In this second 4 Star Stories short short story issue we meet a garage inventor, singles looking for reincarnated lost loves, jungle tribal folk legends, nuns gone wild, a woman whose childhood dream is realized, and a tweak of the classic werewolf story. And we do it all in less than 1,000 words each!

If you have a minute or two – we have a story for you!,

In this second Short Short Story Issue we are proud to present:

 Lou Antonelli’s A Stone's Throw

Maureen Bowden's A Lass Unparalled

Ethan Nahte's Blood-Sucking Monkeys

Gloria Oliver's Salvation

Cassandra Shore's The Grotto

Libby A. Smith’s Canary Breath

Enjoy!

The Editors
4 Star Stories

Here is a poem to get you started....

A few years ago I read a medieval miracle ballad called “Our Lady’s Juggler”. It left me wondering if I could write a miracle story of that type. -- my big problem being that I live in the 21^st century, where belief in miracles of the kind described in the ballad is in short supply. Could I pull off a Miracle Ballad when my readers were working from a 21th century viewpoint? This prose poem is my attempt to write in that genre. The miracle in my story may be more psychological than the one in “Our Lady’s Juggler”, but I think it is the sort of miracle a reader in the 21th century might understand.

-- Matt Gray

THE ROSE KNIGHT

By Matt Gray

Once there was a knight

Whose emblem was Our Lady’s rose,

The Rose Knight.

He was not young,

But was a knight battle-hardened and true.

One night he, in chapel, knelt

Keeping a promised vigil in prayer.

The night was long, cold, lonely

And the flagstones hard.

Deep in prayer,

The good knight found himself facing his self,

His ever less-than-perfect self.

Repentant, the Rose Knight his still vigil kept.

Quietly telling the truth of his successes and failures

As a man and as a knight

To himself and God.

Teardrops sometimes wet the stones upon which he knelt.

Until he felt himself but the shade of a knight

Praying in the chapel’s silent mirk.

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With the dawning, the morning sun climbed a silver-blue sky;

Lighting the chapel through its rose mullion

Flooding the shadowed chapel

With a thousand bits of warm, singing, dancing, colored light;

Blessing, forgiving and healing the kneeling Rose Knight

With Our Lady’s loving light

For which

His dark, battle-scarred heart,

Had so sorely longed.

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