Physics whiz Simon Crown hears a girl’s voice in his head but he’s not crazy, he’s a chimera twin – he absorbed his twin in the womb, but her consciousness survived. Simon loves his sister, but he’s so desperate for a mind of his own, he must decide if muting his sister’s voice is worth jeopardizing her vicarious life.

Art by Tsukiko Kiyomidzu

A teenage boy is haunted by ghosts on an Indian reservation. When he figures out the ghosts need his help – retrieving stolen bones, healing broken souls – he also learns the difference between a curse and a gift, and life versus living.

Image by Pexels

Honorable Mention 1 of 2 – Easy Street Magazine’s “Great American Sentence Contest”

The rest of the overflowing rows in her greenhouse were fragrant and hale – broad butter lettuce leaves, chlorophyll carrot tops, indestructible daisies – but the epidendrum porpax was dead, and as Scarlet cupped her hands around the molded dirt that held the tiny plant’s useless roots, she mourned yet another failure to nurture something beautiful, to protect something fragile.

Honorable Mention 2 of 2 – Easy Street Magazine’s “Great American Sentence Contest”

The uneven landscape of tenement roofs – bristling with antennas, pipes, and laundry lines – spread for miles in front of them like a whole other city, adding another layer of life in the space between street and sky, and perhaps providing lost souls one last, unlikely chance for redemption before they either fell further from heaven or clawed their way up into the clouds.