Paige trained for months. She wore out several pairs of jogging shoes in a bootcamp of her own design. Her skin bronzed, then burned in the hot spring sun. The songs she chose invigorated her for weeks, then grew redundant and boring. She picked new songs, and then new ones again. Eventually, she learned to listen to the wind.

She stretched, and hydrated, and ran, and stretched, and hydrated. Then, she’d await a new day. A new day, to run again. A vast field of wildflowers lay waiting for her. She needed only to run nine miles along the unimproved bank of a bayou, and the field would be hers. Hers to see, hers to run through. Hers alone, until she left.

She couldn’t see her success on the horizon at first, but it came into view with each passing day. Her body learned to take more oxygen from each breath, and how to store more water in her cells, so she didn’t have to carry it on her back.

Each day she ran a little further, testing the limits. She’d run so far that she wasn’t sure she could make it back. Then, she’d fight against her fatigue and her fear until she arrived back on her doorstep, promising to see the wildflowers on a different day.

The morning of her triumph didn’t feel different than any other morning. She still had so much more training to do before she could even imagine the eighteen mile round trip. But, she hydrated. And she stretched. And she started to run. From her front door, she passed tidy little rows of houses with manicured lawns that were all so close to each other. Then, the houses grew further apart. When she got to the bayou, there were only a few homes in sight, and their vast yards were wild. Some were cluttered with junk, others populated by lush, tropical trees. Some trees bore fruit. Papayas, figs, and others that thrived in the warm, humid climate.

Soon, there were no houses at all. Just tall grass, and a still bayou. Occasional birds, and jumping fish. A turtle sunned itself, but fled from Paige’s thumping footsteps. Her legs grew tired. Water fell away through her skin. The sun rose higher in the sky, and threatened to sear her flesh. She knew that she would need to turn back soon, if she hoped to get safely back home. But, onward, she ran. Further from safety, further from neighbors and papayas. Her legs shrieked with aches. Her heart thumped protests beneath her breast. Her brain sounded an alarm from thirst, yet Paige kept running.

She began to doubt. Panic welled within her as the thought crossed her mind that this may be her last run. She bargained with herself, then pleaded. Spring will last a few more weeks. There’s no reason you need to finish today. Go back home. Hydrate, and stretch. Tomorrow’s a new day, and we’ll go further still. We’ll see the flowers before the summer sun scorches them. We’ll see the flowers.

Paige’s spine bent with exhaustion, and she forced herself to straighten her posture. In the distance, she could see a haze on the ground that looked different than the tall grasses she ran through. It must be the flowers. She silenced her inner protests, and her legs simply ran, and her heart just beat, and her brain only processed the ever approaching field. Each part of her body knew that it must help Paige get there, if there was any hope at all of her getting back. Under the forced march, she became an efficient machine.

An occasional wildflower appeared as she trekked. Small patches of leggy, struggling flowers became larger patches of stronger flowers until suddenly she was in the midst of an infinite expanse of yellow and orange and blue all growing together in a kaleidoscopic symphony of God and Nature and Paige. She ran deeper into the field, and was overcome with oneness. Euphoria gripped her and swallowed her whole and she was no different than the flowers or than the air. The field and the universe and the body were all one. They were all hers, and she was all theirs.

Paige slowed from a jog, to a walk. Then, she stood still. In a fleeting moment of self-awareness, she looked around, to see if she was alone. Then, she pulled off all of her clothes, and laid them neatly together. She walked deeper into the field, and lay down.

The clouds overhead formed a tapestry of cotton, and Paige reached her hands to the sky and pulled down a blanket, and wrapped herself in it. She lay naked in a field, bundled in the clouds, and breathed in the world around her.

A bee scavenged for nectar in a flower near her head, and then searched a different flower, bringing with it just a few green specks of pollen on its fuzzy little body. Then, the bee moved on to yet another flower. A bird emitted a single chirp, crying out to itself or another. A steady wind gusted across the field, and the flowers pressed against Paige’s body, then the wind changed directions and they pressed against her body again.

Paige felt that she might have run too far. She might not be able to get back home. She wasn’t even sure she’d be able to get back up in the first place, or even try. But, why would she want to? The field is hers until she leaves.

She saw no reason to go.

Maxwell Porter is an author who lives in New Orleans. He and his wife are on a constant mission to find natural beauty together, and to support each each other in their spiritual fulfillment. They often sit together, with her painting a picture of trees or flowers, and him writing stories of them.

We counted days by the automatic porch light outside our apartment. Sensor activated, the bulb flashed on once the sun vacated the sky. Our living room was awash in the artificial glow coming through the plastic slats of our cheap blinds. Some days, we sat with baited breath, looking on as the other lights in the complex clicked on, one by one. The light was the only event we could wait on with certainty. It was a small joy; all other aspects of life had reached a standstill. Some days, we were caught off guard by the light, and we deflated, knowing that another day had slipped past us unnoticed. Eventually, we gave up counting days and just let the light delineate day from night.

Nights passed in tosses and turns, fitful snatches of disturbed sleep. The light radiated so brightly that the blinds glowed as if it were always dawn. I slept and woke in limbo. Neither my roommate nor I owned curtains; they had never made it into the budget. I once tried to hang a blanket over the window with thumb tacks, but it was so thin that light streamed through just the same.

The light was supposed safety. Cost-effective and eco-efficient assurance that cut through the Appalachian nights. But all we ever got were spiders scrawling moth-catching designs and a number of burglaries that never got investigated. Our downstairs neighbor had her car broken into for a half-empty carton of cigarettes. Some others got broken into for spare change.

The long-limbed leasing agent said it is for our own good that the lights stayed on, but it was just policy made by the landlords who lived in a different state. They got to pretend to be protectors while threatening tenants with fines should anything happen to the lights. It was their assurance, not ours. They’d fine anyone who added an extra lock to their door either.

Sometimes we liked to watch things with wings dance in the glow after dark. Humming softly until caught in the well-placed webs. The spiders oblige in the free meal, having made such a fortunate home in the harsh glow. It is all we can do hurry outside and untangle brittle wings from sticky silk, to hope they fly far, far from here. But how foolish it would be to expect them to evade for long. There had been a time when we were entranced by their shining certainty too.

Jade Braden is an author and artist, based in Ohio. She is currently working on her undergraduate creative writing thesis at Ohio University and often explores gothic, religious, feminist, and queer themes in her writing.

In Sears one Saturday afternoon, I took a second glance until certain of it and then my sternum collapsed and I blew out a mournful sigh. I was gawking at the rock star Meatloaf in jeans and a denim shirt, his hair still long but graying. Alone at a mall in the allegedly modest burb I called home, the original Bat Out of Hell sat and looked nervous on a green John Deere riding mower. A young salesman was assuring him he could drive and control it with ease. I doubted the salesman knew who this customer was.

Soft forms of misery aroused heartburn that bubbled into my throat as I remembered the cruises and make-out sessions I’d enjoyed while the hit song “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” played on a cassette in my car. I remembered midnight showings I’d attended while drunk and in costume with my friends, shouting “Not meatloaf again” whenever he appeared on screen as Eddie in Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Now this titan of operatic teen angst and a monument within the landscape of my personal iconography was sitting on his rather sizeable rump and testing a machine that would cut the grass around his estate home. Didn’t he have dozens of minions to run such prosaic errands for him? I’m sure he did, but this was what I liked about him. In spite of his fame, he was still a regular guy.

It wasn’t the mighty who had fallen. It was I, just another faceless middle-aged white dude out shopping with his kids. Having melted on the spot, feeling battered and flabby, I went after my three boys, each of them with their little gadgets and little fingers pushing little buttons. I moved them out of hardware toward shoe racks where it was easier for me to forget memories of nights on dirt roads when a new album-rock ballad on the radio kept my fervidly carnal predilections charged and actualized.

How had I grown so old? Was it as simple as time passing? Apparently so.

What to tell my boys? I decided to keep quiet. They linked meatloaf to ketchup, not high school sex, and their Mom cooked it for them usually once a week.

They didn’t link cars or Daddy to rapturous acts of connubial bliss, conception, and excessively strident pop music. Nor did they view time as a thief who sneaks into your deranged idealism and shows you how much a faded picture in a wobbly frame a whole chapter in your life has become.

I had to figure this one out on my own, and boy did it feel lonely. I tried not to stare over my shoulder, but I did so just the same. He was still there. I felt relieved that I was too far away to see him well. I thought about my wife who was in another part of the mall getting her hair done. I would be merciful and not tell her. She no longer looked like the girl I’d mounted in that Dodge late one night on a deserted farm road, Meatloaf crooning at full volume, “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad.”

She disliked feeling her age even more than I did.

A message in this had been aimed at me. I had to embrace it, to consider my marriage, career, my boys and how far I’d come – not how far back I went.

Did my sons realize I adored them? It remained hard to say. It was a constant process, wasn’t it? It would never end, not until I was one with the very nocturnal creatures that Meatloaf’s tunes had once stirred out of my imagination.

I stood there dazed. I watched as Meatloaf nodded, getting his questions answered, which were no doubt about cost and maintenance and how long such a machine could be expected to last.

One of my sons leaned against my legs and whined that he was bored. The other groaned saying he had to pee. The third started nagging me to buy him expensive sneakers.

I brought them together and led them out of that Sears, saying it was time to head back to see Mom in her new hairdo. I was a lucky man. I had everything I’d ever wanted.

John Michael Flynn was the 2017 Writer in Residence at Carl Sandburg’s home, Connemara, in North Carolina. He’s published three collections of short stories, his most recent Off To The Next Wherever from Fomite Books (www.fomitepress.com). He teaches at TED University in Ankara, Turkey. Visit him at www.basilrosa.com.

Who was going to pick up the dead mouse drowned in a paint bucket left upright by mistake full of rainwater and catkins was always clear.

Though my mother pretended it was a familiar task that I should not shy from, being eighteen, I could see her eyes fidgeting, glancing, which meant the retrieving of the mouse was no small thing. So I pinched the tail with thumb and two fingers and like a sunken ship raised by a winch, brought it up slowly into the air without a wriggle, spasm or twitch.

My mother looked away to the west as if drawn by some important bird but the trees were empty, her jaw set in a clench that would have broken branches, hands trembling from the daily grief, darkness and depression that surrounded her.

She hoped that the mouse didn’t have young that would be lost, she said, but I had become old enough to know that she was no longer speaking about a mouse.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and a July abundance of plums. He grew up in Wisconsin, Texas, and Nebraska, and found a home in California, the the Midwestern landscape still populates his vision.

She was known throughout the industry for translating renowned books from the Spanish language, but few knew of her failed attempts at getting her slim English-language novel published in America. 

Publishers regarded the length as too short and the plot as too whimsical. And there was no point in getting started on the magical realism that seemed to leap from every other page.

So the translator decided to slap a pseudonym on her miniature manuscript and developed a story that it was an unearthed, previously unpublished work by a Borges protégé, whereupon she easily sold it in under a month.

Ran Walker is a husband and father who loves to write. Formerly an attorney, he is now a writer and creative writing professor. He is glad that his six-year-old daughter knows him for his work in the latter area rather than the former.