FlashFlood: 2025

Saturday, 14 June 2025

'That One Time You Loved a Mermaid' by Laila Amado

That one time you loved a mermaid the sea followed you everywhere.

It leaned on your windows, clouds pressing against the glass, murmured about sunken treasures between the lines of late-night radio broadcasts.

It roared in the road noise of a faraway highway, sloshed in the glasses of gin and tonic passed around in your favorite dive bar.

It dripped down the shower curtain, rolled to rest at your feet in a scattering of pearls and salt, greeted you in the night with the forlorn calls of lost tankers, when you lay sleepless by her side. In the darkness of the room, her curls on your pillow twisted and twined like ribbons of kelp.

A sudden whiff of seaweed from the teacup told you she was on her way from the airport.

A gust of cold wind in a closed room—all ice and brine—told you she was angry with you.

All staircases spiraled like ammonite fossils.

One time, when you were lying together on the roof of your apartment building and the stars above looked like specks of sun glitter on the surface of the waves, you reached for her hand. “The sea is a graveyard,” she said. “No one to talk to but the shadows of long-gone whales.”

She didn’t love you back, of course.

Every now and then, you go for a walk along the beach, steps tracing the soft curve of the coastline, and the sea recedes from your feet, forever shrugging away.

Laila Amado is a nomadic writer of speculative fiction. She writes in her second language, has recently exchanged her fourth country of residence for the fifth, and can now be found staring at the North Sea, instead of the Mediterranean. The sea, occasionally, stares back. Follow her on Bluesky @amadolaila.bsky.social

'Octopus-Hearted' by Jude Potts

I wonder what would happen if I stopped wrapping myself in tentacles, protecting my solitary, sucker-scarred heart. What might we share, beyond stealthy cigarettes on a fire escape, smoke swirling skyward, ash dropping on my sneaks?

‘How’s tricks?’ I ask.

‘Tricky,’ your reply.

Sometimes that’s all we say, and it’s almost enough. My mouth fills with octopuses, I can’t get the right words out without tentacles tangling my tongue.

‘Did you know, octopuses have three hearts?’ I keep my eyes on the spiralling smoke. If I were octopus-hearted, I’d risk saying so much more.

I watch your lips tighten around your cigarette, sending smoke signals I can’t quite read. Did your hand linger on mine as you passed me your lighter? Did you feel a spark as your fingers brushed my arm?

Cigarette clasped in one hand, my other arm wrapped around my waist, I console myself I don’t have six more arms longing to reach out, brush ash from your chest, letting fingers linger on the top button of your checked shirt.

Tomorrow, I might ask you for a coffee. On the one hand, you could say yes and later break two of my octopus’ hearts with lies. On another hand, you might say no and immediately break them all. But octopus hearts allow octopus choices, so on one more hand, we’re sipping coffee in bed, a tangled knot of lazy limbs, your body as familiar as my own, our six octopus hearts full.

Love’s tricky with just one heart. Two hands leave me with binary choices. Ask, don’t ask. Yes. No. Love. Heartbreak. I bubble-wrap my lonely heart with tentacles. I cling to cigarettes and sideways glances, watching smoke dance away, never catching fire.

Jude is bimbling through life, sometimes dabbling in flash fiction, focusing on wry, dry and sly looks at human failings (usually her own). She believes in the magical capacity of shared joy and humour to change the world and tries to contribute.

'Orange Blossoms' by M.E. Macuaga

The last thing I did for you, the only thing I could do for you, was peel you an orange. A little mikan mandarin, from the pile of sweet spheres brought by our neighbor Miyoko from her tree to your hospital room. I plucked one from the paper bag she left along with her regards, and, with its dry rustle still whispering in my ear, I dug my yellowing thumbnail into the soft bare button of the fruit. A fine mist of citrus oil sprayed us and we laughed, bright as the falling sun. Then you watched me from the bed, your gown as loose as your smile. My hands cupped the mikan and turned from each other like a prayer in reverse, a flower blooming as my thumb peeled back the skin to bare its orb. Rind removed from what it had so fiercely, gently protected. Heart tilting, I plucked the segments from their stem.

There, one for you.

Here, one for me.

There, tucked inside, a baby one, naked and awakened now as you once awakened me.

And here — a seed I set aside, away from your throat.

I think of your skin now, also loose beneath your gown, and your bones beneath your loosened skin, and pithy veins, so soft, and how I could help change your colostomy bag but had to blink my gaze away from the bumps of your spine when the mid-day nurse came to clean you. That’s my job, I’d thought, angry as I left the room for the privacy you wanted. But I had bigger jobs coming, didn’t I, jobs that became mine too soon. To peel you an orange on our last day. To see your loosening. To take that one seed we found, and plant it.

M.E. Macuaga is a Japanese Bolivian storyteller and escape room addict whose diverse work can be found now/soon in HAD, The Cincinnati Review, Epiphany, Seventh Wave, Flash Fiction Magazine, Oyster River Pages, Luna Station Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her communities include Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Tin House, and Storyknife. Read more: curiousstoryprods.com & @memi_writes.

'That Summer' by Zary Fekete

She said the fireflies are dying. Not enough moonlight, she thinks, to guide them back to the swamp. Her fingers move over the cracked ceramic mug, too warm from the coffee that was never really coffee. But she won’t tell you that. She never tells you what she means.

She said she can smell them still. The ones that lived once, back when the wetland was alive with their hum. "That summer," she whispers, "before the dry winds made it all disappear." You nod. She’s always saying it, that summer. As if it was the only thing real.

The dry wind pushes dust across the porch, sifting through the cracks of the faded wood. She watches it scatter, her eyes not quite focused. There’s a sound, the low rumble of a truck in the distance. You wonder if it’s the one that used to come to pick up the old barrels, or if it’s just another echo from the past.

But she’s still talking, her words like smoke in the air. She speaks of the swamp, of summers spent hiding beneath the cypress, of her father’s hands carving the world out of nothing, of waiting for the rains to come. She speaks like she hasn’t forgotten the sound of their laughter, like she hasn’t been left with the empty spaces in the backyard, with the patches of dirt where things used to grow.

You don’t ask her to stop.

You look down at your hands, remembering how they used to hold her once, tightly.

“Do you remember?” she asks, as if the answer’s in the wind. But the fireflies are gone, and you wonder if you ever really saw them at all.

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky: zaryfekete.bsky.social

Debut Flash: 'Molting' by Jenn Keohane

I zippered myself to Christina for years: playdates, sleepovers, whispered secrets about boys we thought we loved. I haven’t seen her since graduation.

She breezes into Starbucks with a vibrant scarf and dangly earrings, her gaze on my grey sweater and sun-damaged face. We catch up on thirty years: her jewelry business, valedictorian son. My first stint in rehab, bedazzled lighter collection, cozy home. I leave out that it’s an Econoline van. Christina means well, I think, as she places a manicured hand on me. You’ve lost touch with the person you used to be.

Which version? The nine-year-old with an imaginary dragon, buck-toothed tween dancing naked to Duran Duran, bleached-blonde dreaming of Broadway?

Once, in 9th grade, we double-dated German exchange students—hers handsome, mine homely. They slipped their magic hands into unexplored places. Suddenly, I had a new feeling to chase; I sprinted toward boys, and later booze, shedding my childhood skin that had grown too tight, numbing myself for decades.

We finish our coffees, pretending we’ll do this again. She slips off her scarf—it’s from Barcelona and has good juju—and loops it around my neck. It’s tight, suffocating, like a noose, and she’s standing too close. But she’s right: the blue brings out my eyes.

She hugs me, my first touch since that truck stop rendezvous.

This could be the start of something new.

The only thing I want is to twirl, naked and irreverent, with my imaginary dragon, but I don’t remember how anymore.

Jenn Keohane has been writing microfiction since 2022. Though tragically unpublished at the time of this submission, she’s been an NYC Midnight finalist several times. She lives in sunny California with her husband. Their young adult children, now off the payroll, have thankfully flown the nest.

'Tenderhearted Optimists at the End of the World' by Diane D. Gillette

We huddle together on the front porch of the house we are currently squatting in. What flickering hope we have for survival will eventually expire with a shudder if something doesn't change. We are thinking that the well here still has water for now, but that the nonperishable food stash is beginning to dwindle. We have packets of seeds for a garden in our possession, but the gray cracked earth here will refuse to yield any bounty for us to consume.

We constantly worry about scurvy and cuts that won’t heal. We worry that we never saw ourselves as the badass heroes of the post-apocalyptic movies we watched before they became less fantastical and more of a guide for survival.

We do not voice our worries. We comment on how pleasant the breeze is. Marvel that the sun can still glitter in the sky when there is so much death below it. A deer wanders into view. We catch our breath and wait. It’s a thing of beauty despite its visible ribs, despite its frantic grabs at what little vegetation has managed to grow.

We have talked about this moment. How one of us — tenderhearted both — will have to spill the blood of an innocent if we’re going to survive. But the deer meets our gaze. Looks at us as if trying to place us. We reckon she has likely not seen any humans before.

We stay frozen. Neither reaches for the weapons we keep at our sides now always, but don’t really know how to use. The deer moves on. We don’t talk about what didn't just happen. It will be minestrone from a can again tonight.

Diane D. Gillette (she/her) mostly writes short things, but sometimes she strings them together to make longer things. She lives in Chicago with her partner and cats. Read more at www.digillette.com.

'I am the Wedding Photographer Who Took These Photos.' by Ani Banerjee

I am the Wedding Photographer Who Took These Photos.

The yellow marigold garlands hanging in strands on the front door, twined with fairy lights in red. The bride’s father, blessing the bride before she is handed off to the groom. The bride in red and groom in white sitting half lotus on the floor, the priest and fire in front of them. The bride and groom walking around the fire, the inexhaustible witness to their union. The groom putting the red sindur powder on her forehead. The bride smiling, with the sindur powder dropping to her nose. The buffet table with a thousand items, wish I could capture the smell. The groom’s mother, looking frazzled, searching for something. She is looking under tables, lifting the tablecloth. Someone gave her a metal detector, and she is swishing the floor with it, like it’s a vacuum cleaner. Her kajal smudged on her face, had she been crying? Dancing to Bollywood music, the groom’s father kissing the bride’s mother, his hands squeezing her butt. The bride’s mother and the groom's father walking towards the door. The bride running towards them, holding her saree up.

Ani Banerjee is a retired lawyer and an emerging writer from Houston, Texas, who was born in Kolkata, India. Her flash fiction has been published in Swamp Pink, Lost Balloon, McQueen’s Quinterley, Dribble Drabble, and others and nominated for Best Small Fiction and Best of the Net.

'Introductions Over Avocados' by Lisa H. Owens

Double-doors swooshed open and there he was, standing on the Welcome to Walmart mat, the stud of my dreams. He was a raven-haired fella sporting a red tartan sweater that hugged his barrel chest. His head tilted at a jaunty angle and his nose twitched as he hovered in the doorway like a lost puppy.

A gust of wind swept in, bringing winter's chill into produce, and a silver haired door-greeter looked over—perturbed.

“Make up your mind, pal, in-or-out,” and that’s all it took. My Scottish dreamboat casually strolled across the threshold, his man in tow.

At this point, I grew shy. What would he think of me? There was no denying I was a big-boned gal, and in my uncertainty, I tucked behind a tower of avocados, my golden curls spilling into my eyes, watching the man loop a blue basket over one arm.

“C’mon, Scotty,” he said and they walked straight toward... the avocados!

I looked around, panicked. My lady held a dark-hued Hass in each hand—squeezing for ripeness. Such antics. What would they think?

Scotty dragged his companion to the spot in which I stood, and the man went to work—squeezing avocados. He juggled a bright green specimen, hand-to-hand, and glanced at my lady, a shy smile on his lips.

“It’s taco night,” he said, an attempt at conversation, and my lady said, “Hmmm,” and kept digging.

My attention came around to Scotty and I hunkered while he cordially sniffed my butt, getting to know me. I turned to do the same, ecstatic to learn he was old... and fixed, for I was well past my prime.

“Aha!” They spyed their quest at the same time, their hands intertwining while reaching for the same gnarled Hass. They locked eyes and sparks began to fly.

Lisa H. Owens, a former humorist columnist, resides in North Texas with two senior rescue dogs and a possum named Harry who lives under her backyard shed. Her stories are sometimes inspired by true events, including family secrets, and her work's been published in dozens of ezines and multi-genred anthologies.

'Brocade' by Eirene Gentle

‘Why do dragons have scales’ Mia asked as she picked the blooms of raw skin on her arm. I smoothed lotion over her limbs in long, slow arcs she mimicked on the sleeping round of cat. ‘Why does Mimo have fur?’ She stroked the smooth grey pelt right down to the belly with its tiny rivered scar.

My clear flesh as I dressed her in soft oversize cottons drew a border between us she wouldn’t let me cross so I took her out to find familiars. ‘Look’ I said of drowsing roses so like the pinking of Mia’s flesh and meant ‘how perfect you are.’ But she ached to be a bristling thing more durable than petals. ‘Girls should have thorns’ she said, not knowing she did.

It was softer in the rainy season. We’d watch fractured sky hurl creeks at our window and pretend to swim, her scalloped flesh like fins in silvered light. But it vanished with sun.

On the way back from the vet, Mia’s hands hot from the last touch of Mimo’s fur. Pale vomit splashed on roadside sumac where we pulled over, the cat’s crate already cool and Mia deep in the woods without me. What if I left her there where wild things grow? Would she learn why dragons have scales? Could she forgive cats for staying such a short time? Ungraspable, this child of cloud and brambles. How many ways are there to fracture?

I found her crouched in last October’s leaves staring into moss-furred wood and lichen furls. The glow of it, emerald and gold on rain-black trunks and Mia’s shuddering breath as she pushed up her sleeves. ‘So beautiful,’ she said, and was.

Eirene Gentle is a writer of lit, mostly lit, based in Toronto, Canada. Published in The Hooghly Review, Litro, Jake, Maudlin House, Bull, Ink in Thirds, Leon Literary and more.

'In Praise of Moderation' by Susan Fuchtman

She loved the gold floral recliner, despite its missing antimacassar and cracked back leg. When she sat in it, the chair melded to her body as if it had been waiting to embrace her. “But,” she mentioned to her aunt on the phone on Thursday, “Furniture Mart is having a sale, and it might be a good time to upgrade the old thing.”

Friday, upon arriving at work, she spotted one of the gold floral arm covers stuck to her trouser leg. She joked with her co-worker, “The chair doesn’t want me to leave!”

Saturday, she spent more time in the chair than usual, making phone calls and reading. “Now I don’t want to leave the chair,” she thought, huffing to her feet to make lunch.

Sunday, she skipped lunch. Instead, she snoozed, watched TV, crocheted, read, and snoozed some more.

Monday, she had a sharp pain in her calf. Calling in sick, she told her manager, “I’ll elevate it and rest. That should do the trick.”

Tuesday, her forearms had an upholstered feel, and she noticed little metal balls on the base of her wood-grained feet.

Wednesday, her lap was covered in a familiar floral pattern.

Thursday, her head felt stuffed and soft.

Friday, the phone rang and rang.

Susan Fuchtman writes poetry and short fiction, with work in Stonecrop Review, Short Edition, Reckon Review, Plume, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City where she is a board member of PorchLight Literary Organization, a non-profit that supports writers through community-based, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary approaches to creative writing.

'When the Circus Left Town' by Tara Campbell

When the circus left town, they left behind their tent, deflated swaths of parachute cloth wriggling. At first we thought it was just the wind bringing the black-and-white fabric to life, but when the wind died, the tent didn’t. Things moved beneath the remains of the big top, bulges roving from side to side, shapes shifting, leaping, inflating and deflating.

Muttering and growling things.

We called the circus organizers.

“What do you want?” boomed a man’s voice over the phone. “Were you not entertained?”

“Oh, yes, yes, we were entertained,” we stammered. “But you left some things behind.”

“Impossible,” he barked.

“Oh, but it’s true,” we said. “There’s something underneath the cloth. Are you, by chance, missing any monkeys?”

“Ridiculous,” he scoffed.

“Any sword swallowers?”

“No.”

“Any storytellers? Llamas? Elephants?”

“No, no, and no.”

We swallowed. “Any lions or tigers?”

“I’m telling you, no. We had to get rid of our tent, but every other part of our circus is with us right now.”

“But it isn’t,” we insisted. “There’s something alive under that tent.”

“Perhaps…” We could have sworn we heard someone else whispering behind him, could have sworn we heard the word “curse.”

“Have you looked underneath?” he asked.

We wrung our hands. “No,” we said. “We’re afraid to.”

“Well…” he began. For a moment all we heard was the click clack click clack of the train carrying him farther and farther away from us. “You should be,” he said.

Then he hung up.

And the circus tent roared.

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. Previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary, as well as two novels and four collections of fiction and poetry.

'Newton’s Laws of Childhood' by Lenny Eusebi

Football helmets rattled skulls, big boys with big inertia. When violence closed in, the coaches scolded Billy for tossing the ball away as he’d done in playground games of Kill the Carrier. Coach Mike said adversity molds you in the shape of your heroes.

Billy had the opposite reaction. No sports molded you into a lightsaber-wielding farm boy or prodigal assistant pig keeper. He decided astronauts were the answer: adventurers sculpted by equations and star charts. And no one gave you dead arms or wedgies in the school library. Astronauts took derivatives, not fastballs to the ribs.

The gravity of actual astronauts on the cafeteria TV pulled him into its orbit. Not quite the Enterprise, the shuttle was still a marvel: gleaming white threaded with structurally sound black. In the Florida sunlight, it lit the whole cafeteria from a single screen. Billy glued his eyes to it, eating mechanically in time with the pre-launch countdown. Mission Control spoke: mellow, confident. Air exchangers and static hissed behind the tin can voices of astronauts. He’d memorized their names, even the teacher, reading them over and over on his promotional sticker. They were so cool. As T-minus ticked toward plus, pilot and commander battled jitters and sputters.

Pressure built. Rockets roared. A great white cloud of exhaust spiraled into the blue, then puffed outward like a firework made of cotton. Every voice flatlined, even Mission Control. Billy stared at that fluffy white burst, so soft and safe-looking. He peeled off his sticker, a rough velcro sound suspended in the silence.

Lenny Eusebi is a poetry and flash fiction enthusiast living near Boston. He has studied physics, designed computer games, built a career in applied science, and told many stories to his two young daughters. Inspired by the grandmasters of science fiction, he loves anything compressed and oblique and speculative.

'Appalachian Appaloosa' by Court Harler

Most people don’t know how to say Appalachia. It’s like Nevada—you say it differently if you live there, if you’ve ever lived there. Nevertheless, a horse lives in Appalachia, high in the Cumberland Mountains. She descends into the valleys to eat red apples off stunted green trees. Those trees, they twist, and she, the horse, rears on her hind legs to get at her favorite fall fruit.

I met her there once, in the apple orchard. Like many Scientologists, I believed the horse could be my mother reincarnated into a free, wild being. My mother always said she’d come back, so I hiked the hills around our farm until I found my mother in her new horse shape. I recognized her by her haunches—plump and bouncy. My horse mother galloped away at first, but I sang her a song about an appaloosa. She didn’t have any spots on her new coat, but the song still worked. She came closer and closer to me as I sang, nudged me on my shoulder. I pet her black mane, tapped her knobby knees. I don’t know why, but her knees, they fascinated me. They were black like her mane and tail, not brown like her body. I guess I’d call her a bay, and quite a common horse. If she hadn’t been my dead mother, I wouldn’t’ve looked twice at her, much less broke and rode her.

Court Harler is a queer writer from Northern Kentucky. Court is currently editor in chief of CRAFT and editorial director for Discover New Art. Court's multigenre work has been published around the world. Learn more at harlerliterary.llc.

This piece appeared briefly online with Writing By Writers in February 2018.

'Half Moons' by Preeti Chandan

Mom swiftly rolls the dough into a perfect two-inch round, stuffs it with sweetened powder of cashews, almonds, raisins, folds it into an elegant half-moon karanji and hands it to me. To crimp its curve, an artistic touch.

Fumbling fingers search for the pinch-pull motion mastered as a young girl, atrophied over the years, like other traditions left behind with the native land. Nah, mom says to the first with an uneven fringe. Naaah, to the second. Both defective goods, set aside.

A memory surfaces: Mom, aunts, grandmas chatting, chuckling in the kitchen, week before Diwali, the festival of lights. Their ample frames shaking with merriment. Deft fingers rolling and filling, folding and sealing plump semi-circles. One leaning toward seven-year-old me: Here child, here’s how. Fold-pinch-pull. Tight folds, tiny pinches.

Then in the years following: Let the child crimp, she does it best. The sweet fragrance of the fried delicacy swirling, wrapping around us.

I find myself humming and try again. Fingers catch the old rhythm: fold - - pinch - - pull. An arc of neat pleats begins to crown the half-moons.

Preeti Chandan grew up in Mumbai, India. She is a former journalist who now works as a sales and marketing professional in Southern California. Her micros and flash have appeared in 101 Words, 50-Word Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine and other online journals.

'St. Louis Blues' by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Chaz is a baseball player turned hockey pucker, an entrenched chewer of chaw, plug, qat, call it what you want. What his guitar-twanging wife, Daisy knows, and he knows too, is it makes teeth rot, heart stop, yields all manner of cancers: Mouth! Esophagus! Throat! Pancreas! When that list doesn’t stop his cud chewing, sewer-sludge-spitting, scourge of a habit she pulls back one finger for heart disease, another for stillborn offspring, a pinky for preemies, middle one for wives who are queasy, weary, and utterly disgusted (and don’t go whining that cud—as she calls qat—ain’t tobacco.) Chaz snuck some back from his Yemeni “hiking” trip in his duffel, lucked out it wasn’t sniffed out. Snuffed out, she’d snorted. Habit-forming, mind-altering so they say (just so! he agrees), gastritis-causing, esophagus-wrenching, vaso-constricting. Yet so, so satisfying, he counters, not to mention performance enhancing (in bed, he adds with a wily wink). To which Daisy twists her lip, cups the C-shaped maple neck of her instrument around her breast, hugs it tight, declares his vice ain’t nothin’ but a heart-wrecker marriage-breaker, but now he can munch, spit, slather and stink all he wants because she’s done with his honking stonker of a habit and before he can hock another boggy loogie anywhere in her vicinity she’ll be halfway home to the sticky-floored clubs of Nashville with her ‘65 Strat between her thighs. She’ll strap it around her neck and stroke those steel strings ‘til they moan with melancholy and heartbreak.

Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears, or is forthcoming, in Atticus Review, Centaur, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and others. Books include award-winning flash collection, Wolfsong, and novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social

Debut Flash: 'What We Talk About When One of Us Is Out of His Mind on Percocet' by Jim Parisi

“If this was the Middle Ages, I'd be shunned.”

“Shunned because you had meniscus surgery?” She forgets how funny he was when he got high.

She stops at the light and turns her head. His left leg, swaddled in a cocoon of cotton padding secured with an Ace bandage, stretches across the back seat.

“Without modern medicine I’d be a dead man limping, cast off to the outskirts, forced to rely on the charity of the few benevolent souls who took pity on me.” He scratches under the dressing with the business end of an ice scraper. “Who knows what would happen with the kids? You'd be forced to sell your body so we could eat.”

“We’d definitely starve.” She hits the blinker, decides not to needle him this time about how they’d get along fine without his pin money. “How much Percocet did they give you?”

“Enough to make me feel goooood.” He titters, a high-pitched giggle she hasn’t heard in years, maybe since when the kids were in training pants.

“Listen.” He pushes himself up on his elbows. “You’d have men crawling over each other to get with you. I’d be first in line. I’m sherioush.”

“I know you are, honey.” She’s banished him to the guest room for less. But she smiles, all teeth, in the rearview mirror. “That’s really sweet.”

The light changes. She turns off the blinker, hits the gas.

“Why didn’t you turn?”

“The kids won’t be home for another hour. Let’s take a drive.”

Her eyes catch his in the rearview mirror. His face erupts with the lopsided grin of a five-year-old; he waves as if noticing her for the first time.

“Lie back and relax, goofball. And tell me all about our life as medieval outcasts.”

Jim Parisi is a freshly unemployed editor who lives in Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife and their sweet but highly reactive boxer-pitbull mix. He has published personal essays about music for ihavethatonvinyl.com.

'Shooting for the Moon' by Jessica Klimesh

Ellee asks the boy next to her what he’s going to be when he grows up. The teachers are always asking, and this time the teacher has told them to talk about it with a partner, to write it down. The boy shrugs, but Ellee already knows, so she writes fast, then hands the boy her list, tells him that she’s also included things she’s already been, like a bird, a comet, and an Antarctic researcher. The boy only glances at her list, so Ellee reads it to him, says she’s going to be a dancer, a teacher, an astronaut. Now your turn, she says. The boy says he hasn’t been anything yet, but that he’d like to be famous someday, maybe a serial killer. Ellee pushes the piece of paper towards him, prodding, and he finally writes “cereal killer,” making her giggle, imagining someone gunning down bites of Toasted Oats or Wheaties. They are both too young to think about death.

The boy will move away in fifth grade and, in college, Ellee will study music, physics, and political science. And she’ll remember that once she was a bird, that once she was a comet, that once she wanted to be an astronaut. But she won’t recall the boy, his name, or even what he looked like until his face flashes across the TV screen one night. There will be a faint spark of recognition, the name familiar, but Ellee will dismiss the nagging thought. If she ever knew him, she’ll think, it was a long time ago, and they were both very different people then.

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer, editor, and writing coach whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Milk Candy Review, and Neither Fish Nor Foul, among others. Her work was also selected for Best Microfiction 2025.

'Between Spines and Silk' by Alyson Tait

Roads stretch beneath a cloudless sky that doesn't have vocabulary to forgive—to have mercy. Heat presses close to the earth and everything between, thick and unmoving, and within it, the saguaros stand in ranks. Tall. Unshaken. Spines a warning. But the elements don’t show fear. They don’t ask permission before brushing against them. The rain doesn’t hesitate before running down their ridged skin, sinking deep into their roots. The desert doesn’t apologize for what it is, and the cacti don’t bend.

And then there’s the bed—where breath catches, fingers trace the curve of a shoulder, sighs slip between parted lips like wind through canyon walls, skin against skin, without fear, heat against heat, without apologies; the slow reverent unraveling of something that was never tangled to begin with. Only the confirmation of what had always been. The quiet certainty in the way a body moves when it's exactly where it belongs, once a tongue has tasted the skin of a perfect match. The world tried to carve doubt into bone and to make the heart believe it's a question rather than an answer.

Outside, the saguaros remain, standing guard and providing sanctuary as they always have—spines raised, armor intact. But even the strongest roots crave rain. And even the fiercest things, given time, will flower. Even saguaros eventually seek confirmation that it belongs—deserves—planted in the hot desert dirt.

In one form or another, they will always remain.

And so will this.

And so will we.

Alyson Tait was born and raised in the Southwest USA, where she walked alongside cactuses and scorpions before moving to Maryland. She has appeared in (mac)ro(mic), HAD, and Pseudopod. She has chapbooks published by Querencia Press, Bottlecap Press, and Fahmidan Publishing, and one book forthcoming with Graveside Press.

'Locks' by Kelli Short Borges

We never walk alone at night. Never. Only stupid girls ignore that rule and we know what happens to them. If we need reminding, all we need to do is watch Dateline and listen to Keith Morrison, watch breaking news in any state any city any day. We never forget the girls’ faces. Their Bambi eyes, their yearbook grins, hair shiny as rearview mirrors. We click deadbolts, check them twice. We lock our bedroom doors at night—a lock inside of locks. We never take cocktails from strange men. We travel in packs, never leave a girl alone, never drink more than two martinis. We remember the girl who went missing last month, the ghosts of her eyes, her Chiclet smile stapled to a Starbucks bulletin board. A girl who broke the rules. It won’t be us, we say. We never walk to our cars without our keys in hand, nails flashing Kick Ass Red, metal splayed through our fingers like weapons. We are cortisol-flushed, animal eyes alert. We are ready. We never forget the rules. Until our keys are hung, our pajamas on. Until we’ve turned locks upon locks upon locks.

We never see them coming. Until their whiskey breath runs hot down our necks. Until their arms slip around us, familiar as locks. Until we remember Keith Morrison, his baritone warning, it’s always the friend, the boyfriend, the husband, it’s always someone you know.

Kelli Short Borges writes from her home in Phoenix, Arizona. Her fiction has appeared in Peatsmoke, Moon City Review, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. Recently, Kelli's work was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist and the 2024 and 2025 editions of Best Microfiction. She’s currently working on her first novel.

'When "Plan A" Goes Awry' by Lisa Ferranti

Dani’s hands are dirty. She digs in soil beneath the rose bushes in the condo’s community garden, ignoring Blake, who’s weeding next to her. She forgot her gloves, and her fingernails collect grime. She tries not to picture her nails raking Blake’s back just an hour before. The audacity, she thinks, trying to avoid other “A” words that crowd her mind.

She’s still surprised she’s attracted to a man the same age as her father, a detail she’s concealed from him on their weekly calls. Another concealed detail: Blake is married. The disease Blake’s wife has: Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t absolve Dani, but she uses the knowledge to assuage her guilt.

Mrs. Crandle, the condo association president, gives her a purse-lipped smile, and Dani nods, looks away. She imagines that everyone sees a scarlet “A” emblazoned across her chest. She recalls the family-folklore her dad tells: how at age three she ate a little wooden “A” tile from the Scrabble game. She wonders now if that incident branded her somehow, marked her as a future Adulteress.

A prickly weed pokes her finger and she yanks her hand upward, scraping it against the bush’s thorns. A line of red dots appears on her knuckles. Blake removes one glove, pulls a white handkerchief from his pocket, offers it to her, their arms brushing in the exchange. She pulls away as if her skin has been singed.

She remembers her highest scoring Scrabble word ever, during a game with her dad when she was younger: Vixen, the X on a triple letter, plus double word. She was so proud of herself, the word holding no meaning then other than Score!, a time when her plan didn’t include being a mistress, when all “A” stood for was Apple.

Lisa Ferranti's fiction has been a Best of the Net finalist, nominated for The Best American Short Stories Anthology, The Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. Her work has appeared in Fractured Lit, RUBY Literary, Gordon Square Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere.

'When "Plan A" Goes Awry' was a Reflex Fiction 2019 Winter contest finalist.and was published in Reflex Fiction 2019 Anthology.

'Overactive Imagination' by Olivia Brochu

I think about what I would wear to your funeral if you died tragically, perhaps in a car accident, and I’d have to walk into church, our church, with the stained glass windows that make it look like the sun is peeking through the forest, dressed all in black with our kids trailing behind me and everyone staring, maybe in one of those hats with a veil over my eyes so no one could see my mascara run while I read that poem you like about the indispensable man, and host a luncheon at our house, the one I insisted we buy even though it had holes in the walls and a busted down front door, but it doesn’t look like that anymore because you fixed it all, and I’d tell everyone gathered to mourn you about how you stayed up late after work for years to spackle and solder and repair and redesign, and then everyone would leave and I’d sit quietly in the house you made our home, on the stairs that you painted - black treads and white risers with smudgy handprints that came later – and sob in unison with the sounds of our babies’ sleeping breaths.

I think about it so if it happens, I’m not too surprised, too shattered.

Which is to say, I love you.

Olivia Brochu's work has been featured by Anti-Heroin Chic, Feels Blind Literary, The Inquisitive Eater, and more. Her essay about her father's heart attack was a WOW Women on Writing contest finalist. She is a fan of gut-wrenching prose, rollercoasters, and baby feet. You can read more at oliviabrochuwrites.com.

'Everyone Was Welcome at The Hope and Ruin’s Spoken Word Night' by Anika Carpenter

Even Evan, who wore a beret and a black polo neck like we were hanging out in a 1950s New York basement. Evan, whose poetry was written by bats.

I asked him once if he’d prefer to read up-side-down, ‘it might feel more authentic.’ He looked at me as though I should find myself exhausting, like quitting hosting poetry nights to focus on my actual job was the best option for me. ‘Bats process more sensory data than we ever could,’ he said.

The first bat poem Evan read was about grief. In it, devastation bounced off every surface creating echoey images of impenetrable cave walls. The audience, mostly poets clutching the pieces they planned to read, was moved to tears.

As far as I’m aware, bats don’t find themselves wishing they could talk to their not-long-dead father about their troubled marriage. They don’t drop from the sky because the thought ‘I must give dad a call’ popped into their head, because for a moment they forgot he won’t be there to answer. But Evan said, ‘If we want to understand our lack of understanding, we have to embrace non-human creativity.’

Evan started sharing his access to bats with other people, had Spoken Word Nights changed to Chiroptera Slams. He swapped bar snacks for swarms of midges and introduced segregated seating, because female bats tend to keep themselves separate unless they’re ready to mate.

I couldn’t stomach the readings. I went outside, sat and watched insects bother street lights, wrote about a community who survived on a diet of nothing but moths. They had all the protein they needed, but fur from the moth’s bodies built up on their tongues, until it was impossible for them to get their words out.

Anika Carpenter lives and works in Brighton, UK. Her stories have been published by Fictive Dream, Gone Lawn, Goosebury Pie, 100 Word Story and others, and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Award. You can find her via her website www.anikacarpenter.com

'The Summer I Learned About Love' by Jeff Harvey

To get me away from watching reruns of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman all summer, my Aunt Zettie invited me for orange Kool-Aid and taught me how to crochet using Wonder Bread plastic bags. She showed me her collection of Sunday hats, dining room curtains, a toilet seat cover, and her own version of The Last Supper that she had crocheted; all popped with red, yellow, and blue dots. Soon I made vests and headbands for my sisters, a tie for Dad, a rain bonnet for Mom, and my summer wardrobe: t-shirt, shorts, flip flops, and underwear. Mom gave me the news about Aunt Zettie, and I crocheted her a wig and a gown with twist ties in the back. When I visited, she was wearing both and said, “This takes me back to the time I read tea leaves at a carnival.”

Jeff Harvey lives in Southern California and edits Gooseberry Pie Lit. His fiction has been published recently by Ghost Parachute and Bending Genres.

'Fetch' by Kelly Pedro

Zara swam in her backyard pool wearing mermaid flippers her mother made. Her mother tossed rings, and Zara obediently retrieved them. Her brother threw a fork, and Zara plucked it mid-air and used it as a comb. Her father lobbed a Barbie that fluttered before it thunked in the pool and Zara skimmed her from the surface and held her under her arm. Her dance instructor threw a pearly pink tutu that Zara had once worn seven days in a row, and she performed a grand jeté, the tutu and Zara both landing without a sound. On and on it went, Zara swishing through laps for days, years, so long her fingers wrinkled, her arms tired. She begged for a pool noodle, a life jacket, a float board. Instead, a professor who questioned everything Zara knew about physics thrust in her thesis. A micromanaging boss she’d grown to hate pitched a doll Zara had mistakenly loved rocking to sleep, striking the side of her head with a reverberating ring. A man she wouldn’t marry shoved in Barbie’s dream house and paper dolls that melted in her hands, the ink staining her fingers. Zara stacked each item, using the pages of her thesis like plaster to hold everything together. She tore the tutu in half, lacing the fabric through each ring before tossing it over the pile and heaving on the line until it went taut. She unzipped her mermaid flippers and climbed, hooking a toe into the dream house’s kitchen window, bashing the fork into the water-logged doll to hoist her up until she reached the top and planted the tines of the fork into the heap, the metal glinting silver from the sun, her reflection in it like some kind of treasure she had just discovered.

Kelly Pedro is a Portuguese Canadian writer from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. She is the winner of the 2024 CRAFT Literary Flash Prose Prize and shortlisted for Room’s 2022 Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in CRAFT, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Cleaver, Archetype, Flash Frog, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Moon City Review. She is a 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow. She lives on the Haldimand Tract within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples—land that was promised to the Six Nations of the Grand River. Find her at kellypedro.ca.

'Solo' by Lori Cramer

After she drives away, he’ll order a pizza. Not from DeFranco’s, the place she prefers, but from Rocco’s, where the pizza’s so greasy she always blots her slices at least three times with a paper towel. No need to ask for a bottle of diet soda, that’s for sure. He’ll be having Bud. As many cans as he wants. He’ll eat, drink, and belch right there in front of the big-screen TV, and you can bet he won’t be watching a rom-com or some red-carpet fashion show. No, he’ll be flipping from one ballgame to another—without anyone nagging him to just pick a channel already! When all the games are over, he’ll head to the bedroom, toss his clothes anywhere he wants, and stretch out in bed. If he snores, nobody’s bony elbow will dig into his ribs in the middle of the night. And the next morning, when sunlight rouses him from a sound sleep, he’ll reach over to her side of the bed and, taken aback by the chill of the sheets, grab his phone to check the time so he can calculate how many more hours he has to fill until she finally comes home.

Lori Cramer’s short prose has appeared in Fictive Dream, Flash Boulevard, The Mersey Review, Scaffold, Splonk, and elsewhere. Her work has been longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best Microfiction. Links to her writing can be found at https://loricramerfiction.wordpress.com. X: @LCramer29. Bluesky: @loricramerwriter.bsky.social.

Debut Flash: 'A Deer Looks Up' by Simone Kremkau

When the days in the summer of 1973 get too hot we go over to the Shulmans. We sit on the raw wool mustard green couch in shorts, dangling our legs, the fabric scratching the backs of our thighs. The window AC blasts in the background and Mrs. Shulman brings out trays of lemonade and cookies. A framed photograph on the mantle shelf shows Mr. Shulman as a boy, at our age, ten or eleven, holding the hand of a tall elegant woman in a fox trimmed mink coat.

“How old is your grandma now?” Our grandmothers look different and it’s not just the coat.

“Dad was born in Chicago in 1947.” Ben, our friend, scratches his head. “Grandma grew up in Germany. But she doesn’t want to go back.”

“Not even visiting?” Hard to believe, we think to ourselves.

Ben has a snow globe, too. Inside, a circle of fir trees around a deer with a tiny red scarf, looking up. When we shake it, a flurry of plastic snowflakes blinds us and conceals the little scene. John tried to open the globe once but didn’t succeed. And the snow never wins, but settles back always, leaving a thin film of ice, barely visible to the naked eye.

As a librarian, Simone Kremkau spends her days organizing knowledge and making local history accessible to all. With countless stories following her home, she cannot resist weaving past tales into present-day fiction, as though they are just another layer of the now. She lives in Northern California.

'Born Again' by Rebecca Tiger

“Drop your grotesqueries in the bucket!” the man in the white jumpsuit bellows. With trembling hands, we tear off misshapen ears, bulbous noses, some of us gouge out our beady eyes, peel back our thin lips, rip out coarse hair, extract yellowed teeth. We now have faces like Swiss cheese, scalps like molting Blue Jays, we look as if made of Play-Doh, clowns before makeup, our hands shiny with gore and the air turns sickly sweet, our chests swelling to fill our lungs with the benumbing perfume. We fall to the ground, tripping over our comatose brethren until we unite in a deep chemical slumber.

When our closed eyes register shining light, like the brightest of suns, when it warms our skin, kisses our rosy cheeks, we groggily breathe in the crisp air with our aquiline noses, run our tentative fingers through soft wavy hair, our cochlea, protected by round well-proportioned ears, register contented moans; we see each other through almond shaped eyes, we smile with full lips, our white teeth gleam. We cry together, we wail in unison, we now know what it is like to be beautiful; we, too, can say that we are perfect.

Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at Middlebury College and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. She writes on the long train ride to and from work. You can find her at published stories at rebeccatigerwriter.com.

'Paperclip Empire' by Myna Chang

Radiant mice tell me they want to live in my house. It’s night and I’m trying to sleep and I don’t think I want any roommates, not even when they glow and sing a cappella at midnight. You can’t stay here, I say. This is the wrong place for you.

The mice show me their feet. Look, they say. We have clever mice feet. We will build temples for you. A wave of frothy mud fills my floor and the mice use their clever little feet to sculpt it into miniature Roman structures; a replica Colosseum, a small-scale Pantheon, a petite aqueduct. They hum ballads while they work and I wonder where they studied architecture.

The mice pat the frothy mud into a bust of a scowling emperor. Not Caracalla, I say. He looks so angry. They re-sculpt him into a waterfall that tastes like sanctuary and cotton candy; and they create rosebud roads and starshine bridges and parks filled with velvet pillows; and they sing me disco songs that make my not-so-clever feet tap light, so I tell them it’s not the wrong place for them after all, they can live in my desk drawer, if they want, forever, if they want, as long as they don’t mind the stray paper clips.

Myna Chang is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books). Her writing has been selected for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America. Find her at MynaChang.com or on Bluesky at @MynaChang.

'Paperclip Empire' was first published in Gone Lawn, Issue 40 in Spring 2021.

'Hero Complex' by Timothy C Goodwin

You’ve got your cigarette-stained drunks at the Dixie Tavern, your ex that riles you into a fevered pacing after seismic phone calls but still scores you dime bags, your manager at TGI Friday’s who shares his coke with you in the office; but you’ve also got me, who cleans your dogs' shit in the kitchen when you’re too stoned to walk them, who drained the back yard of dead brush and sun-bleached garbage to try and trap you in sunrises and sunsets, who pays your rent, so you have a place to sleep it all off so you can do it all again. You've got me, who keeps saying No when you beg me to meet your bar friends, No when you’re asking if I want to celebrate nothing in particular with cocktails, No, no, and no, my magic word that will get you to admit how much I’m doing for you, so I can get my own fix.

Timothy C Goodwin has work included in Trash Cat, HAD, Twin Pies, Dishsoap Quarterly, BULL, JAKE, and elsewhere. He is also the cohost of the Tiffin Inn Writing Workshop podcast, and lives in NYC.

'The City at Sunset' by Cheryl King

Under the cover of twilight shadows, we frolicked past the garden gates, where vines intertwined like our linked hands. Past the brick porches of stone homes stacked together like children’s building blocks.

Past Mrs. Herrington’s cottage, crammed between brownstones and clotheslines. Up the cobblestone hill and around the stucco corner and past the bakery with its tendrils of sugar chasing our noses.

“Where are we going?”

Your hat tumbling down and away, you squeezed my hand harder.

“You’ll see!”

Up the patterned cathedral steps and around to the alley overgrown with ivy and stray cats, down the narrow pathway between Mr. Barbora’s flat and the quaint bistro with pineapple umbrella drinks.

Through archways and gateways, past pink doors and yellow windows, under faded awnings and vibrant flags, over dwarf hedges and toadstools.

Past horn blasts and bicycle bells and dog barks and mamas calling their children inside.

Past music drifting from windows and whistles rising from kettles and squeals bursting from babies.

Around winding corners, through torchlit tunnels, under walkways spilling cascades of flowers. Past porches and patios and pergolas, and one building after the next, so close together their doors opened onto one another and waved hello.

When we reached a moss-covered footbridge, the river’s aroma upon the air, you announced, “Almost there.”

And, like the city’s bon voyage, the stone gave way to grass, and the grass rolled toward trees, and the trees opened up to blue, blue water with the orange stripe of the setting sun, and all we could hear were the gulls and the wind and the river and their sundown orchestra.

We sat arm in arm, catching our breath but losing it too, and there was nowhere else I would rather be – the city at our backs and the future floating freely out ahead.

Cheryl King is a dyslexia therapist and writer with two published historical fiction books.

'Primers for young readers: Flick and Jane go to school' by Cheryl Markosky

My name is Flick. My friend is Jane. Tomorrow, we go to school.
Mother says I will go across the road. Jane a long way away.

“Why?” I ask Mother.
“Because she's Catholic."
“Surely this is an accident," I say.
“No,” Mother says.

“Can I go with Jane to her Catholic school?” I ask Mother.
“No,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because you are not a Catholic,” Mother says.
“What is a Catholic?"
“Someone who has lots of babies."

Jane has a baby doll called Bess.
“She will have more babies,” says Mother.
“Will they be accidents?”
“Yes and no,” says Mother.

“Can I go to school with Jane and have babies that are accidents?”
“No,” says Mother.
“Why not?”
“If you go to Jane’s school and sit on the swing you might have an accident, you might get pregnant."
“What is pregnant?” I ask.
“Having a baby,” Mother says.

I like the idea of pregnant, of having a baby like Bess. Bess has blue eyes and blonde hair like Jane. I have brown eyes and brown hair.

Mother says I must not sit on the swing at Jane’s long way away school and be pregnant. Mother says I am a Protestant.
“Do Protestants sit on swings and have babies like Catholics?” I ask.
“Yes and no,” Mother says.

I am confused.

“Catholics and Protestants sound the same," I say.
“They are not,” says Mother. “Catholics have more babies.”
Catholics have many Besses. I want to be a Catholic. Mother says no.

I want to sit on the swing at Jane’s school. I want an accident. I want a Bess. I want Jane.

My name is Flick. My friend is Jane. Tomorrow, I go to school. I go to school across the road. Jane goes to school a long way away.

Cheryl Markosky has had teensy stories published in New Flash Fiction Review, Janus Literary, Retreat West, The Molotov Cocktail, Mslexia and others. She writes about fathers turning into centaurs, Grandma's shrunken head decorating a tiki bar, a dog in season and more...

'Disenchanted' by David Galef

And I, an old citizen of Elvenbloom, a village ruled by two irascible warlocks named Jack and not-Jack, its citizens composed of those who work magic and those worked upon, the morning air misted with spells of transformation, boy bewitched into cabbage, girl into swine, and dusk lit by counter-spells of restoration, though not always complete (boy retains green ears, girl grunts), parents of an unruly child hoping for a changeling, the market folk purveying everything from birth charms to deadly relics and supernatural fava beans, the blacksmith and baker at times aided by blue and green fairies, at other times frustrated by trolls, the town well inhabited by a frog prince who croons “Kiss me!” with no takers, the local school presided over by a witch who has punished bad students with a hundred years of detention, the public library loaning out grimoires and thaumaturgy treatises, the annual Festival of Mirth with its forced cachinnation, the doctor with the devil knows what in his bag, the lawyer who speaks with a serpent’s tongue, the therapist offering necromancy sessions for dissatisfied couples, youth lying entwined on the village green in summer while experiencing the enchantment of youth, the pharmacy advertising a drastic sale on love potions, talking cats roaming the streets though without much to say for themselves, dogs who are just dogs, the town not far from the Lair of Oom, where the dragons noisily mate every spring, the moiety of us all too often bewitched, bothered, and bewildered—I long for a municipality with a just and equitable system of government, a democracy in harmony, presided over by elected officials and a board of impartial judges with no hint of invisibility—but that, I know, is a magic wish that will never come to pass.

David Galef has published a dozen books, including My Date with Neanderthal Woman (Dzanc Short Story Prize) and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (Kirkus Best Books of 2006). His latest is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. He’s also the editor in chief at Vestal Review.

'Gameplay' by Emily Rinkema

My boyfriend’s thirteen year-old daughter challenges me to a game of Scrabble as her father, my lover, makes my favorite dessert, a berry pie that’s more bitter than sweet. She confidently places her first word, GOOSE, and her father says something celebratory. She gives me the look she’s been practicing for months, a look she first flashed when her father flirted with me in the restaurant where I work, a look that says, “He’s mine, bitch.”

I know that look from both sides and I know who he’ll choose every time.

I drink my wine and play the word FLING and then rack up the points, word after word: CHERUB and MOVE and NYMPH on a triple letter, and I keep eye contact with her, this creature who’s still young enough to cry when she loses, but old enough to do it in her room, who will soon cross lines she isn’t even aware of, who will learn to express her anger in a way that’s invisible to the world, but visible on her body, and I lay JEZEBEL onto a double word and lean back and watch her place tiles that open the board wide, that set me up for QUEEN down the left side triple word, and I can see her holding in her tears, the physical pain of it on her little face.

She has so much to learn, and I know I won’t be around long enough to teach her.

“Pie,” her father says, placing a perfect slice in front of me and kissing the top of my head, and she knows I’ve won, that she never had a chance, and even though she hates me for it, I can see in her glassy eyes that she’s grateful, at least, for the clarity.

Emily lives in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has most recently appeared in Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can follow her on X, BS, or IG @emilyrinkema.

Debut Flash: 'Graduation' by Sarah Padgett

As everyone tossed their graduation caps in the air I looked up to see a sea of royal blue come hurling down around me. I was still clutching my cap and had yet to throw it upwards because I was struck with some unshakable and heady feeling I couldn’t put a name to. Then about half a second later I threw up my graduation cap and it was as if time had been suspended and my hat floated up there just long enough for me to realize what the feeling was. It was the complex fear of growing up mixed with the giddy uncertainty of what the future held. I gave everyone around me some kind of last look like they were about to evaporate into the ether of the real world. Some of them I would see again in sparse surprising ways and others really would just blend into some kind of vapor and disappear after that.

Sarah Padgett is a lifelong writer hailing from Texas but currently living in Michigan.

'A Normal Tuesday' by Louise Hurrell

I stepped in from the cold night air. Familiar sounds rushed towards me: excitable football pundits, the held breath of the crowd. Blue light pooled at the living room door. I shucked my coat, swapped my Mary Janes for slippers, and padded through. You were sitting in your usual spot on the sofa, eyes glued to the screen. You didn’t look away when you asked:

‘How was work today? Anything interesting?’.

I wanted to tell you the truth: how I drove to the office; how I got out, turned and walked away. Left the car in its bay. My heels chirruped against the pavement; wildflowers bloomed between the cracks as I passed. I strolled for hours but my feet never tired. I waltzed straight to the harbour, hopped in the first empty boat and untied the ropes. I sailed across the globe. I learnt new languages, sucked exotic fruit. I snuck inside the Library of Congress and memorised every single book. Ask me to quote any poet – Mackellar, Lorca, Limón - and I could. I travelled alone to the North Pole. I discovered the cure for the common cold. I greeted the people of Atlantis and dragged the Mary-Celeste from her hidey-hole. I toppled whole dictatorships. I invented a rail service that actually ran on time. I sang, danced, slurped, swallowed, stroked, poked, sniffed, whiffed, until the Earth held no more secrets. Then I cupped the sun like a clementine, peeled the pith with my teeth and ate the segments, spitting out star-seeds onto the sky’s dark tablecloth, the same stars you grunted at disinterestedly when I pointed them out to you last night, and not the fact you had forgotten our anniversary.

I wanted to tell you all this. Instead, I shrugged.

‘The usual, really,’ I said, ‘Nothing much’.

Louise Hurrell (she/her) is a writer from Dundee, Scotland. Her work has appeared in Oranges Journal and The Circus Collective. She likes to wander art galleries in her spare time.

'We Were Lost and Young' by Kathryn Kulpa

So young, and the world was young with us and offered nothing to guide us. The car bumped along a dark winter road and we bumped along inside it. We only touched by accident. Streets passed without street signs, without streetlights, no lights at all but the stars in the sky. Once I would have loved getting lost with him. Now I watched the gas gauge nervously, pulled at the seatbelt that dug into my shoulder. The radio faded between stations. The only part of the car that worked reliably was the heat, blasting a dragon’s breath of stale popcorn and skunked beer. I cracked my window, wiped the fogged glass with my jacket sleeve. Dark shapes passed, as if the whole town was sleeping, and then I saw a house all alive and brightly lit. Doors open to the night, flooded with orange light. A barn, and inside the shape of a horse.

Stop, I said, and the man I wouldn’t marry laughed, asked if I wanted to ask the horse for directions. And I did. I had never wanted anything so hard in my life as I wanted to leap from the car and run to that lighted barn. Whatever that horse told me, I would believe him.

The man I wouldn’t marry kept driving. Eventually, we found a ramp for the highway. A highway he would take in another direction someday, with a woman who wasn’t me. I don’t remember the day he left. I don’t remember our last fight. I only remember that night. How lost I felt. I remember the wanting. The campfire glow of that doorway, like it was there to welcome me home. A dark night, a lonely barn. A horse in the moonlight, waiting.

Kathryn Kulpa is a writer, editor, and librarian with work in Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions. She is a 2025 writer-in-residence at Linden Place in Bristol, RI, where she hopes to grapple with the ghosts of history.

'Sebby’s Rocket' by James Montgomery

Look, I know it ain’t much, a bottle of fizzy pop, nabbed after last night’s shift at the Golden Dragon, but your mom’s got foil, paints borrowed from working today’s kids’ club, and paper, all crinkly like, for flames from them thrusters—the bog roll’s ours, at least—and I know it’s not the one you want, the one we promised, with the flashing lights and the countdown song, and God knows I’m cack-handed, will probably mess it all up, but we’re trying our hardest, and when we take off from here, someday soon, I swear by that there moon we’ll soar.

James Montgomery writes from Stafford in the UK. His stories have been published by Bath Flash Fiction Award, Splonk, The Welkin Prize, Emerge Literary Journal, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, Reflex Fiction and more. Find him at www.jamesmontgomerywrites.com

'Tongue' by Sudha Balagopal

Father's tongue falls out of his mouth during Sunday dinner. One moment he is spewing a hail-storm of hateful, hurtful words, next moment, the muscle lands from his mouth onto a half-eaten bun.

Mother crushes the napkin in her fists, quakes in her chair. My fork and knife clang-clatter onto the tiled floor.

Father's vast, toothy mouth drops wide open, revealing bits of food stuck in his molars. He lunges after the slimy pink organ with his meaty fingers, scattering the bread and tipping the soup tureen. The quick tongue, moist with a coating of spittle, slip-slithers away from him.

Father is particular about taking care of his sinful tongue. He scrapes the three-inch length with a stainless steel, U-shaped tongue cleaner every morning and every night, over and over. He has grated, and grated, and flattened his taste buds. Now, he cannot taste the tomato sauce in a lasagna or the brown sugar mother adds to the apple pie.

Today, he screamed at Mother for her muddy soup, for the chalky bread, for the salt-less vegetables. His tongue, that soft body part, hit her harder than a baseball bat.

She's learned to tuck the injuries under a soft voice, inside her soundless movements, behind her lowered gaze.

Father swings across the table making guttural sounds, gasping, grasping for his tongue which has flipped upside down in the oven-roasted vegetables. Faint blue lines mark the organ, veins maybe.

The muscle leaps onto Mother's plate. In two breaths, she places the tines of her fork on Father's tongue, holds her knife poised over the flesh.

He waves his arms up and down, up and down, stamps his feet, thud-thud-thud.

Mother pins her gaze on him. It's as steady as her fork on his passive tongue.

First published in Stanchion Zine, October, 2022.

Sudha Balagopal work appears or is forthcoming in Banshee, Doric Literary and Fictive Dream among other journals. Her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction, UK, in 2024. She has had stories included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top50.

'One of the Lies I Tell My Children (#19)' by Ruth Joffre

If they say they hate this town and want to go somewhere else, we will leave—just like that—sell the house and pack up the minivan and let it decide where we should go next. Every morning, we will wake up somewhere new: the parking lot of a drive-in slinging hashbrowns and flapjacks for brunch, the trailhead of a hike nestled deep inside a national forest, the rocky shore of a beach on the Oregon coast, hundreds of miles from anything we have ever known and loved. This morning under the gold-tipped firs will be their first time seeing the ocean. Smelling the brine, hearing the waves break against stones. I will watch them discover how it feels to dig their toes into the sand. How to roll up their pants and let water crash on their shins. They will refuse to collect seashells, at first, believing themselves too cool (too mature) to engage in such a childish activity, until one of them stumbles across a piece of sea glass, its edges long and wavy like a dagger, and they start slipping keepsakes into their pockets (a gray pebble flecked green; a piece of driftwood bleached white in the sun; a mussel, its shell pried open, stripped of meat). For a day, at least, this will feel like home. We will throw open the trunk door and dangle our legs out the back as the sun sets. At night, we will build ourselves a bonfire. Toast marshmallows on sticks we gather from the sands. Say, Where will we go tomorrow? as if we have any control over the future.

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, TriQuarterly, The Journal, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022,

'Olvera Street Loteria' by Peggy Riley

La Arana.

Brown fingers in fingerless gloves, she fans and turns the cards.

La Luna.

He rode in through darkness, hard hooves on a red dirt road. Only came in for a beer. Now he’s getting his fortune told, penny for five cards.

Widow spider, crescent moon. “What is this?”

She shushes him. He isn’t used to that. Back home, women bat their lashes, bite their lips for him. Out here, they’re scarce as water. Anyone’s a prize.

La Nopa. Wild-armed cactus tree.

He came west in a buckboard wagon, crossing plains, counting chickens. Left behind his family and birthright, the pink-lipped, wide-hipped girls, for the prospect of glint and glimmer, but all he found were rocks. Didn’t know how to stop digging.

La Calavera. Skull.

Once, he swung his pickaxe. Struck bone, head round as a river stone. Native? Miner? Could’ve been anyone, but he didn’t want it to be him. Maybe he hadn’t believed streets would be paved with the stuff, but he’d thought there might be a nugget left for him.

He swapped his pan to a greenhorn for pennies, hitched a ride with a friar on the back of a long-lashed donkey. Mission-bound, but he wouldn’t stay, not for God nor the hope of stew.

La Muerta. Skeleton.

“No.” Fist to the cards. This won’t be his fate.

Her hand is a bird, taloning his wrist. She turns a sixth and smiles.

El Corazon. A heart – a heartbeat.

Between her lips, a flash of gold. Her mouth is all a-shimmer.

He pulls out another penny. What else of her might shine?

Peggy Riley is a playwright, writer, community artist and lecturer. Her work has been commissioned, produced, broadcast, published and installed. www.peggyriley.com

'Professional Waver' by Guy Cramer

There was a family who every time we drove past their mansion I’d wave to their son in the yard. He’d be out tumbling around streaking grass stains on his white clothes. He’d look up, but he wouldn’t wave back. My dad said they were so rich, if they didn’t want to wave, they didn’t have to.

I pulled back the giant brass knocker and stood between the Romanesque pillars, asking if they’d like to hire a professional waver. The butler said hold on and went away. When he came back he asked when I could start. I said I could start anytime. They set me up outside, dressed me in the same clothes as their son, gave me a lawn chair I could sit in while the yard workers worked.

I’d been out there long enough the wife was concerned how much I sweated. She sent someone with a pitcher of lemonade for me. The first few cars that drove by I waved at, even though they didn’t wave back. Word got around. Before I knew it, there were two-hundred cars a day coming by just to wave at me. So much that the husband said they should talk to the city about putting in a toll booth. When my arm got tired I slouched in the chair, drank all the lemonade away. They hired a man to stand behind me just to hold me up.

I decided to retire and they gave me a pension. I stand outside in front of my own mansion now, when the paperboy or tourists come by waving I just stare back. The mailman asks why I don’t do it even for him. I tell him I did it for years; there are just some things you shouldn’t give away for free anymore.

Guy Cramer is a writer from east Texas whose stories have appeared in: Paragraph Planet, Short Beasts, Vestal Review, Flash Frontier, Major 7th Mag, and JAKE. He has forthcoming work in 5 Minutes and Does It Have Pockets? He is on Instagram @guy.cramer

Debut Flash: 'Deliverance' by Christina Sponselli

You gave birth three times, yet never saw a baby being born until you watched at the foot of my bed. “He’s not as slimy as I expected,” you said. We laughed.

Now, I’m at the foot of your bed. Eyes are closed, your breath labored. I talk about our life, just us two. Things I wanted to say, but never did, until now. Your eyes are still closed. I talk about the birth of my son, your grandson, and your eyelids raise, barely. I see your pupils – lighthouse beacons – and your familiar eyes watch me one last time.

Christina Sponselli lives with her family in Northern California. She has served drinks in a Boston nightclub, formatted patents at an Austin translation company, and packaged smoked salmon in an apple orchard near the California coast. But she was always scribbling her observations in a notebook.

'Wedding Breakfast' by Anne Howkins

Amy totters down the airplane steps like a newborn foal unfolding too-long limbs after a cramped gestation. Jim is still jittery with virgin flyer’s nerves and post—wedding euphoria when they check into the hotel, wafting at the cluster of insects buzzing around the desk. Not quite the salubrious joint he expected. Formalities over, they traipse along a corridor, green fluorescence flickering to a twitchy rhythm. Amy fumbles with the lock. He picks her up and staggers into the bridal suite.

‘Ah,’ she says, ‘undress me.’ He unzips the dress her mother gift wrapped her in twelve hours earlier.

Amy sits on the toilet, watching a fly zigzag across the mirror, listening to her husband’s gentle postcoital snoring. Rolls the word husband around in her head, thinks she prefers boyfriend.

She surveys the airconditioned bathroom. A pair of lizards, so still she thinks they are plastic, sits on a pipe. She gazes at their miniscule perfection, sees the hint of movement, peers at flickering tongues tasting the air.

‘What are you doing?’ his voice, already worn down with the weight of marriage, bounces off tiled walls, ‘Come back to bed.’

Jim’s hand is a hot knife on her ice cream cool skin. She edges away, grateful for the vast queen size bed, murmurs, ‘Sleep’.

Amy lies still as his breathing softens, letting her bones set in some new married pattern. Her eyes practise swivelling in the gloom, learn to process kaleidoscope images. Her tongue flickers, tasting the air, waiting for that fly.

Anne mainly writes flash. Recent stories have appeared at WestWord, Flash 500, Free Flash Fiction, NFFD, Cranked Anvil, The Hoolets Nook and TrashCatLit. When not writing, Anne looks after the finances of a charity, walks, sings and dances, and spends as much time as possible with her adored grandson.

'The Music Teacher' by Sarvin Parviz

For Negar Ighani

We stood in a circle, patted our chests and thighs, sang and jumped then clapped. We jumped once more in tune, until lightning struck. She asked us to hold hands and the rain grew slower under our toes. We felt like raindrops falling from the sky, droplets lying deep within the sea. This was her idea of God. We promised to never speak of it with anyone. We told her we didn’t believe in one. What was it others believed in?

***

We stand in circles and jump, higher than before. Lightning strikes. We hesitate. We hope to hear her voice.

Sarvin Parviz is a writer, librettist, playwright and artist born in Tehran. She is the winner of Graduate and Professional Council Award in Creative Activities and a semifinalist in the European Opera-directing Prize (EOP). She has an MFA in fiction from SIUC and is currently working on her second opera.

'Mapping' by Patricia Bender

Someone once asked me how do you write directions to a memory. I can’t remember who asked, but I can tell you it might be a sound, like the click of the old screen door that marks the spot. Or the smell of lilacs and geraniums that says, you’re here, you’re back. Or they are. They planted honeysuckle, which remind you of sweet biscuits, to climb the trestle alongside the dog run. The flowers intoxicating the bees so completely, there is no danger of getting stung as you run to the back gardens. It might be the sound of a gravel drive under your car tires telling you, you’re home, Or a train whistle. Certainly, the sound of bagpipes drifting up from the river banks, that would do it. But so would the wind moving through an oak tree’s branches announce, you’re back or they are, your loved ones. It might be the sight of a red singled house with grey wooden porches. It could be a small hen, red, and a large dog, black, standing sentry at some gates. You’d be right to find them friendly. Once dusk opens, a porch light shining in a back yard will signal you’re in the right place. You’re back or they are, your loved ones waiting. It could be the sound of a voice, one you remember but never heard before, a stranger asking in a cadence that acts as bridge, as highway, as high speed rail, You’re all right there, are ya? You might think, sometimes, you can’t get there from here, but the directions come to you when you need them most. And you never need write them down.

Patricia Bender’s writing has been published by Paterson Literary Review, Switch, in THE GREAT FALLS ANTHOLOGY, and elsewhere. She’s received recognition in competitions offered by Cutthroat, Over the Edge, and The Allingham Festival. A National Writing Project Fellow, she serves as an editor of the New Jersey English Journal.

'How Red Your Heart' by Faith Allington

I always knew one day I’d lose you. We could choose a life rural or urban and it wouldn’t matter because fairytales linger in your blood like flecks of microplastic. They may shimmer and shapeshift, hiding their sharp bones under prettier stories, but they never stop singing their warnings. How the sweetest lips taste of small deaths, how to spot a wolf and what wedding dress is also a burial gown. The story you loved most was how to escape by sewing your mouth shut and refusing the gifts—jewel dark berries, worm-kissed apples, fresh toadstools and meat pies brimming with rot. But when he comes for you with golden offerings, you smile and open your mouth, waiting for the poison to take. This is you crawling into the throat of the wolf, armed with fists and teeth, unhinging your own hunger until you’ve devoured everything but the skin and eyes. This time, O this time, they’ll fit.

Faith Allington (she/her) is a genre-blending writer in Seattle, where she admires fungi and drinks too much tea. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Haven Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Crow & Cross Keys. She can be found at www.faithallington.com.

'From Her Kitchen Garden Olia Ostapivna Waits and Watches the Sky (Because What Else Can She Do?)' by Sherry Morris

An hour after dusk, when the lighting ban begins, she creeps out to her kitchen garden. It is a black-black night—like that bleakest, darkest night, when a knock brought news to her door.

In daylight hours her kitchen garden is a haven, a place she can focus on the soothing drone of bees or deciphering raucous sparrow chatter. A place she can plunge her calloused hands into the sable soil of her Motherland and breathe in deep the pungent scent. From her kitchen garden Olia can absorb earthy mettle as she shelters between rows of cabbages, corn and beets, while a sunflower-yellow sun radiates hope in a clear flag-blue sky. And from her kitchen garden, she can drift back to happier times when her family was together, not yet forced to far-away scatter or enlist in mandatory battle.

On these black-black nights, when she is smothered in pitch-black grief, she comes to her kitchen garden seeking consolation, craving remedy. Needing light.

She sinks to her knees. Dirt clots press through the fabric of her worn house dress, bury into her thick woollen tights. She looks up.

Usually, at least one star winks down. Tonight, not even moon-sliver. How odd it only takes a puff of cloud to snuff out star-light—even super-bright supernovas bursting with eons of star-life. It isn’t right. She could curse these malevolent nebulae and their malignant power. She could simply weep. Instead, she does what too many mothers in too many lands do: she clasps her hands together, but she does not bow her head.

Fortified by soil grit, she lifts her face higher to the sky. Wishes on a star she can’t see but knows must exist somewhere, for her remaining son to survive until those oppressive clouds pass over.

Originally from Missouri, Sherry Morris (@Uksherka & @uksherka.bsky.social) writes prize-winning fiction from a farm in the Scottish Highlands where she pets cows, watches clouds and dabbles in photography. She also presents a monthly online spoken-word radio show featuring short stories and flash fiction on Highland Hospital Radio (hhr.scot). Many of her stories stem from her Peace Corps experience in 1990s Ukraine. Read more of her work at uksherka.com.

'Martin’s New Hire Understood the Assignment' by Christy Hartman

“Jim, why are The Wombats next to The Kooks?” Martin shook the LP at his employee.

The flannel-clad twenty-something, perched on Turntable Tavern’s front counter, didn’t look up. “You talking to me?”

“Jim—we’re the only ones here.”

“It’s Jimothy, and the Bats and Kooks have the same post-aughts suburban-punk aesthetic, fam.”

“We’re not family! Stick to filing by artist.”

“Alphabet’s a social construct. Music’s just vibes.”

Martin, on the brink of tossing out Jimothy and his lavender-latte, froze as a fedora-clad customer entered.

“Do you have a hypnagogic pop section?”

Jimothy smirked at his boss. “I got you, fam!”

Christy Hartman pens short fiction from her home between the ocean and mountains of Vancouver Island Canada. She writes about the chasm between love and loss and picking out the morsels of magic in life’s quiet moments. Christy has been shortlisted for Bath and Bridport Flash Fiction prizes and is a New York City Midnight winner. She has been published by Elegant Literature, Sci-Fi Shorts, Fairfield Scribes, and others. www.christyhartmanwriter.wordpress.com

'What Can We Safely Assume About Blue Jays?' by Dan Weaver

I saw a blue jay on a branch just like fall off. It was pretty high and it looked down and then just fell off head first. It was all relaxed and resigned and for sure going to smash into the ground into its head and maybe commit suicide we can’t know what was going on in its life. It could have some problems we don’t know about and that’s why it’s trying to smash into the ground. The thing is that we know that despite the struggles it's dealing with that we aren’t privy to the blue jay should choose to live. The blue jay doesn’t know about that though because of their society it’s not as vigilant as ours regarding being strong advocates against such terrible self harm. We can safely assume that about blue jays. It made me terribly sad that the blue jay was going to land on its head from falling no matter why or why not it was happening it was sad all around. Also this was happening while I was peeing and looking out the bathroom window so I did have to pay attention to that at the same time because the house was recently cleaned. It was a pretty complicated moment. But an instant before the blue jay was about to impact the ground and die it did this little swoop arc thing by way of a quick what-have-you with its wings and tail and then landed on its feet very elegantly and just fine. So the entire time it was just showing off like a hot shot. I’ve heard this about blue jays come to think of it. I’ve heard they’re known to be dicks and have a penchant for just kind of being nonchalant and dicky for the most part.

Dan Weaver writes in Vermont, USA. He is on Bluesky @supernaturalfeat.com. More of his work can be found at supernaturalfeat.com.

'Lonesome in Aberystwyth' by Emily Macdonald

Davy leans on the railing. He looks out to sea, ignoring the salt in the wind, the shingle sounding the push pull of the waves. Instead, the rolling swell is a prairie, a sea of spear grass, sage, sedges and saskatoon, the clouds as snow-capped ranges hiding cougar and grizzled black bears, the faint islands as sand hills, pocked with nesting crane birds, rattling with snakes.

Davy slings his reins and spits a globule of baccy. He shadows his face with his hat then laces his fingers through the silver long horns on his belt buckle and strides from the prairie sea, leading his walk with his hips, legs wide apart, balls heavy as slingshot.

He hears the clink of his spurs, the tumbleweed skitter. He feels the eyes of the town on his back, the prattle-chatter silenced by the question ‘Who is that man?’

With clenched buttocks he rolling parades towards the saloon. He’d like to push at swing doors, sound his boots on hard wooden floors, to spit again in the sawdust, and for Ethan the barman to be twitch-eyed, expectant of trouble, upturned tables, a brawling gun fight.

But the pub disappoints daily with its dragons and flags and beer-stinking carpet and the only bandits flash in the machine by the door to the gents.

“Haia Davy,” Ethan calls.

“Howdy,” Davy replies. He straddles a stool, lays his hat and his gun down on the bar.

Ethan pulls a pint and holds a glass under the optic for Davy’s first whiskey chaser.

Davy drinks in silence like he does every day. A lonesome rider missing his horse, a gunslinger missing his shootout, a cowboy in a Welsh seaside town, waiting for the nod, the tap on the shoulder and for his wild west adventures to begin.

Emily Macdonald is published online and in anthologies. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Award twice and was nominated for Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025 by Raw Lit. Her collection of driving related stories, Wheel Spin and Traction, was published in 2023.

'Night Blooming' by Linda M. Bayley

Edwin realizes too late that the door to the roof has locked behind him. He pats his pockets; no, his phone is still on the nightstand. And Lenore, such a deep sleeper, won’t notice him gone until morning.

What a stupid idea, coming up here to steal some night-blooming jasmine for Lenore. She thinks he’s a romantic, only ever coming to this garden after dusk, and a workaholic who never leaves his windowless home office. He should have told her his secret.

Hundreds of years, and no regrets until now.

Dawn is coming. The scent of jasmine fills the air.

Linda M. Bayley is a writer living on the Canadian Shield. Her work has recently appeared in voidspace zine, Five Minutes, BULL, Short Circuit, FlashFlood Journal, Underbelly Press, Stanchion, Does It Have Pockets, Roi Fainéant, Frazzled Lit, and Tiny Sparks Everywhere, the National Flash Fiction Day 2024 Anthology. Find her on Twitter and Bluesky @lmbayley.

Debut Flash: 'Heedless' by Chikamma

Daniel Bankole died on a Wednesday, on a day uncharacteristically bright as if the sun didn’t care what had happened to my friend.

Perhaps it didn't.

The grass beneath my feet did not. Nor the students who crunched on their blades in the assembly and the air and the teachers who gasped into it.

No one knew him like I did.

Chikamma is a fiction writer and essayist whose work is centered on examining and critiquing the self. She is a Mechanical Engineering student from Nigeria but fiction is her first love.

'The Pig in Your Head EP' by Nick Havergal

1. We opened our shows with this one too. Synths swelling like an abcess, Marco’s murderous fills on the toms, the Adam Curtis sample. And Clay’s scream a minute in, turning heads, furrowing brows. We were playing at deep thinking. Clay insisted the lyrics were an attack on state repression, but realistically, if we’re being honest, they were about fucking. I knew him better than he did.

2. We wrote this after a house party. He’d just bought that third-hand Honda and felt like writing the millionth song about speeding down an open road. We hummed out a two-part harmony, or the bones of one. Our bleary-eyed duet was whispered from a floor strewn with cans and gorgeous bodies. We fell asleep as the sun slicked through the window, with his chin on my shoulder. Sprouting stubble scratching my ear.

3. Title track: inspired by a marathon Curtis doc about mind control. Once we'd hammered out the structure at the studio, Marco and Alfie left to get tins and my hand crept towards his. I asked him, when our lazy eyes locked, if he thought free will was an illusion. At first, I took our heady, hungry embrace as his answer, then he sent me that message hours later. That never happened. Love you, bro. I decided, yeah, freedom's an illusion, and illusions are cruel.

4. My fiancée and I are decluttering and I find this EP. I stick it into an old laptop, skipping straight to this closer. The quality’s poor, like the song’s being gargled, but that riff’s still so inevitable. I funnel a friendly ember from my throat. I stretch an arm outward, my opposite hand balled like a mike, and from somewhere underground he grabs me close and we holler our hearts at the wall.

Nick Havergal has written for theatre and radio having had work produced by Bristol Old Vic and BBC Radio 4. In 2024 he was listed in the Bridport Prize, the New Writers Flash Fiction Competition and twice in the Bath Flash Fiction Award.

'Imagine That' by Barbara Westwood Diehl

Frank has a hard time dying. It wasn't supposed to happen this way, though he should have expected it. His body is like an old house with the original plumbing. Corroded. The brochure in the examining room said that he'd get an aortic valve made out of pig tissue. He has a leaky heart. Imagine that. Leaks are something Frank can understand. Frank is a plumber. A replacement sleeve on a copper pipe, and you're good as new. The doctor laughed when Frank said that.

But Frank is shutting down. Maybe the pig was a bad idea. He is anesthetized, his heart is cooled, and his blood is circulating through a heart-lung machine. He shouldn't see the surgeon's hands over him, but he does. Only the hands. Making shadow puppets against the wall. Imagine that. A curly-tailed pig from a Little Golden Book. His first wife on the kitchen floor with her hand to her cheek. A boy slamming a screen door closed and running into the woods. An old man unable to lift a pipe wrench.

Doves are loose in the operating room. Too many to be the work of the surgeon's hands. The nurses' blue surgical gloves flutter above him, and the shadows of mourning doves swarm the ceiling. Frank is dying, and the nurses are distracting him with shadow puppets. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. He thought his corrosion could be scraped clean with a wire brush, be hidden in a copper sleeve. The mourning doves coo and leave. A flying pig hovers in the surgical light. Imagine that.

Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, and New World Writing Quarterly.

'Excavating Sniffy Bear' by D. X. Lewis

You’re terrified by mountains, but you’re soon to climb a cliff.

You’re soon to climb a cliff, harnessed to a rope above.

Trusting someone is holding the rope above, you climb.

You climb to smell of salty sea and sound of sliding shingle, whirling wind, whooshing waves.

You climb as seagulls circle, dive, swoop, peck your eyes, you new Prometheus.

You climb climb climb, one foot at a time, one hand, age-old strata at your nose. Time and matter compressed: sand, rock, pebbles, fossils of birds, fish, dinosaurs, plants.

Forget B.C. Forget Christ, for God’s sake. Before You, B.Y., isn’t worth a fig. Now is what matters. The only time you know.

But B.Y. must mean something, you think, cliff-clinging by fragile fingers. To the stone-frozen creatures in the rock face. To every human back to Adam, back to Eve. Without that rope, unbroken, you wouldn’t exist.

And very soon you won’t exist, if nobody is securing the upward rope.

Trusting the upward rope is secured, you haul yourself skyward, left toe tasting, right hand reaching.

As you grope and reach and taste and stretch and touch for the top, you spot a fossil of your sister’s koala bear. The comfort bear you jettisoned in spite, forty years ago. Whose fate you never confessed. Whose disappearance broke her heart. Whose ears went bald because she sniffed their fur.

To free the fossil of the bald-eared bear, you chip into the cliff, climbing hook in right hand, left hand holding tight. Like Michelangelo, you think, releasing forms from marble.

No, don’t be pompous. Don’t reach beyond your station.

And as you reach beyond your station, releasing bear from stone, you fall, fall fall to the ground.

Nobody is holding the rope.

A recovering journalist, D. X. Lewis is devoting his golden years to other forms of fiction — from novels and plays to ever shorter texts. His stories, flashes and micros have been published widely online and in Bath, Fish and Oxford anthologies. In 2021 he won the Bangor 40-word-competition. His short story Crossing the Curtain was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Panorama Journal. 'Geoffrey Swaps His Cage', a prize-winning flash, was featured by Writing Magazine in April 2024. His novella-in-flash, A Life in Pieces, is available on Amazon. D.X. Lewis divides his time between London and Ferney-Voltaire, France.