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Zig-zagging from my normal routine, this week I have invited some writers in my network to introduce short stories they have published.

•  “Stripped Clean,” by Cassandra Dunn, Every Writer’s Resource

They say that scent carries the strongest connection to memory. But what if the scent is of someone you’re trying to forget? This flash fiction piece is about letting go of someone, and the lingering feelings that we need to work through as part of that process.

Cassandra lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA

“Nannie Trilogy”, by Peter Bouchier

The genre could be described as “maritime historic fantasy’. I wrote it in honour of what I think is the most beautiful object ever made by human hands: the 19th century clipper ship Cutty Sark, the figurehead of which represents Nannie, the witch from Robert Burns’s poem Tam O’Shamter.

Peter Bouchier lives in Amersterdam. His story is translated from Dutch.

• “Twist of Luck”, by Olga Godim, Amazon.com (read an excerpt)

I once read statistics about people who lost or cancelled their plane tickets or were tardy or missed their planes. It appears that flights that met a bad end—hijacked or exploded—had a higher percentage of absent passengers than the industry average. It is almost as if some highly intuitive persons might have a premonition that something bad is about to happen and, perhaps unconsciously, act to avoid the tragedy. After all, someone was late for one of the planes that hit the Trade Centre on 9/11. I used this research for my story.

Olga lives in Vancouver, Canada

• “Come September” by Sally Whitney,  Bloodroot Literary Magazine, 2013 edition

When a stranger starts attending a small town’s high school football games, the team’s regular fans are apprehensive, all except Margaret Sumner, who just wants to be left alone. Yet something about the stranger appeals to her.

Maybe it was that he didn’t look at her with pity like so many others did.

Sally lives in Maryland and used to attend high school football games in a small town in New Jersey and imagine the lives of people in the stands around her.

• “The Old Cowboy”, by Calder Lowe, Cowboys & Indians

Editor’s note: Poems often tell stories using poetic techniques like rhythm and word choice that are not that different from how writers craft a good short story. Line breaks are one of the features that make narrative poetry unique.

When I was twelve, an inebriated neighbor offered to give me his horse. My repeated pleas to my mother to let me keep his horse, fell on deaf ears, and as a consequence, I immersed myself in the reading of Zane Grey novels and the memorization of numerous cowboy songs. Growing up, essentially with no father figure, these luminaries of the silver screen became my heroes.

Calder lives in Columbia, California