“Daddy” by Valda Moore

It’s eleven o’clock in the morning but dark as night . . .

“Special K” by Siggy Buckley

Scared out of my mind
Heart thumping
Chilled to the bone under layers of blankets
In my surgical gown and silly cap
I wait to be knocked out by ketamine . . .

“For Me” by Stephanie Laterza

My son Martin is still learning to grasp the concepts of you and me . . .

“Take Two” by Paul Renault

I sat on a railroad tie along the driveway, with my bad leg stretched out in front of me and the bike wheel across my lap. After deflating the tube, I worked the tool around and peeled the tire out of the rim. I kept having to stop to wipe the sweat from my eyes . . .

“No Prescription Required for Murder” by ID Smith

University College, London. Johnson marched me through the clipped campus, down echoing corridors, past alabaster busts and locked doors. At the end of a long corridor, he stopped at a door marked Private.

“It’s never too late for university, Cartier,” he said, knocking.

“Some Country” by Jacqueline Freimor

In the open side door of the school, Koenig leaned on his broom and watched the junior high children stream from the building at the sound of the bell. Line after line, they spilled through the front doors like cockroaches from the drains in the basement. He pictured a colony of roaches wearing yellow Star of David armbands and laughed . . .

“Dextro Heaven & the Death Drug Impulse” by Bob Freville

The gateway drug is not the weed you smoke in a too-thin joint as a teenager. It’s not the beer you surreptitiously sip from your father’s fishing cooler while hunkered down in the garage. The gateway drug is escape . . .

“Peter and the Wolves” by Rion Amilcar Scott

The tractor-trailer lay dead, an overturned behemoth in the roadside brush, its refrigerated guts split open and littering the highway with frozen wolf carcasses . . .