'Territorial' by Shana Naugle

I’m sitting on the porch, craving a Belgian tripel in a frosted pint glass.

I miss the warm stomach bubbles and slow obliteration of high ABV craft brew in the afternoon. I used to put smirnoff vodka in the freezer but it wouldn’t freeze, just get viscous and sludgy. You pour it in a shot glass and watch it swirl.

I hear a sharp tik-tik-tik and turn to watch this bird attack the driver’s side window of my car. 

He pecks and bobs. 

He sits.

His tail flicks. 

He stares at his reflection.

He flies off.

He comes back. He paints my vehicle with his shit, which cascades down the white paint.

Last time I drank, I cascaded down the stairs and was knocked unconscious. 

“Do you know where you are?”

The contusions are still numb, purple and yellow after more than a month of healing.
I close my eyes, thinking about fireball shooters. I could walk to the store and put two in my pockets. I wouldn’t get drunk off of just two. No one would notice.
I could get three.
I think about the MRI machine at the hospital. The radiologist was terse and impatient, asking me again to hold still.

I wouldn’t tell the registrar my name. I said it was “Kendra Bee”.

I’m still paying that hospital bill off. 

I walk to the hose and turn it on, placing my thumb over the flow of water. I turn it on the bird who flies away. I spray my car door. Then I douse myself. The water is colder than I wanted it to be. My shoes and hair are dripping wet. 

I turn off the hose and walk inside to take a shower. The bird hops back onto my car as I close the front door.

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Shana Naugle is an adjunct professor and a mother living in the Midwest.

 

Debut Flash: 'Natural' by Leigh Ann LeBoeuf

Boom. 

He looked through the rifle scope with quiet calm as he watched the deer plummet to the ground.

“Now that’s how you do it, son,” his father cheered.

“He’s so calm,” his uncle said. “Like he’s been doing it all his life.”

They climbed down from the deer stand, and he walked toward his kill. Calm. Collected.

His father began showing him how to field-dress the deer to bring back to camp. The sounds were surprisingly calming. The sudden rip of flesh as the knife dug into the hide.

“Son. Why don’t you try?”

He took the knife from his father’s outstretched hand and continued the cut where his father had left off. He noted the arrangement of the animal’s organs and wondered what it looked like when the heart was still beating. He liked the way the blood felt coating his hands.

He pulled the hide off as his father instructed and began to remove the organs the way he’d been shown.

“Like a true natural, son. Great job.”

This was the most attention he’d gotten from his father in a long time. So this is how I make them love me, he thought.

He wiped his hands on his pants. The blood was already drying. He thought about next season for a long time. Then he smiled at the two men, because that was what they were waiting for.

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Leigh Ann LeBoeuf writes Southern Gothic fiction from the bayou country of South Louisiana, where her Acadian roots run deep. She lives in Houma with her family and two blue heelers.

 

'Shimmy' by Abigail Myers

Yesterday I saw a photo of myself that someone took from behind, back fat and terrible posture wrapped in my beloved green dress with its print of fall leaves and bunnies. But I ate hand-pulled noodles with friends in the evening, and later at the theatre, the woman on the stage cried, I’m fifty-five and I’ve never felt so fucking free, I’m not afraid of anything anymore. This morning my daughter climbed into my bed and told me about the older girl at the elementary school who already wears a bra. And in the afternoon I zipped up the mauve coat—I had waited and waited for it to go on sale—and walked to the school to pick up that same daughter, sipping the last of the iced macchiato. In my reflection in the door of the school, my legs looked thick as adolescent maple trees, all the sweetness of every iced macchiato and the tenderness of every noodle packed into my thighs that shimmied with every step. And they carried my body, undulating with age and luck, forward to meet her.

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Abigail Myers writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on Long Island, New York. Her work appears in Best Small Fictions 2025 and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Wigleaf Top 50. Her debut short fiction collection, The Last Analog Teenagers, is available from Stanchion Books. Keep up with her at abigailmyers.com.

 

'When We Traveled 1,200 Miles for Forest Bathing' by Beth Sherman

Tomorrow, after showering separately, we’ll dredge up the same old recriminations and regrets, the same talk-talk-talk about talking, our marriage a drab, uninteresting field off the highway – nothing to see. But today, we set aside our grievances for 90 minutes. We turn in our phones and pay attention to the woods, which our guide says will deepen our connection to the natural world. We watch the sun rappel up Vermont’s Green Mountains, squish mud beneath our boots, run our fingers over sycamore bark the texture of an elephant’s hide, listen to the haunting whistle of a hermit thrush, mindful of our breath, our transient, busy thoughts. We share each new discovery – monarch butterfly, chipmunk, thistles dozing in the sun – the ordinary turned astonishing. How could we not have noticed before? We’re dwarfed by the pines, sheltered by the blue bowl of the sky. Our fingers crisscross like shoelaces tied just right. Our hips nearly touch. We breathe in unison. The air is sweeter here, our words light as sparrows. When we come across the felled tree, we stare in horror. An elm. Destroyed in the last big storm, our guide explains. The tree lies on its side, as though dashed against the earth by a rageful giant. Trunk split in half. Leaves papery brown. Humongous, snaky roots pointing in the wrong direction. Dead. We study the gash wounds, wonder how something so big can be brought low. We’re about to keep walking when one of us – it doesn’t matter who although much later, we’ll try to recall — one of us points out slim green shoots hiding in the grass beneath the tree, whispers of life that might eventually become a sapling, growing in the shadow of the broken elm, struggling to find the sun.    

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Beth Sherman is the author of How to Get There from Here, a novella-in-flash (Ad Hoc Fiction). She has had more than 250 stories published in literary magazines. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 and Best Small Fictions 2025. She can be reached @bsherm36.

 

'The Roller Derby Girls Skate Circles Around My Teenage Heart' by Travis Flatt

They detune my stratocaster. They flat my Mustang. They butter my fingers. They tear open my bad boy mask and expose my self-image, circle closer and closer like sharks. They gnaw inward, the way certain fungi eat trees. They fog the edges of my mirror, tightening toward the center of my face down to the middle of my mustache where nothing grows. And here I thought I was hot shit.

Before each match, I’ll comb up my pompadour, but by the time I bike to the rink, my hair’s a limp, greasy center part. My leather jacket’s sweat-soaked; my English Leather’s evaporated to the scent of mom’s cats. 

I sit alone in the bleachers, slink past the front row of boyfriends and girlfriends, who recline smoking cigarettes, up past the parents. Say, “Excuse me, sorry.” Sit with little siblings, where the boys pinch the girls, and the girls play with paper pyramids that read the future.

Most evenings, I wake screaming, “That’s the Way (I Like It)” thumping in my ears, stink of the rink in my sinuses—armpit, corndogs—and cotton candy on my tongue. In my dreams, I fight them off with a trash bag of mixtapes through crisscrossing corridors of some labyrinthine high school.

In the fall, they open try-outs. I skate for the Roller Derby Girls. If you can’t beat them, join them; if you can’t charm them, disarm them. I make waterboy. They dress me up as some fuzzy thing with purple spots to pump the crowd between jams. I roll the rink at half time, hands clasped and raised by Roller Derby Girls to roaring applause. That’s all I ever wanted: to be greased wheels on waxed Northern maple, to unself myself and spin spin spin. 

 

 

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'All That Was Left to Do' by Matthew Jakubowski

It became clear one summer that a starling in the neighborhood had apparently learned to mimic the sound of a small child screaming. Those who heard it thought the child might be four or five-years-old. Maybe she liked to scream as she played or watched TV or screamed at the dog or the squirrels or her parents, or maybe there was something larger and darker going on in her world. 

It was generally unsettling and made the neighbors wonder why this little person’s scream was reaching them over the backyard fences, echoing between the houses and into the overgrown brush and trash in the alley behind their homes. 

Over time, hearing this scream as they tried to enjoy sunny days in their backyards, people began to think of the silly bird’s scream as a feature of the alley, not one of their homes. The alley after all was frightful, especially at night, bristling with broken glass thorns drug needles rusty nails and scrap metal dumped there illegally. No one wondered if the wild neighborhood starling was upset about the filth in their alley and many more alleys across the city. No one surmised that for the starling all that was left to do was scream and scream and teach the children how to let their world know exactly how they felt about it, too.

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Matthew Jakubowski's short stories appear in Doric Literary, Scaffold, Gone Lawn, JAKE, Necessary Fiction, Milk Candy Review, and the Best Microfiction anthology. He lives in Philadelphia and is online at mattjakubowski.com

 

'Lost Connection' by Sudha Balagopal

When Mother calls, Sonia itches to extricate from the repeated grievances: lazy nurse-attendant, unsympathetic doctor, thieving pharmacist, yet listens, therapist-like, although she, too, has problems she can't share―husband unemployed, leaky roof―because Mother'll remind her she could've married Jay, her choice, until Sonia's daughter interrupts and Mother calls the child disrespectful, demanding, at which Sonia grits her teeth, hangs up, only to berate herself: Mother's starved, memories her sole company, once-agile body gone, the inevitable looming, so hand over heart where aggravation and love tussle, she calls back, says cell phones are unreliable, somewhere, somehow, they lost their connection. 

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Sudha Balagopal has had two novellas-in-flash published by Ad Hoc Fiction, UK: Nose Ornaments and Things I Can't Tell Amma. Most recently, her collection, Family Matters, won the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. Her stories have been included in Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions.