'The Moths Have Been At Our Love' by Abigail Williams

We wrap it in tissue paper and tie it with string and place it beside my skinny jeans and your dead-worm tequila. 

How we bulge with our unmet future. Not done, just different – we promise to come back for our tissue-wrapped hearts and saunter past the ruins of other loves: charred smouldering lightning-struck. Sad grey diminished. Loves felled by infidelity. Not us, we say. 

The rivers are a surprise. We’ll go straight through. You wade on, arms aloft. Too deep, too wide, the waters sweep me across sleepless oceans, past Lego tundra, over deserts of fever, through jungles of clinging arms. As I come up gasping for air I see you on the shore, bone dry, whistling.

The raft years. I sit among filthy grows with cracked nipples and watch you watch TV and get promoted and talk to pretty girls at parties and I wonder how you still look like you. I scratch my slack skin, twist my thin hair. 

Baby baby baby. Barely room to turn around on that raft. 

The tide deposits me in the end, parched, with a stone in my chest. I wonder if you even know I was gone. I scrabble through tissue paper, tug at the string searching for the love we left, soft as mohair, big as the sky, but when I spread it across my lap it barely reaches my knees. The babies – larvae, you say – laced it in holes, shrunk it with spit. I’ve been too long adrift. I’ve nothing for you but spine and rib and salt and hurt.

Morning clatters my eyelids. Needle on needle. Acres of yarn. You are aged in the breaking dawn, face cracked with concentration, our moth-eaten love in your lap. 

It’ll take time, you say. 

But I can wait. I can wait.

 

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Abigail Williams is a northerner living in Devon. She writes flash, short and longer form fiction. Her work has won, been placed or listed in various competitions including the Bath Flash Fiction Prize, Oxford Flash Fiction competition, the Bridport Prize, Mslexia flash and short story competitions, Fish Flash Fiction Prize, Flash500 and Exeter Novel Prize. Her work has been published recently in Frazzled Lit, Molotov Cocktail, and Fictive Dream. Find her on BlueSky @abbywilliams.bsky.social. 

Debut Flash: 'Green' by Chris Hutchings

I saw her through the branches of the freshly-felled tree, down by the stream where the air was cool. She was stepping barefooted, surefooted, over green moss-clad rocks that matched the colour of her naked skin. Her appearance should have frightened me, but I was more surprised than anything else.

She was a creature out of myth. She wasn’t a part of this modern time, and yet her confident motions and the way the woodland seemed to accommodate her, shelter her even, suggested she belonged there much more than I.

I remember reading stories and legends as a child, so many years ago now. Long, long before I’d started working as a logger. Stories that had drawn me to nature in the first place, tales of green ladies, dryads, sylphs, wood-witches. I guess those legends had to come from somewhere, some grain of truth hidden in each one, like the sand within a pearl.

They were the fierce defenders of the forests, protectors of the green places in the world, destroyers of those who would destroy nature. And that was when the fear started. I realised I should have started running when I first saw her. By then, it was too late.

 

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Chris is from Sheffield where he has been reading, writing and roleplaying for over 25 years. He finally got around to completing an MA in Creative Writing as it’s far more interesting than the day job.

 

'Dry Stone Walls' by Slawka G. Scarso

Rosa was bitten. Rosa was bitten while outside. Outside by the dry-stone wall. I saw it. It was black, she says. Black and furry. Rosa shakes, shivers, and shreds her rainbow dress to pieces, looking for a swollen bite to show. The village women wrapped in black shawls circle her, watch the exotic garment fall into pieces. Rosa jumps, screams, cries: Help me, will you? The women shake their heads, cross their arms. You should have known. Rosa freezes, cool sweat springing from her shoulder blades. But she’s not from here, one of them whispers. Even more so, the others hiss. Rosa jumps, stamps her foot, jumps again. She’s possessed. This is no spider. It’s in her. It’s deep inside her foreign soul. It’s in her alien blood. It’s deeper than our garden wells. Deeper than the olive trees, rooted all around us. For she has no root here. Dance it out, they shout. Sweat, swelter, sweep the spirit, they instruct. And then go back to where you came from. What were you doing behind a dry-stone wall, anyway? they ask. Hiding, she replies. The women grin. Dry-stone walls are not for hiding, the village women say. Not for people. But for snakes. Scorpions. Spiders. Our women do not hide. Rosa jumps, stamps her foot, jumps again. She pulls the broken fabric from her dress. Didn’t you know? Didn’t they tell you? And hiding from what? one whispers. Hiding from my husband, she says. The women look at her now and see there’s more than a swollen bite on her skin. Her garments are no longer exotic, her skin is bruised, her hair is pulled – just like their own. Her blood, her soul no different. 

Dance it out, they whisper. 

Sweat it, swelter it, sweep it, they sooth.

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Slawka G. Scarso works as a copywriter and translator in Italy. Her words have appeared in Mslexia, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit, Scrawl Place and FlashBack Fiction among others. In 2022 her novella in flash All Their Favourite Stories was published by Ad Hoc Fiction.

 

'One for sorrow, two for joy' by Harshita Nanda

The myna squawks irritably before alighting on the window ledge. 

One for sorrow, two for joy, I hear mother’s voice intoning as I cross my fingers, hoping to undo the curse, as the myna peers into the room, which smells of dampness, medicine, and disease.

I want to avert my eyes from the myna, but her beady, yellow eyes have hypnotised me. I stare at her instead of my mother, lying frail and helpless on the bed in front of me. The machines that keep her alive hiss and beep repeatedly. 

One for sorry, two for joy, the chanting in my mind reaches a crescendo as I wait for another myna to join the first. 

One for sorry, two for joy, the chant becomes mournful as the beep of the machines soon falls silent.

 

 

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Harshita Nanda is based in Dubai, UAE. A shortlisted candidate for the Rama Mehta Writing Grant, 2023, her short stories have featured in many anthologies, including Lightning Strikes: An Anthology of Flash Fiction by Indian Writers. Her words have appeared on Kitaab, Porch Lit Mag and Roi Faineant Literary Press.

 

'The Xylophonist’s Tune' by Sherry Morris

She waits for her cue.
Mallets raised. Hands poised. Ready to roll an orchestral zig-zag riff over two rows of hardwood bars.

*But*—

the xylophonist struggles to read sheet music.
She bumbles black holes. Or is it wholes? Stumbles over treble clefs and half-rests.
Fumbles her way through the stemmed and flagged notes rising and falling along the page.
Remains determined to decipher the code these gangs of linked symbols—crowded into bars, crammed between spaces—hold.

*She*—

ignores the page. Listens to the flutes. Almost! plays their part by ear.
With soft mallets, she gentle taps. Wonders if anyone hears her heart pitter-pat to Luke’s snare-drum rat-a-tat.

*Dreams*—

she is musical. Masters the unruly ciphers on the page. Plays correct notes in rhythmic time while wielding multiple mallets. That Luke looks over and smiles. Compliments her style. Asks her to show him her roll technique. And when she places her hands over his, they lean in over the xylophone bars to xxx tender and slow.

*She*—

crashes back to reality. Xylophones cannot be taken seriously. Certainly not by Luke playing precise paradiddles with majestic military flair. He double-strokes three seats away, as unreachable as achieving polyrhythmic technique. She falls into a trance watching his beautiful hands. She can play the Looney Toons theme tune perfectly. Surely that counts for something. Maybe if she started a serious discussion about percussion…

*Succeeds*—

in falling hard off her chair. A stand-alone cymbal crashes to the floor. 
She blinks as his hand offers help.
It’s out of her mouth before she can think, A concussion of percussionists.
She smiles hoping he’ll like her joke.
He’s blank, grave-faced.
She sighs. Drummers keep their own beat.

Then a smile flits across Luke’s face. A concussion of percussionists, he says.
He smiles again. Wide.

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Originally from America’s Heartland, Sherry writes prize-winning flash fiction and short stories from a farm in the Scottish Highlands where she watches clouds and pets cows. She also presents Sherry's Shorts, a radio programme of short fiction on Highland Hospital Radio. Follow her on Bluesky @Uksherka or visit Uksherka.com

'The Xylophonist's Tune' was first published online with Free Flash Fiction in January 2022. 

'Fifteen Ways to Grieve your Mother' by Lee Irving

Fifteen Ways to Grieve your Mother 

(after Paul Simon)

1. Learn to cook the Mother Of All Roasts, complete with high-rise Yorkshire puddings, and gravy from the gods.
2. Steer clear of herbal and fruit infusions: they are not tea.
3. Refuse to stop for pedestrians waiting at a Zebra Crossing but get irate when drivers fail to stop when you are the pedestrian waiting at a Zebra Crossing.
4. Stockpile enough spare tins of beans, vegetables, soup, and prunes to get you through a nuclear winter.
5. Cultivate the Art of Malapropism, coining such classics as: ‘He’s just a wolf in cheap clothing,’ and, ‘As happy as Cary [Grant].’
6. Blame the recession on the last Labour government/the EU/foreigners-in-general. 
7. Do say, ‘Thank you for the present. I do hope you kept the receipt.’ 
8. Don’t say, ‘There’s no rush for you to find a husband, and plenty of time for you to have children.’
9. Only expect men to hold open the door for you, but grumble when a woman doesn’t do so.
10. Deride those who wax lyrical about their wonderful grandchildren all the time, while waxing lyrical all the time about your own wonderful grandchildren.
11. Refuse to wear suncream because, ‘We won the war without it, you know.’
12. Be stoical in the face of adversity, even when you have a serious brush with skin cancer.
13. Remember that her own mother was no good at showing her affection.
14. Focus instead on the one time she did tell you that she was proud of you.
15. Never forget it was you she wanted to hold her hand at the very end…

… and set yourself free.

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Lee Irving writes to try to make sense of the world by exploring what it means to be human, and his work includes everything from micro-fiction to novels. He has won competitions with Writing Magazine and Tortive Lit's #FlashFiction101. You can see more of his published stories at: https://leeirvingwriter.wixsite.com/lee-irving

 

'Bad Blood' by Alison Woodhouse

Here I am, dated and pasted between thin plastic sheets, pressed and smoothed in the red leather album from Grandma’s house. 

I’m the girl with the pudding bowl hair, gap-toothed, arms splayed, up against the wall where the pear tree droops. My sandals are sticky with sweet rotting fruit and the wasps are biting. 

I’m the girl with hyacinth eyelids, wobbly strawberry lines around my mouth, dusty pink kisses on my cheeks. Downstairs, she whacks her ruler across the back of my hands, twice. My room is out of bounds, she says, and nice girls don’t wear make up.

I’m the girl on the back seat of the Zephyr 4 parked outside her front door, my Sunday dress too tight across my chest. Grandma’s cigarette is clamped tight between her lips and she’s looking elsewhere. 

Where’s the photograph of the raggedy lobed hawthorn and purple sloes flying past the car window and the hundredth time of my mother saying she was a kind woman, wasn’t she? 

Where’s the picture of Grandma’s house never smelling of bread and blackberry jam, just empty shells and a stiff north-easterly? 

Or the shoreline where I walk, smoking in quick inhalations like a beached fish gulps air.

I hang back as our little family tramps up the gravel path to St. Botolphs, but there’s no photograph of me sucking blood from my thumb, ravenous. 

Are you alright, my mother asks, but maybe not then, maybe much, much later.

When they finish lowering Grandma into the freshly dug hole, I step to the precipice, turn out my pockets. Shell shards tumble and so do my cigarettes but no one sees, they’re too busy slinging mud.

I don’t cry, oh no, not until Mother’s thin arms lasso me, and then I am gasping.

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Alison Woodhouse is a writer and teacher of short fiction. Her debut novella, The House on the Corner, is published by Ad Hoc Fiction and her collection of short fiction, Family Frames, is published by V Press.