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Monday, April 25, 2016

FreeCreate Friday, Amy T. Crawford

Hike
By Amy Crawford


Old Man and a Wishing Well, Fred W. Feldman

The Wishing Well
by Frederick W Feldman


1.


Gerard, the old man, was visiting the gardens. He was alone, but that was not because he had no friends. He did have friends, but they were not with him today.
In the gardens were many trees and plants. The gardens were established as the pet arboretum of a wealthy family. The venture had been a hobby but fell into disrepair after several generations until it was eventually purchased by a philanthropist who decided to open it to the public and create revenue by charging admission and then to redirect that revenue into upkeep and expansion.
Now many people walked the trails and admired the feats of landscaping and the natural beauty resplendent in all the grounds. The convex bulbs of sunglasses floated past Gerard and rolled around in orbital motions at the many sights. They wore yoga pants and cargo shorts. They wore floppy hats and slapbacks. Much athletic wear, and gallons of sunscreen.
How many gallons of sunscreen did it take to protect the county from becoming sunburnt? How many had still been lost?
Gerard liked the greenhouse very much, but he had already been there many times and had enjoyed the rare varieties of flora. It was a good day. Simple pleasures are tenuous. An excuse to move his legs was a boon.
Part of the philanthropist’s enterprise was the building of structures made of stone and marble that existed organically within the gardens. These were no small structures, either. A bell tower rose from the top of a hill that he had scaled last time, but he did not feel spry enough to take the stone path today.
There were other displays that he was pleased to visit today. He passed the families gawking at the topiary – which he found dull and grotesquely carnivalesque positioned as it was in the midst of masterful art and gaean grandeur  - and ventured to a sunny spot where he liked to stay a while.
The Outdoor Arcade was a great pleasure to him and there he tarried.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

A Home In the Stars

by Melissa Taggart, featuring Henry Taggart
Prompt: write a disjointed, chaotic story in which nothing makes sense

the darkness settles in the moon laughs as the earth flees from my footsteps i turn suddenly at the sound and the moon grows bigger in a purple sky i rise above the world the moon shatters the pieces falling upon the world like glass i reach out my hand to touch one and it bursts into a thousand flowers that float out of my grasp looking for homes among the stars my feet have left the earth my lungs burning within the stars swallowing pieces of the moon and i rest on the wind that carries me ever nearer to the stars




Honest Love Song, Katy Comber

For Honest Love Song, I grabbed a poem that I've been working out for years. It used to be over a page long until I cut it down for this edition. (I listened to the advice of an anthology rejection letter that told me to EDIT.)

 I wrote this poem in an effort to understand why, despite being in a deep, committed, and loving relationship, I still have these pesky thoughts about my first love from time to time. Because that was a not-so deep, hold-on tight cause we don't want to fail, we don't want to hurt/be hurt type of commitment with my high school boyfriend. His name was Graham. He was cute. We got along for more than year. I loved him with my understanding of love. He did the same. Until we didn't anymore. The end. 

Here's my piece, Voodoo Doll Heart.

Voodoo Doll Heart
By Katy Comber

First Love's a bitch
She turned a sliver of my heart
into a squeaky toy
sewed it up tight with 
selective memory strings 
made sure a winged toddler 
       (that perpetual youth w/terrible aim)
found it wedged 
under a gutter grate.   
and every once in a while...
that little bastard squeezes
to see if it will still make noise

It's the only explanation 

Monday, April 4, 2016

Ghost Town, Fred W. Feldman

Ghost Town
A story by Frederick W Feldman

Sam tossed the can of beans into the air and juggled it around before finally digging in with the can opener.
He dumped them into the pot and stirred them over the iron stove, but Kara didn’t come over. She continued staring at the rotting shelf that held their last few cans of beans.
“We’re almost out of food,” she said.
Sam stirred the pot. Almost ready to eat. He got his bowl out.
“It’s the full moon tonight. We’ll get more,” he said.
Kara huffed and stayed near the beans. She shook her head, finally coming over to Sam, with great reluctance, to have breakfast.
They ate in silence. Sam knew it was hard for her to wait and do nothing while they munched through their rations, but there really was no reason for anxiety. They’d get plenty more tonight.
Will they come again tonight? Kara wondered. Depending so heavily on an outside source for their survival made her heart rate quicken. They should have a backup plan so that they could eat if something happened and they could get no more supplies. They should have been rationing the food way more than they had been.
She looked around at the bare, dilapidated kitchen and through the window – one of the few left in the town that still had a pane of glass in it – and there was the desert outside. It was warming up, now that it was morning, and the wind kicked up the top layer of sand and rolled it across the ground like a coughing fit.
No way anything was growing out there.

Ghost Town, Katy Comber

Hope and Perrish
By Katy Comber


An iridescent haze swept slightly above the ground as loose gravel crunched under the traveler’s boot. His feet felt heavy and his back burned in the smoldering sun, and yet he kept strolling by the abandoned town’s buildings, storefronts with dusty displays and a saloon with swinging doors that creaked and swayed if the wind ever decided to whistle on through. The traveler stopped. That noise. It sounds like… It can’t be. The traveler followed the impossible sound in the direction of the town center.
The town consisted of ramshackle buildings along a short dirt road with a chipped Welcome to... sign on one end and a Now Leaving… sign hanging lopsided off its post on the other. The straight road only curved and parted around a small crumbling stone pillar surrounded by a circle of benches and posts for tying up horses. Something else was tied there. The certainty of this thought made neck hairs raise under the traveler’s dampened white t-shirt. The pillar was capped by a large wooden disk and a clay ladle hung from its side. The sound, a throaty giggle, echoed from this direction. Someone, something, lay inside of the well.

Ghost Town, Joe Persch

Exploration
By Joe Persch

John saw his destination from quite a distance. It wasn’t hard in this environment. Flat, dusty, and dry. The book he was writing was coming along nicely, but it didn’t have that one place that would make it stand out. He hoped this would be that place.
There was something unusual about the way this particular town was viewed. All Ghost Towns have their myths and legends about them. There are stories of shoot outs, gold mines, bandits, indians (actually native americans. He hated that name, “Indians”), and even demons from time to time. But this town had none of that. No gold stories, no train hijackings or bank robberies. Not even any origin on why the town was founded. This one, above all the others, bore looking into.

Affinity CoLab's Featured Contributor: Joe Persch



Joe Perch, age 36, is Affinity Colab's Spring Edition Featured Contributor! His piece, The Day It Was Destroyed, reached over 500 readers! 

AF: Welcome, Joe! 
JP: Thanks! This is awesome. 
AF: Affinity CoLab is about nurturing creativity and supporting all mediums and creative outlets. What would you say is your creative outlet? 
JP: As far as my creativity, I absolutely love to write and I dabble a bit in model painting (as in collectible and gaming models). There's always so much in my head that I need to get it out in text somehow so I can clear my thoughts. Sometimes thoughts will just simmer in my head for a time. Other times they'll be ready for me to type and I fidget and become easily distracted if I can't write immediately. It doesn't always happen, but it's fairly frequent. As to the painting, I'm a gamer at heart. Not just video games, but also board games, card games, and table top games. I play one in particular, Warhammer 40,000 (abbreviated 40k usually). You buy the models to represent your army, assemble them, and paint them. I love painting them, but I don't always have time. I've been complimented regularly on my paint jobs which has only encouraged me to continue doing so.