In front of me stands the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Part of me knows she only seems so attractive because my heart is pumping like a piston and my adrenaline is dripping from my pores.

From my right periphery I see the five cops. They’ve made it through security and they’re in a hurry.

I’m still staring at her and I can almost convince myself that I caught her smile at me. Maybe if I’d had a woman like this at home I wouldn’t be here.

Looks like I’m going to miss my flight. The cops are checking everyone’s face. I know they’ve got my photo somewhere.

“You’re beautiful.” I yell out to the woman. I just thought she should know. She doesn’t care, at least she doesn’t let on. She smiles.

Her trip is about to get a little more interesting. Now this will be remembered as the time she got hit on by the fugitive right before a swarm of cops nabbed him and dragged him out of her life forever.

In a way this is better than a shoot out or car chase. At least this way one beautiful woman will never forget me.

Ryan Priest lives in Hollywood California where he writes prose and screenplays while perpetually between dead end jobs and lay offs. To see more of his work or get news on his first feature film “The Scam” go to www.RyanPriest.net

When the girl who became a vampire discovered her transformation, she did not become evil. Nor did she use her transformation for any undead purpose. She’d lament up and down the coiling halls of Dracula’s dungeon, waiting for night to fall. She’d stab herself with self-control and fill herself with vegan. Then, armed with dysphoria, she’d dive into vespertine shadows and neglect the passing silhouettes. When she saw three young men breathing heavily in an alley, she turned off temptation and walked the other way. They might have seen a ghost swimming through twilight, panting like a lightless star.

Later, the girl who became a vampire was eaten by the werewolf.

Andrew J. Stone sleeps with one eye open. This is a lie. Recent work has appeared at Danse Macabre, The Camel Saloon Gallery, and Short, Fast, and Deadly, among other places. An ekphrastic chap is also in the works. He’ll transmute you at: http://andrewjstone.blogspot.com/

He had a handlebar mustache, but he took himself very seriously. It was in fact, perhaps, because of the mustache that he cut such a grave figure. Of average height and solid build with healthy orange coloring, his face was surprisingly gaunt, pale skin stretched taut over jutting cheekbones and skittering blue veins. On this hungry, brittle face, over the thin, cracked callous of a mouth, brushing the pulsing blue cheek hollows, spanned the most lush mustache, potentially, known to man. Two rich deep dark sloping points, arched dexterously to the nostrils, sweeping grandly back to the twitching mouth corners then up and out into ear-skimming, playful curls. Uniform color throughout, though he was nearing forty and his lineage predicted early-onset graying, and glossy as a magazine cover, the mustache hair was of quality only conjured in the daydreams of beauty school hopefuls.

Although he was not prone to appearance attentiveness, he recognized his extreme good fortune and exercised rigorous maintenance with regard to his extraordinary facial hair. Each morning, with solemnity to the very sleep crust in his eye, he balanced his tools on the sink ledge. With sterilized hands, he massaged in the volumizing shampoo followed by the corresponding conditioner, a delicate towel-pat, the remainder left to air dry as he slipped into his pin-stripped button down and pleated black slacks. Finally, the grand finale, a thumb and forefinger dipped and dainty into the wax, the deft tracing of the faintly-strawberry-smelling whiskers until they smoothed into those rich deep dark slopes at impossible angles.

The mustache was complete, and it was glorious.

He didn’t know who he was before the mustache. It wasn’t so much that he defined himself by the mustache. It was that the mustache was so much more than he would ever be. True, he was responsible for the survival of the mustache, but the mustache had, undeniably, a life of its own. A parasitic relationship. Once he began growing the mustache, his face shrank and drained to accommodate, to nourish, to act as not only a weathered canvas on which the mustache looked particularly stunning, but to act, in addition, a mobile, animated method of display.

Yet was it really parasitic?

He didn’t mind tending to the mustache, coaxing and gentle like a new mother, and he was just as reverent towards it as everyone else; it was impossible not to be.

Some women do not like, or claim not to like, mustaches– do not like the look or feel as they kiss their significant others and snag on, say, a well-waxed coil. But no woman could resist this mustache; thus, no woman could resist him, as it was– is– inappropriate to be infatuated with facial hair alone. He didn’t mind being second to the mustache; after all, he felt at least partially responsible for its profound success. As a result of the gracious recognition of his inferiority to the mustache, he met many agreeable women who often offered– insisted– on grooming the mustache for him.

So maybe it was symbiotic. He didn’t need tan fleshy face skin so long as he had the mustache, had all the ladies wrapping it around their little fingers. He was not a proud man, and, again, was not so offended to blanch in comparison to the mustache. He reasoned most people would. He took what the mustache provided and provided for it in return, like a crippled old man with only his pet dog keeping him alive. But he was barely alive. Quite literally; the mustache was sucking the very life from his body. It was plumper longer curvier, more bodacious than ever, and his neck was whitening fast.

He was left in an interesting predicament. He was an observant man, and as he stood at the mirror, clamping his chin in one hand, prying at his withering neck with the other, he pondered his ultimatum. “Either the mustache goes, or I go,” he said, to himself, in a marked Texan drawl, real.

Either way, he was going. But which death was preferable?

His innate human drive for survival of course urged him to kill the stache. But his learned, maybe, human drive for pleasure urged him to, in essence, kill himself. But the mustache was a quintessential part of his self, if not an entity greater than himself. Possibly the latter, probably. There he stood, with a razor, electric, in one hand, the other empty and not meaty orange for long, considering the value of life, what constitutes life, the point at which–if at all– primitive instinct overrides reason, morality, stooped over his perpetually dribbling sink with the rusting valves. Heavy, heavy Tuesday night.

Delaney Rebernik is an English major at Northeastern University.

Her father’s trumpet sat in its case for several years. A glittering icon of her youth, the silver and pearl keys less important in memory than the sound. What sound: the brassy, rumbling roll of arrogance and self-importance was scared, the pinnacle of religion. The warming up—that incandescent A—still was like prayer.

Last week, she heard the noise fluttering down the street, brass notes flapping wildly, a crow in downtown Manhattan. It was that same A, that growing caw of resonance. Mid-chop, she threw her head out the kitchen window, the smell of the café escaping with her. Her eyes scanned madly for the father of her childhood, but found only taxis, a thick yellow line like a highway on a map. There was no jazz man.

That night, she called her dad. They hadn’t talked for months, a relationship befuddled with grief for their mother-wife and one-way phone tag. When he answered, she knew he was preparing for emergency.

“No,” she sighed. “Just checking in.” After a long pause, “I heard a trumpet playing on the street today and thought of you.”

“Oh.” He was quiet. He never knew what to do with her bursts of affection; prom photos punctuated the living room piano at home, struck with a Bible distance between father and daughter. “I started playing again.”

“Not at the corner of Broadway and fifth, by chance?” She tried, but his laughter was delayed, the space filled by the broken hum of a couple arguing downstairs.

“No. At church.”

“Oh? What do you play?”

“Well, I played taps for the 9/11 service recently.”

“Ah! Cool. Good for you, Dad.”

“Thanks.” Then, “I enjoy it.”

It’s quiet again. The phone crackles. Her apartment heater clicks in its metallic belly; the dishwasher fills. Outside, New York City buzzes and spirals like a ballad. She remembers how she propelled from the kitchen window, foie gras simmering voraciously behind her, how she had searched for the instrument that stole her father’s joy.

“I’d like to hear that,” she found herself muttering absently, raking a hand through pick-up-sticks hair. In sepia-shadowed memory, she remembered him saying once that her mother had been the one in charge of lullabies.

“I could…” he muttered, and he disappeared into the shuffling and fluttering of papers; noises she could only assume was sheet music kissing the stained, lilac carpet of his study, converted from her room after she’d moved to NYU and stayed through Christmas her freshman year. “Could play for you on speakerphone.”

“Okay.” She scarcely breathed.

Her father, she could imagine, struggled with the antiquated landline, glowing green buttons remembered from teenage years of whispered telephone calls to boys at two AM. It wasn’t much later that she heard the cushioned keys clicking and raising scales, and then, finally, that beautiful A. She put her own phone, a streamlined mess of touch screens and sleek logos, on speaker and let the warm, baptizing sound lap at her feet, flood the apartment and leak, drip, flow over the window sill, the New York skyline, stringing together the high rise buildings.

Stephanie Renae Johnson is a recent graduate of Flagler College and now works as a production artist at Xulon Press. Previously, Stephanie worked as an editor assistant for Jason Cook at Ampersand Books. Stephanie’s work has been published by poeticdiversity, danse macabre, writing raw, opiumpoetry, Orlando Sentinel Online, and The Flagler Review.

“Do it here,” Haimon said, waving at a spongy patch of moorland. His assistants established and prepped the core sampler on the flattened part of the hill. Once the core was taken and transported back to the science academy, they would be able to study the soil layers in microscopic detail. They hoped to discover why the planet’s biosphere had collapsed, taking major forms of life with it. All that was left on Riseden were blooms of phytoplankton in the chilly seas, a massive bone here and there, and damp, low-lying club mosses and weeds. Haimon’s boots sank partway into the muck.

Specifically, they were looking for signs that some animals, or at least their eggs, had gone into diapause or some other form of dormancy when things went south (but why?). They also needed to find some means of helping the planet recover at least part of its ravaged diversity, or they risked revocation of grant funds and public outcry from an already indignant, poverty-stricken populace. At least, out here, he was safe from them and could work in peace for what little time they had left to prove the usefulness of their research.

He nodded to the assistant manning the core sampler. But rather than meeting the expected resistance of rock, the mouth of the sampler sank too easily into the ground, causing the assistant to slip and yelp in surprise. Haimon flinched as warm liquid sprayed across his face from the wounded earth. As he wiped the crimson streaks out of his eyes, the ground rumbled, then shifted–tearing the scrubland like ripping cloth. A long, angry moaning echoed through the empty air, joined by the screams of his team as they were swallowed by collapsing soil and rock.

Haimon’s last thought was: The hills are alive, but not with the sound of music.

Charlotte was born and raised in Alaska. She moved to Philadelphia to finish a BA in English and an MS in Library and Information Science at Drexel University. In her spare time, she is a chaotic gardener and struggling fisherman. Her work has appeared (or will appear) in “Danse Macabre,” “Flashshot,” “Subtle Fiction,” “The Criterion,” and “365tomorrows.”

A statue of three turtles caught the attention of a boy as he walked through the park with his mom. They were made of brass and set on the ground, and the boy was proud to find that he was bigger than the turtles.

“Do you know what animals these are?” asked mom.

“Turtles,” said the boy.

“Very good. And which is the biggest turtle?”

“This one.” The boy touched the leftmost turtle. It was hot from the sun.

“And the smallest?” asked mom.

The boy pointed to the center turtle.

“And the medium-sized turtle? The medium-sized one?”

“This one,” said the boy while lightly kicking the rightmost statue. “Daddy turtle, mommy turtle, and baby turtle. That’s me! Ira the Turtle!” Ira the Turtle smiled.

“And which is the happiest turtle, Ira?”

“That one.”

“The biggest turtle? Are you sure?”

“Um, this one?” Ira pointed to baby turtle.

“Ok. Now the saddest turtle.”

Ira tried the biggest turtle again.

“No. The saddest turtle, Ira.”

Ira considered the turtles. Faint shimmers of heat rose from their backs.

“They’re really hot, Mommy. Feel them. They need shade.” He opened his t-shirt and held it over the sculpture.

“Ira.”

“Feel them, mommy.”

“Ira. The saddest turtle, please. Ok, fine. The selfish turtle. Do you see the selfish turtle?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like turtles.” Ira spun in place on his right heel.

“We’re going to have to start over, Ira. Now, which one is the biggest turtle?”

A statue of a bear watched mother and son from across the park. Its mouth was open slightly, which interested Ira, and it stood on a marble pedestal, taller than he was.

“Mommy, look, a bear!” he said. “I want to ride him, I want to ride him!”

Mom followed Ira, who was making little growls in his throat, to the bear, and placed him on its back. But once up there, Ira began to panic.

“You want down?”

“Yes!”

“What’s the matter?” asked mom, putting her son back on the ground.

“It’s the bear,” said Ira. “He doesn’t like you, mommy.” And he ran away.

Maxime D. McKenna lives in Philadelphia and writes fiction, among other things. He works at the Kelly Writers House, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.

A cramped adobe huddles in the desert on the bright road to flagstaff. A splintered sign on its front calls it The Native American Emporium. The two halves of its tile roof tilt against each other, sagging at the apex as if the whole building had previously swelled with a tremendous breath, but has now collapsed into a sigh, accepting the sun. Inside, the shag carpet stinks of sage. Here, Chris and his father rest from the heat of their southwestern road-trip. “Don’t touch anything,” his father says. “We can’t afford it.” Chris nods. He is too thin for his skin.

Chris hides from his father among the plywood shelves, ducking under dream catchers, bumping his head into tortoise-shell rattles. There, on a red cabinet, black, primitive and vital, a kachina doll dances in ritual stillness, still as dust. It stomps behind stone fetishes and black and white pictures of Indians in headdresses. Its knee juts, its foot dangles, and its chin bends in a dark nod, yellow mask twisted to the right. Chris gazes at its Stomp Dance, blood rushing to his fingertips. The yellow mask bites his eyes the same way the sage bites his nose, and he wants it removed, to see what is there behind it, and its black whittled teeth are not enough to discourage him. Standing on tiptoe, he steals the kachina under his shirt, then crouches in the dark crevice between the cabinet and the wall.

In the private shadow there, he turns the kachina in his hands, exploring its alien weight, its unexpected heat, holds it up, its feet to his nose, squinting under the mask trying to see, but he can make out no features of its face in the dark. So he cradles the kachina in his lap. Stretching his legs across the carpet, he runs his hand over the feathers fanning from its mask; he slides his thumbs across its eye slits, its yellow cheeks; he pauses on its chin. Trembling. He presses down hard on the edge of the mask and pops it off to the floor. Beneath, he sees nothing. Only the smooth curve of dark wood.

His father discovers him lounging against the cabinet, breathing as if exhausted, his chin jutting, head dangling, eyelids bending low over his pupils, the sunlight painting yellow on his cheeks, his fingers curling deep into the carpet, tips finding the root of the shag, and his thumb stroking the wood, empty of a face.

“Put it back quickly, before the shopkeeper sees.”

Isaac Weil is confused. He doesn’t know his place, and writes to find it. He is also a student at Fresno City College. For the last three years he attended the CSU Summer Arts Creative Writing programs, a source of infinite joy (thank you Doug and all the rest), though only for a month each year. He plays piano and plans on attending UC Berkeley in the fall of 2012.

They left the bar laughing, her leaning on his shoulder, him leaning on hers while making it seem the other way around. Neither paid attention to where they were walking, and so when they hit the gravel parking lot and tripped into a pothole, they both fell unsuspectingly, mouths dropping in surprise, eyes shifting out of focus in an effort to fight intoxication and the shift in gravity.

They landed on their knees in a thick liquid. His hands fell into it; she managed to keep all but her fingertips free, but whereas his legs were covered by denim, hers were left bare by her skirt. After regaining his composure the best he could, he pulled his hands out and looked at them. The liquid, deep red in the dim glow from the street lamps, clung to his fingers. He could feel it slowly trickling down his arms, softly burning against his palms. She could feel the same, except on her legs, creeping not downward but up, warm and tingling and almost as painful as it was pleasurable.

It was cool out, but the liquid was as warm as blood. That wasn’t what it was, though. He said, “What is it?”

“It’s love,” she said. Her hesitation was due only to the alcohol, and the stirring sensation as the liquid hit her waist and went higher. She eyed her fingers, and put them in her mouth one at a time, sucking them clean.

“Love,” he said. He wanted to wipe his brow; he wanted to wipe the hair away from her eyes. But the liquid was all over him. He said, “How do you know?”

“Women know these things,” she said. She smiled shyly as it reached her breasts.

He felt it constricting his chest, and he gave in and stopped fighting. It was gone from his hands now, seeped into the skin he supposed. He could feel the warmth within him, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It was something new, that was all. Something foreign. It was too soon to know if he liked it.

She had felt it before, but this was different in that way you can’t really explain but just know. As he stood, then helped her to her feet, she couldn’t decide if she liked this difference more than the last time, which had been different from the time before that, too. The last pothole hadn’t been as deep, the fall hadn’t scratched her knees as much. The time before that had been a canyon, though. You don’t always recover from that.

His hands free, he brushed her bangs away from her eyes, then kissed her. He tasted it in her mouth, she in his. They tasted it in each other until a horn honked and they had to move. They went back to his place. The feeling lessened a little. Whether it would be there in the morning, he couldn’t say. She was sure it would be, was counting on it; he was wondering if it wasn’t the whiskey after all. All things considered, he would prefer the whiskey. Cheaper, and he could put the bottle on top of his kitchen cabinet as a souvenir.

Daniel Davis was born and raised in Central Illinois. His work has appeared in “Bluestem Magazine,” “Bartleby Snopes,” “Necessary Fiction,” and elsewhere. You can find him at www.dumpsterchickenmusic.blogspot.com.

In the beginning it was empty spaces, cold concrete and spiders that nestled in my corners. Then came the stuff, boxes and trash bags, dented folding chairs and empty tiki torches from the first party you held in the backyard, then the plastic margarita glasses, still sticky. A smiling ghost, dirty from outside, and the fake fall flowers in rustic vases. Glitter and glass, a tree in a box, little orbs wrapped carefully and arranged into shoeboxes, then colorful baskets with plastic eggs. The crib, toys, toys and more toys, little blue onesies that no longer fit. I remembered all the things you forgot.

Then came the fun. The sheetrock and carpet, the whistling and hammering, the recessed lighting and drop ceiling. There was noise and excitement, a television that kept the silence away, a couch for cuddling and popcorn. There were games and laughter, toys got bigger and more exciting until they too got pushed into my closets and dark spaces where I watched over them.

I saw new people, I saw old people, I saw slumber parties, then secret parties, then wild parties that made holes in my walls and spilled beer on my floors. I heard him with her when they were alone, hushed whispers in the dark, saw soft kisses that became something more, but you never knew. I giggled on the inside.

Then, one day, there were tears. He spoke gently and held her hand, spoke about car trips and long distance and everything being okay. I felt sad and pretended he was talking to me. I watched as you started bringing everything out, scattered memories on my floor that got put into big cardboard boxes or simply thrown away. All those things that I held onto for you, kept safe, years and years, now gone. I felt so empty. Soon the couch was gone too, the TV, the laughter, the warmth.

And I was alone in the dark.

Amanda Himmelmann is a Senior Creative Writing Major at the State University of New York at Geneseo.

You enter the kitchen through the patio door, in a dark blue bikini, hair wet, towel covering a pregnancy just beginning to show, and there he stands, at the far side of the room, up against the cabinets, your murderer, in sandals, khaki shorts and light blue golf shirt, video camera in hand, filming you becoming suddenly aware of his presence and saying Jesus!, putting your hand on your chest, laughing and covering your face.

Come on, don’t be shy, you’re a sexy mother now, your murderer says behind the camera.

You wave him off. You walk to the refrigerator, wet flip-flops squeaking, and open the door, pull out a bowl of fruit, carton of juice, which you tuck under your arm, and slide the ice-tray from the freezer.

What, we don’t get to see the belly? your murderer says. Come on.

Uh, you should be making your pregnant wife the shake she likes, you say, walking to the center island, to the blender, without looking up. Ignoring your murderer and obviously holding in a smile, you put the fruit, juice and ice in the blender as your murderer sings, Kay-cee, Kay-cee Bay-bee. You shake your head and start the blender.

Uh, hey, Kay-cee? Tell everyone how your back feels, your murderer says.

You stop the blender and look up.

Got her attention! he says, and you finally crack, you smile, and as you pour slush into a cup your murderer says, You gotta say something, come on. You gotta say hello at least.

Blurry figures moving in the swimming pool somewhere in the background, you wave both hands, smiling wide now, and say Hello! to the camera. You step back from the island and open the towel to show your belly, spin around, playfully moving your hips, your ass, you blow your murderer a kiss, leaning toward him—Marilyn Monroe! he says—and then cover your belly, pick up your drink and say, Now turn that thing off, and he does, and you’re gone.

Michael McCloskey recently graduated with a BA in English-Literature from Monmouth University in central New Jersey, where he grew up and still lives today. Currently he is working in a local family business as he considers applying to graduate school.