more miserable minute at that table.

Instead, I sit up in my small twin bed, swinging my legs over the side, feet resting on the cold floor of my studio apartment.

I take a second to center myself before looking over to the only picture frame on my bedside table. It’s scratched, the stain is worn in places on each side, and one of the corners is glued together. It’s perfect.

I trace the face of the young woman centered in the photo. She’s laughing with her head thrown back. There is a kind of happiness in her that can’t be faked. This face was supposed to stand with me so that we could take on the world together. This is the face that I want to remember her by.

Not the thin, worn image from the newspaper article that I have hidden just behind it.

For me she had grown up fast, filling the shoes that our parents refused to. But no one had ever done the same for her. All the comfort and warmth that she provided me, she could only find from a guy named Ricky who sold 8-balls for eighty bucks out of his shitty Pontiac Grand Am.

For a second I let myself feel the embarrassment, the hatred that I have for her, for leaving me to face this life without her.

It takes me longer than normal to push the feelings back down, to stuff them in a box deep inside that I never consciously open. But I do it. I set her back down on the stand beside my bed and get ready for work.

It’s an hour later, after I have flipped off the lights and am halfway out the door that I pause, calling back to her, “I’ll see you tonight”.

It feels like I am trying to pressure her to be there again, and I guess I am. I will spend the rest of my life hoping to have shitty dreams of us together so I can escape the nightmare that is having to survive life alone.

—

Naomi Sheely thrives somewhere in chaos and caffeine. This has led her to the Dean’s list and literary publications at HCC, all while completing a double major and several all-night study sessions. It has, somehow, also given her a steady and calm husband and a well-behaved dog. Predictably, though, her three children are feral. There is no free time for hobbies, only the sweet escape of the written word.

I sometimes eat lunch alone at a table on a busy sidewalk by a shopping center with brand new buildings. There’s a fancy new pizza place, a gym, and it looks like a new fast-food restaurant opening up across the street. There’s a new development of houses behind me that seem to have multiplied since I last came here.

I can remember a time when all of those buildings hadn’t yet been built, and in their place lay acres of empty fields. When the only road through town was a tiny little main street lined with old country homes that were more often than not a little run down, but held generations of character. When there were family-owned ma-and-pop shops, and when the sidewalks in the summer were filled with barefooted boys running about with wooden bats over their shoulders.

We used to all meet up at the pool in the morning. Seeing who could do the coolest dive, swim the fastest to the other side, or hold his or her breath the longest. The lifeguards used to blow their whistles and yell at us to stop running, but we did it anyway.

After swimming all day, we wandered around neighborhoods, feeling the dirt under our toes, and peeking out from behinds red maple trees to admire historic homes. We played games, and ran up and down the dirt path.

The sun would set over the mountains behind us, which meant it was time to grab dinner at the old-fashioned pizza place across the street. They had live music and the best fizzing, fruity soda I’ve ever tasted.

One by one, my friends traded their dirty white tank tops and jean shorts for trendy crop tops, Nikes, and the latest iPhone. And one by one, the fields where we used to play hours of endless baseball in our bare feet were replaced by stores and restaurants. And one by one, the ma and pop shops where I used to buy soda -- the kind that still came in glass bottles -- closed down.

Now, my shoes pinch my feet as I walk on the fresh asphalt in the crowded street. The homes I once admired must have shrunk, or perhaps I have grown. The people I used to swim with are now lifeguards that blow their whistle and yell at kids to stop running.

—

Hannah Gagnon is from Knoxville, MD. She has worked as a Digital Marketing Coordinator for a non-profit and is an emerging creative writer. She is currently a student at Hagerstown Community College. She enjoys writing poetry and short fiction about nature and the mountainous region where she grew up.

Drone XTPE 413557 maintained a height of four hundred feet, with a standard deviation of altitude of fifteen feet as it flew along the southern shore of Lake Erie. XTPE 413557 was the newest generation of monitoring drones. A combination of light-weight battery packs, high efficiency solar cells and next generation electric engines meant that XTPE 413557 remained forever aloft, only landing when informed by weather servers of impending inclement weather, or for servicing as self-detected.

Three days ago hospitals worldwide had overflowed with patients. By the evening of that day, one in one hundred people worldwide had experienced symptoms: nausea, severe headache, diarrhea and / or dehydration. By evening of that day the early cases were bleeding from mucous membranes.

Drone XTPE 413557 overflew the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve as it passed Bratenahl. Its onboard software kept it centered on the shoreline but the small size of the Preserve peninsula allowed it to overfly the half mile square area as it approached downtown Cleveland from the northwest. To the left of its direction of travel were the docks of the Intercity Yacht Club, and, across Interstate 90, the five baseball fields of Gordon Park arranged in a pentagonal pattern.

The traffic lights changed and cars were parked on the road sides. But no cars were moving. There were no pedestrians. Interstate 90 lay bare. Every hundred feet or so a car might be stopped on a shoulder. Birds flew and chirped but aside from that the hinterland of the city was silent.

The next morning, two days ago, one in ten people had had symptoms and two in a hundred from the previous day had died. There was no regular programming. Stations were either static or constant coverage; curfews were announced and by the afternoon military vehicles began to appear. Experts on television declared it to be a new type of hemorrhagic fever, fast-acting and lethally airborne. By evening, two days ago, two in five had symptoms and one in ten had died.

The social web collapsed. Workers from all sectors failed to appear at their jobs. Businesses closed. Scant army units tried and failed to enforce cordon zones. Those few people walking on the streets avoided each other. Violence flared in ten thousand thousand spots across the world where warnings to stay away were ignored.

Drone XTPE 413557 flew past the 55th Street East Marina. The drone flew almost directly above the stone breakwater. On previous passes children would wave, imagining that somewhere someone was looking through a camera on the drone, but such was not the case. There were no children today nor would there be again. Drone XTPE 413557 began a sweeping hyperbolic turn to the Northeast, anticipating the two overlaid rectangles that formed Burke Lakefront Airport.

One day ago nine in ten had symptoms and four in ten had died. None of the infected recovered, all died. The prognosis was evident: symptoms mean death. Human society no longer existed. No one walked the streets. There were no looters. There were no good Samaritans. Some had fled the cities, driving to remote areas, hometowns, backwoods cabins. This had the effect of infecting all the highways and turning all inhabited landmasses into isolated pockets of infection; free zones bordered on all sides by infectious areas.

XTPE 413557 passed the airport and flew across the small faux bay that held the USS Cod Submarine Memorial. The drone passed Voinovich Bicentennial Park and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It had just completed a data upload to a remote server in Buffalo, New York, and had in turn been handed off to a server in Toledo. Pointers were reset and onboard memory was logically if not electronically cleared to zero used. Ahead to the left was First Energy Stadium.

This morning six billion, eight hundred million humans had already died or were dying. The survivors were in outlying and rural areas although many of these had been infected by arrivals from cities. There were people in remote locations, the high arctic, McMurdo Station, and hermits and various other social isolates. Some of these regions had enough community and population to survive for several generations.

XTPE 413557 passed over Edgewater Park Beach. A young man wearing only shorts lay dead on the sand. The areas around his orifices were now a dark rust color. He lay expressionless in the morning sun. An orange rind and a half eaten sandwich lay beside him on the sand. XTPE 413557’s formerly southerly direction now became northerly again as it followed the curve of the coast back out into the lake on the journey west.

Everywhere an infected human breathed became a lethal zone. To exhale was to shed virus. Survivors had limited resources and as supplies became scarce they would fearfully forage into unknown territory. Often they would bring infection back to their band and the uninfected zones grew ever smaller. Those desperate few who had early fled the cities were almost always infected and their arrival meant death. Thirty days after it began there were only seven million survivors left, trapped in small areas.

Drone XTPE 413557 flew past the Lakewood high-rises and adjusted it’s heading again. It was now flying almost entirely west and only slightly north. It overflew the small peninsula of Lakewood Park. Somewhere in among the trees a hungry dog barked and snarled at the movement.

There were small breeding populations, but there was nowhere to expand into that could be considered safe. In 2132, one hundred and fourteen years after the first case, the last human being would die. Twelve years later from now drone XTPE 413557 would develop a critical fault in a motor. This would cause it to drift out over Lake Erie, and a day later, it would be torn apart by a thunderstorm.

—

Bill is an aspiring fiction writer with a background in computer programming. He is still trying to decide what he wants to be when he grows up. Born in Indiana, Bill is a transplanted Hoosier living as a Buckeye by way of Canada and the Netherlands. Contact Bill at [email protected].