'New Shores' by Alex Grehy

I wake up on this beach the day after my retirement party.  I reach for my last memories - the fizz of cheap prosecco and the hubbub of my colleagues’ good wishes. 

I look around, curious. This is like a child’s painting -- yellow sand and a blue sea mirroring a cloudless sky. There is a smooth rock, dished and inviting. I sit down.

The fine sand sparkles like diamond dust. I feel compelled to touch it. I look at the grains caught on my fingertips and see a different version of myself in each one. There, I am on stage, singing Schubert, the audience applauds my luscious soprano voice. In the next I am sitting at the head of a mahogany table, the board members listening raptly as I confidently outline my plans for further success. So many unfulfilled possibilities, each grain of sand a life I could have lived. A multiverse of potentialities, piled into vast dunes by the choices I made, or failed to make. I brush the sand away, feeling the sharp cuts it leaves behind.

The surf whispers, carrying the fresh scents of salt and ozone. There is a mutuality of imagination, nothing in my life has been one thing or another. I am neither happy nor sad.

The sun kisses my face. Snowy gulls land on the shore. They pick at shells but leave me alone, for I have nothing they want. In the peace of our unshared motives, I admire the balletic strength of their commonplace beauty.

I am not dreaming. I am on this beach, like a once-jagged plank from an ancient shipwreck, smoothed by the waves. 

Habit has guided my life to this place, but now the sea lies before me, and the tide is asking for my permission to turn.

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Alex Grehy (she/her) is inspired by a reflective life full of nature, rescue greyhounds, singing and chocolate. Widely published, Alex hopes that her words will engage the reader's emotions and help them make sense of the world. Her poetry collections, published by Alien Buddha Press, are available from Amazon.

 

'Gestalt (noun): a theory that a whole is different from and more than its disparate parts' by Rachel Abbey McCafferty

Four.

You are at your uncle’s house and your parents said you could get a pet for your birthday. His dog had pups a few weeks ago and now you are surrounded in tan and white fur, cold noses and small paws pressing against you.

Fifteen.

You are at your first concert and the bass from the opener is vibrating in your sternum. The air smells of sweat and smoke and tomorrow you will, too, ears ringing and head buzzing.

Nine.

You are in class when a new kid walks in the door and introduces themselves with a stutter. Their speech is formal, stilted, stiff, and you join in the laughter breaking and cracking off the walls.

Seven. There are birthday candles. Twenty-two. There is an accident. Seventeen. There is a tentative kiss. Five. There is a swing set. Fifty-five. There is a new house. Nineteen. There is a voicemail. Twelve. There is a ferris wheel. Thirty-six. There is a bubble gum ice cream cone. Forty-two. There is a sapphire ring. Twenty-three. There is a wake. Eight. There is a school building. Twenty-nine. There is a hospital. Two, seventy-nine, forty-one, sixteen. There is, there is, there is, there is,

There is a sunset and ocean spray on your cheeks and waves like a heartbeat. You are six, you are thirteen, you are thirty-seven, you are eighty-two. The sky is red and pink and gold. The air is salty on your lips. The sand is soft beneath your feet.

 

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Rachel Abbey McCafferty has been writing since she first learned that was a thing people could do. Her work has appeared in journals like HAD, Maudlin House and Identity Theory. She can be found on Bluesky and Instagram at @ramccafferty.

'Gestalt (noun): a theory that a whole is different from and more than its disparate parts' was first published in (mac)ro(mic) on May 21, 2021. 

 

'Barometric' by Renuka Raghavan

Maya's father collected weather in Mason jars he kept along all the windowsills of their farmhouse, and she believed him, the way children believe in the weight of things they cannot see, a jar of October fog, a jar of the morning after her mother left, a jar he called the last good summer that he would hold to the light sometimes, just to watch it, but she stopped believing at fourteen when a boy at school told her that jars held nothing, that weather moved through and was gone, the way most things were gone, and she told her father this, and he unscrewed a lid and held the jar beneath her nose and she smelled something, cut grass, her own childhood, a tender quality of grief she had no word for yet, then she left for the city and grew into someone efficient and unsentimental, someone who paid bills on time and did not keep things, but years later, when her father died, she drove back to the farmhouse and found the windowsills bare, everything thrown out or given away, all glass gone, and she stood in the empty kitchen and opened her mouth and breathed, in and out, and understood then what he had really been doing all those years, not collecting weather, but teaching her that the ordinary air inside a life, if you paid attention, if you sealed it against the passing of time, was the only thing worth keeping.

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Renuka Raghavan is the author of three short-form prose and poetry collections. A Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee, her most recent collection is Nothing Resplendent Lives Here (Červená Barva Press, 2022).

Debut Flash: 'Don't write about the ceiling fan' by Anya Rosensteel

It's cliché. It's the only thing you see as you lie in  bed—that and the window. You can write about the window, and the squirrel that chastises you every morning because you have the audacity to live on a second floor. But don't write about the ceiling fan and the shadows it creates in the afternoon. The squirrel breaks your pots. It also sees you naked. Do you remember Apocalypse Now? Blades churning hot stagnant air. Of course you do. It's the ceiling fan. You've tried posting flyers — "Stop feeding the squirrel!" — complete with an FAQ about how squirrels are trash beasts that ruin the ecosystem and your life. "Q: Did you know squirrels eat baby birds? A: Yes, they are monsters in fur suits." But you still find half-buried peanut shells. Peanuts that DO NOT GROW HERE. When people read about your ceiling fan they will only think of better ceiling fans, more poetic ceiling fans. Stick with the squirrel. That fucking squirrel.

 

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Anya Rosensteel is an artist living in Santa Monica, CA.

 

'Dragonbeasts' by Alexandra Otto

Jonah vaults his toy monster truck across the cracked leather backseat. “Watch Dragonbeast’s wheelie, Mama!” 

WHEN he twirls the truck, the dragon wings extending from its cab almost fly. JONAH’S always talking and talking about ignitions, suspensions, and tires. It’s his addiction. I claw at a bottomless itch on my cheek as I search for parking. 

I pull into an abandoned strip mall lot and turn off the car. We’ll fall ASLEEP here. Quarter tank of gas. Enough to drive to the Willow Residential Center tomorrow. Already the cravings are slipping away, I tell myself. I NEED to bundle Jonah’s clothes into A makeshift pillow, but he’s not ready for sleep. Jonah’s racing his truck as I hold him. He can’t stop. He’s powerful. He’s HIT his stride, he’s a tornado, he’s a god. The Dragonbeast tamer. 

“VROOM! Across your racetrack!” He pushes his truck up the trail of collapsed veins on my right arm. Some things don’t slip away. The needle scars, the indentation on my finger from my pawned-off wedding ring, the power TO reach up and grab stars, the way I could FEEL music bleed from my stereo, as if it were as ALIVE like me, the bare hospital lightbulb blinding me like an eclipse when Jonah opened my eyelids after my overdose.

We rock back and forth as ONE, resisting the LAST cravings that try to slip into our heart-shadows this TIME, hiding in plain sight. 

I too can tame beasts. 

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Alexandra Otto writes stories and short screenplays. She's working on a feature screenplay and a novel. When Alex isn't writing or teaching, she is outsmarting the largest bears in the world in Southcentral Alaska. Follow her at @alexottowrites on Twitter or Bluesky.

 

'Thank You for Calling the Thoughts and Prayers Hotline' by Shantell Powell

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Shantell Powell is an elder goth/swamp hag who grew up in an apocalyptic cult but got better. She makes up weird stuff about nature, fairytales, and religion. Her work appears in Nightmare, Augur, The Deadlands, and more, and she is writing too many books at a time.

 

'The Surprise Party' by Karen Crawford

Surprise! everyone screams when you walk through the door. And you are surprised! You haven’t seen these folks in years. Folks sharing stories of remember when, and such a shame.
And you nod and smile politely because your wife knows you hate surprises, and you slip away to look for her, to give her what for, and Surprise! You find her crying. Crying in the arms of your twin brother. Why is she crying in the arms of your twin brother? You haven’t celebrated a birthday with him in years. And why are they staring at a photo of you and her? Or is it him and her? And why are they sharing stories of remember when, and such a shame? And now you’re not smiling, and you don’t feel polite. And you try, again, and again, and again to reach for her arm. Surprised, when you can’t.

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Karen Crawford lives and writes in the City of Angels. Her work has been included in Best Microfiction Anthology 2025, Gooseberry Pie, Fictive Dream, The Citron Review and elsewhere. She is a multi-Pushcart, and Best of the Net nominee.