| Idea #1 | “Pssst…Bill … Hey, Bill, wake up. You’ve been sleeping for two full hours and now you need to wake up and talk to me. I can’t take this silence anymore,” whispered Mitzi. | © W.A. Fix |
| Idea #2 | “We’re going on a field trip,” our teacher told us just before classes should have started. His announcement would lead to quite an adventure before that day was over. | © James Osborne |
| Idea #3 | Cheese and crackers for lunch. | © James Royce McGuire |
| Idea #4 | Nothing special ever happened to Alina. She was born to two good, stolid parents who dressed in dark browns and grays and spoke under the volume of the radio that played instrumental music, not songs with words. | © Tara L. Masih |
| Idea #5 | It had to happen. Eventually, it had to happen. You knew it, and I knew it, and last week it finally did. You made it seem so easy, so flawless, so… perfect. I do hope it was easier for you than it’s being for me. You were always so scared of that moment, but when it finally came you performed as if you had been rehearsing for it your entire life, behind everyone’s back. But I know it was as unexpected for you as it could have been for anyone else. I know because I could see the turbulence in your eyes when you knew it was going to happen |
| Idea #6 | I could see it as clearly as the fog that used to escape your mouth when you sang to me in the cold. It sometimes seemed as if it were your soul, which you were singing out. But it was just water vapor, and the turbulence in your eyes was nothing more than tears pouring out. I tried to dry them, but they only kept coming back. So eventually I just held you in my arms and wished that you would give me some of your grief |
| Idea #7 | that we could maybe split up the sorrow so that you wouldn’t have to deal with all of it, because like the groceries that you brought home everyday and the way that you so incessantly insisted in carrying all the bags at the same time, it was too much. And when you looked into my eyes and said thank you, a brief moment of happiness came over me like a lonely patch of blue in a cloudy sky, because I knew that was your way of letting me know that I had helped, with some of it, at least. Still, the tears kept pouring out. | © Luis Ham |
| Idea #8 | It isn’t how I remembered it. | © Brian Dodge |
| Idea #9 | Below sooty chimneys and starling flocks, an old man lived in a tumbledown house. Every morning, he swept the night off the city. While all the servants and nobles still slumbered, he gathered his rickety broom and trudged through the dark winds. He swept darkness and moon glow from the pathways. He brushed gloom and star seep from the gardens. He tramped past the mansions and towers, under the bridges and steeples. Night shriveled and vanished where he swept. Just as the city folk woke to daylight, he propped the broom against his wall and stumbled to bed. | © Rebecca Harrison |
| Idea #10 | My eyes scanned over the time again and again. Boarding was at 7:30. The flight was leaving 7:50. It was 8:04 and reality struck that I missed both. My eyes scanned the night sky as the planes took off, wondering which one I was supposed to be on. My fingers were shaking as I struck the red tip against the metallic strip on the box. I lit my last cigarette and inhaled deeply, and tossed the still glowing ember of my light to the ground. | © Kelsey Holland |
| Idea #11 | She is a nameless woman with unicorn skin, bearing purple and pink scars that bleed into an ashen sky. Her eyes pulse with the spectral grit and oil of yesterday’s brutality. As pain boils, it sears open a distant heaven, as real as her life, now exhausted, as a kingdom waits, seated on a throne in her mind. At the moment, a giant orb expands and contracts exultingly above her diminishing body, blinding white with cruel, descending compassion. | © Stephanie Flood |
| Idea #12 | The boys came to live with me after my brother Andrew and his wife Monique were tragically killed in a climbing accident. Their mother’s relatives lived abroad, so that’s how I found myself with two orphans aged 11 and 13. This was a new experience for me and it couldn’t have been easy for Neil and Jimmy either |
| Idea #13 | suddenly losing their parents, having to move from one end of the country to the other to live in a small village a few miles from Canterbury. | © Linda Casper |
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