| Idea #1 | Farrah’s blue eyes were once caring and full of happiness, at least I think they were. As they burned holes into me across her desk it was hard to picture her like that. | © Tori Stubbs |
| Idea #2 | Edel never sleeps. She swings in her boss’s silo, post-rota, drifting her chemically unhinged consciousness across her brain’s hemispheres as she staggers on the concrete loading dock, chrome spurs flaring. The triumphant surge of a wild cat lifts at her fluttering heart, held together by gently gnawing stitches and an (ignored) bio-surgeon’s manual. Venom hovers at her shoulders: phantom feeling. Yi promised the scorpion-tab would dissipate the moment she’d withdrawn. | © Brian Dodge |
| Idea #3 | The old man was alone in the cabin with a picture window over the water. He held a coffee cup and was humming. There was a radio playing songs and advertisements. After some moments, he moved to the sink and rinsed some forks and knives and dried them with a towel. His wife died over the winter, and he did activities he hadn’t before: dish washing, laundry, and gardening. He was sadder after his wife’s death. They had been coming to this cabin for twenty-three years. He asked his son to come this summer, but he couldn’t take the time away from home. He fished and walked in the woods, and split firewood, and spent hours in front of the picture window looking at the water and birds. It thrilled him to see a gull swoop into the water and come up with a catch. At night he looked into the fire. In the cot he and his wife shared, memories came to him out of the dark. He knew it wasn’t the same as it was, but he wanted to enjoy what was left. The priest told him to live in the present. His friend Saul told him to get a girlfriend. He had moments mostly in the woods when he felt serenity but they didn’t last. His daughter in law was pregnant and he wanted to look forward to that. He saw the shotgun on the wall. | © Jack Coey |
| Idea #4 | My grandfather, Bill Shuster, lied to my grandmother. I guess it runs in the family because I lied too. On a cool September afternoon when the birds fell silent and the grass still needed clipping, my 12-year-old son, James, returned home from school. I was trying to read. | © Katrina Johnston |
| Idea #5 | Mikey Frick hid in his mother’s closet until his stomach growled and the cinnamon-sugar darkness, filled with his mother’s things, whispered what a good boy he was. When the strangers found him and brought him to his new mom, named Foster, he swore, the next time he hid, no one would ever find him. | © Robert Lowell Russell |
| Idea #6 | From a nearby tree, one after another, birds dropped like stones, then, just before they struck the hard earth, swooped toward the front door. Flying fast, like black blurs through the twilight, they stuck their beaks in the heavy timber door like darts. Thwack! Thwack! Ten birds, then ten more, and Silas just lay there, listening. His eyelids shut so tight they trembled, flinching each time the birds hit. After what seemed an hour, he slid out of bed, but didn’t turn on the lights so as to avoid waking his pregnant wife, Martinique. | © Rob Essley |
| Idea #7 | James was a Captain in the United States Army, but no war zone could have prepared him for taking care of his three year old son Shawn on his own. James had taken leave from the Army so his wife Jessica could go out of state to care of her sick mother. He was excited about playing Mr. Mom for a few weeks, but he had greatly underestimated Shawn. | © Jen Beaney |
| Idea #8 | The boy knowing the river went for a small lure. I caked my big lure in some kind of smelly, heavy liquid that poured thickly out of a bottle. The bottle said the liquid smelt of fish. I thought the orange goo smelt of rubber. But what did I know, I was not a fish. | © Paul Kavanagh |
| Idea #9 | Despite this being summer, the walnut trees dotting the old farmhouse property were dead. Skeletal branches reached up and drooped down in nature’s mournful display that this was poison land where nothing worthwhile could grow. | © Lee DeAmali |
| Idea #10 | Frigid winds howled across a surface of deerskin pelts stretched taught over skeletons of wooden rods, providing shelter for the people huddled within. The eastward migration of the Pa-ayello had come to a standstill as monumental sheets of ice and snow blocked their passage. | © Scott Livingston |
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