Suzanne Verrall lives in Adelaide, Australia. Her flash fiction, essays and poetry appear in Atlas and Alice, Monkeybicycle, Archer Magazine, Lip Magazine, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Australian Poetry Journal, and others.      www.suzanneverrall.com

Ogre

The ogre lived in the dense damp core of the forest. His treasures – the sheep with their self-spinning fleeces, the unsnuffling pigs – were born and grew and died as they had for all memory. Only the ogre had no beginning or end.

A silver-skinned princess stumbled into the forest. She wore a look of terror as if having woken to find herself blind.

The ogre smelt her. He lumbered through the forest, crushing wildflowers in his haste to glimpse her amongst the green-black shadows.

Day and night he watched her scavenging for berries, sipping dew from bladed grass. He fell in love. She became more beautiful and his love grew until it reached the last unvisited corner of his mighty ogre heart.

At which time he took the princess in his trunk-like arms and squeezed every last drop of life from her.

It was what was expected of him.

R. J. Keeler was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lived in jungles of Colombia, S.A., up to age twelve. BS Mathematics NCSU, MS Computer Science UNC, MBA UCLA, Certificate in Poetry UW. Honorman, U.S. Naval Submarine School. “SS” (Submarine Service) qualified. Vietnam Service Medal. Honorable Discharge. Whiting Foundation Experimental Grant. P&W’s Directory of Poets and Writers. Member IEEE, AAAS, AAP. The Boeing Company. His collection “Detonation” will be published in December.

The high moral tone that he used in the bequest speech was judged to be insincere and moreover was received by all the audience consisting of family and attorneys and friends as borderline insubordination but regardless of the tone we all had to agree with each other that it was delivered the language not the tone with exquisite precision and correctness in addition the grammar was absolutely flawless to the point where during the speech there were at least three phrases that stopped my attention cold and for them I had to focus and quickly in the moment form a mental image of the sentence in question and ask is that correct wow I must have been using that word incorrectly all these years furthermore the content to my ears and listening mind sounded expertly well-crafted and even a bit rhetorical one got the sense that the speaker had labored over the speech well into the night before he gave it and had gone over it in the privacy of his study again and again asking himself what do I want the audience to conclude from this speech and how therefore do I guide them invisibly to that desired conclusion at the end of this bequest speech or maybe an hour afterwards after the show of hands and the signing of documents I began to realize that the whole affair was so very well-scripted and designed as to be underhanded and to manipulate us all into innocent little lambs acceding to the agendas of the speaker but by then it was too late.

Nicole Efford is a senior at the College of William and Mary, majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing.

Absolution in Her Red Eyes

Mara helps her mother out of the pew, hoping nobody will notice them slipping out before the end of service. She’d realized her mom was high when she came back from the bathroom, ten minutes into service, with eyes red and half-closed.

“Hope, hi. How are you?” Todd Baker whispers, blocking the door. His hair is pomaded high on his head—reaching for Jesus, Mara thinks.

She smiles innocently and says, “My mom’s not feeling too well right now. I should be getting her home.”

Todd’s eyes linger on Hope’s arm, and then meet her eyes. She stares back at him, unblinking, then drawls, “You are a sinner.”

He chuckles and shakes his head, “Well, we all are. But Jesus absolved us, Hope, you know that.”

“Mom, c’mon.” Mara says as she tugs on her mother’s arm.

“That’s probably a good idea, Mara. Do you need any help getting her to the car?”

Hope watches the man grow a red tail, then jabs her finger into Todd’s face and shouts, “Get away from my daughter!”

“Mom, stop!” Mara grabs Hope’s hand and pushes past the exit. “She’s really not feeling herself!” she calls over her shoulder, rushing toward the parking lot.

Mara gets in their car but Hope does not.

There is a demon in her car—Hope knows it. God has visited her and He has given her the power to detect evil. Hope stares as the demon in the driver’s seat grows two red horns. It is talking to her but she cannot understand; she has too much Heaven within her to speak to children of Hell. She shakes her head at the demon, “I will not go with you.”

Mara stares at her mother in disbelief. “You need to come with me. How else are you going to get home?” She lowers her voice so nobody around the church will hear, “You can’t go walking the streets doped up, mom. Get in the car.”

Mara’s words get through to her mother, and Hope recognizes that the demon in her car is her daughter. The demon pleads again, “Please, mom, let me just take you home and get you to bed.”

“You are not my child anymore,” Hope spits. She gets on her knees and pulls the cross up from around her neck to ward away the demon. “You, child of the Devil—with the power of God the Almighty, I banish you back to Hell!”

Mara glares at her mother, and then notices the silence surrounding them. She looks in the rearview mirror: Service has ended and people from church are staring. “I’m sorry, mom,” Mara says. She backs out of the spot, slowly, so that she doesn’t hit her. She puts the car in drive, and leaves her mother in the parking lot.

Hope gets off her knees and tucks her necklace back under her cardigan. The Devil has gone. She has saved her church. She smiles, sits back on the parking lot ground, and smiles up at the sky.

Niles Reddick is author of the novel Pulitzer nominated Drifting too far from the Shore, a collection Road Kill Art and Other Oddities, and a novella Lead Me Home. His work has been featured in eleven anthologies/collections and in over a hundred and fifty literary magazines all over the world including PIF, Drunk Monkeys, Spelk, Cheap Pop, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Slice of Life, Faircloth Review, With Painted Words, among many others. His new collection Reading the Coffee Grounds was just released. His website is www.nilesreddick.com

Silent Crushes

The teenage girls decided to end their semester at school with a spend-the-night party. They ordered pizza, made sugar cookies, drank hot chocolate, and decided to watch Hallmark movies. Mostly, they talked about boys who they thought the teachers liked better and who mostly ignored them and preferred sports, hunting, or video games.

The parents who allowed them to flop at their house in pajamas too short for anyone never heard the kitchen door shut or the teens pile in two cars parked by the street and leave the subdivision to head directly into another subdivision. The parents had nodded in recliners, exasperated from repetitive, negative news. The girls parked by the curb of a house whose owners they didn’t know, made sure the lights were out at Nicholas’ family’s house next door, grabbed rolls of toilet paper, and draped the pin oaks in front, the holly that flanked the corner of the house, and the azaleas in the landscaping. Some of them giggled while others shushed them.

            Like adult burglars, they piled into the same vehicles and drove to the next house of a boy they all liked, but who also ignored them, and repeated the toilet paper escapade. They papered a third yard before calling it a night.  The three targets–Nicholas, Martin, and Clay—never had a clue anything was happening outside their windows. They wore headphones and were yelling at their friends who were all played a game on the X-box.

            It wasn’t until dawn that any of the boys’ parents realized their yards were draped in toilet paper. The drizzle started about three in the morning and made for quite a mess when neighbors, out for an early stroll with dogs, saw, shook their heads, and were thankful it wasn’t them who had to clean it up.

            Annoyed more than angry, the parents woke and told their boys what their friends had done, but they had no idea it was sweet girls from their class who had silent crushes on the boys.  Some of the mothers, though, knew what their daughters had done. They had the Life 360 app on their phones and tracked the whereabouts of their daughters. Two of the mothers noted where they had been at ten at night and confronted them.

            “We were watching Hallmark movies, drinking hot chocolate, and eating sugar cookies,” one daughter lied to her parents. She lost her phone and car keys for a week. The other daughter confessed what the friends had done, but the parents told her to avoid that sort of thing in the future, that it was illegal, that if they were caught, it could affect their college admissions.  Plus, the parents had done it themselves in a time when the only app was nosey neighbors who called parents to tell.