'After Dad Goes into Care' by Judy Darley

A jigsaw piece waits behind the dented teapot, jacketed in a blue, white, cream scrap of cloud. I spot it as I enter the kitchen, just as Mum clambers onto a stool.

“Mum! Let me.”

She rolls her eyes; instructs me to retrieve a tin.

The fruitcake inside exudes cinnamon and zest.

“I baked it last November,” she says. “Should be perfect now. Not everything weakens with age.”

I cut a slab for each of us while the kettle boils.

My sister believes we must do more, but I’ve yet to learn how to help someone who insists they’re fine.

I spoon in Lapsang Souchong leaves; inhale damp woodland evenings.

At the teal-painted table, Mum puzzles on.

I retrieve the cumulus corner and place it beside her cup of tea.

Smile-lines deepen. “Ahh, that’s exactly what I was missing.”

'Shiraz' by Sara Magdy Amin

She stands on her tiptoes, her bare feet an accomplice to a robbery. One hand outstretched to scale the climbing vines, another to support her bursting belly. She is shaded by trusses of purple grapes, ornate shrines. Their stems grow in tall pillars that arch at the top, signalling eyes towards the sky. Today, her eyes were elsewhere. She would not wait for the promised wine rivers of scripture. She would dampen her mouth, like mortals from the faraway lands often do, with the fruits of her labour. Her fingers target a ripe cluster, pluck the darkest, roundest grape, roll it between them like a miniature Earth. She brings the looted jewel to her mouth and her tongue makes the safe delivery to her teeth. Their stomp stomps yield the most sweetness, like the feet with the clinking anklets always do. An eruption of saccharine warmth fills her mouth and trickles down her legs. She will tell him how she woke up drenched in holy red, she will tell him about the blessed soil and the seven good years, she will tell him about the ululations and clinking anklets. She will tell the vineyard baby how he was named Shiraz, how, beneath the shaded shrines, she stole a small taste of sweetness.

'Widow-Maker' by Mara Buck

Dying didn’t hurt as much as I’d thought. One quick ouch, like detaching a bandaide. Probably different for everyone. Maybe I’m lucky, but you can’t exactly say that, because I am, after all, dead.  

And I find myself here.   

The pinesap drizzling through my fingers smells pungent, urgent, fresh as morning. How can I smell when my face is obliterated, buried under the tonnage of this tree that killed me? Death seems to defy logic.

Ultimately my fault, taunting danger like Hemingway running with the bulls—my personal claim to manhood a rusty chainsaw versus a giant pine. Now I’m thinking the bulls might’ve been a better idea. Too late and a dollar short, Grandpa used to say.

Grandpa would’ve never gotten into this mess. No existentialist crap for him.

“Writer? You?” He’d have revved-up the equipment for another go-round. “Sonny, you always been puny. All them books. No wonder you can’t handle a man’s work.” Grandpa’s voice shared a constant mechanical accompaniment, like strumming a banjo while singing a folk song. He smelled of oil, stale coffee, and staler tobacco; I worshipped the rugged soil under his boots. I’m wearing his work jacket right now. Can’t say it’s brought me luck.

Widow-makers—tricky trees like this gnarly pine that’ll catch a guy off-guard to misjudge his cut. I’m leaving no widow behind, no one to mourn since Grandpa’s already gone.

You’d think now I’m dead I could hear him hoot about this predicament I got myself involved in, except I’m alone under this damn tree.  

I’ve got all this evolving knowledge about death and no one to share it. A writer’s dream, an exclusive story, a sure-fire page-turner. But I’m silent and I suspect it’s a permanent condition.   

'Trick of the Eye' by Susan Carey

Peeling layers of paint on the shed wall must have seen many happy summers: toddlers splashing in paddling pools, dads in novelty aprons burning sausages on barbecues.

My sister sits on a leatherette armchair which leans to one side, sinking into the earth. Since we moved house, Toni wears her hair cropped and spiky.

‘The unicorn will look over the stable door like this.’ I trace a rough outline.

‘We can’t afford a stable and a nag with a horn.’

‘It won’t be real, silly. I’ll paint the stable door and the unicorn’s head. A trompe l’oeil. Trick of the eye.’

‘Where did you learn French?’

‘One of Mum’s art books. You can help me paint the scene! Let’s be creative.’ With a kitchen knife I pry open an old paint pot.

‘Sandwich. Short. Picnic.’ She admires her black-varnished fingernails.

‘Mum used to say, let the dreamers dream, doers do, but the best people are dreamers that do.’

A butterfly with spotty wings lands on a molehill at my sister’s feet. Toni has a weird thing about insects, even pretty ones. Raising her Doc Marten boot in the air she gets ready to flatten it.

‘No!’ I lunge at her. ‘Mum loved butterflies!’

‘Get off!’ She shoves me against the shed wall. The wood is so rotten it gives way and I fall flat on my back. Shards of wood splinter and starfish around me.

‘Oh Molls.’ Toni kneels down and strokes my forehead. ‘Are you alright?’

She helps me up and we hold each other as if we’re Velcroed together. The butterfly spirals around us.

‘Little twerp, course we’ll draw a unicorn. It’ll have to be a bit Goth though. What about a black one with a purple mane and green eyes that can pierce right into your soul?’

Debut Flash: 'Midnight' by Jake Theriault

Redundancies. Contingencies. A hundred ways we could save ourselves if something went wrong. We had plans for if the air recyclers went dead, plans for if the hydroponic system broke down, plans for if the dome began rapidly venting air; but we didn’t have any plans in place for terrestrial emergencies. From up here it looked like a suicide.

It was technically night here when it happened, though I remember the sun keeping everything all too clear in my eyes. It was an evening like a hundred others, sending data packets and breakdowns of “soil” samples from our army of computers back to the eggheads in Houston.  The light delay from us to them was negligible, a little over a second both ways, so responses from Home Base were usually quick. But this one wasn’t. I kept waiting for confirmation of the data upload. Then I saw it.

It was a single bright light first. Then another. Then another. Like watching Fourth of July fireworks from across an ocean. I knew what it was before the computers told me.

Had the United States fired the first missile? Had Russia? Iran? North Korea? The computer didn’t know. It never would. And it didn’t really matter. I felt like something more should be happening. No alarms rang out in the base. Why would they? Nothing was wrong on our end. I couldn’t take my eyes off the gradually more and more occluded atmosphere of my former home. I knew I should tell the others, but I couldn’t move from my chair. 

Midnight had come.

'Exigency' by Alyssa Walker

I want that says Lucy to Max, looking up mid-trudge over slippery cobblestones at something red through a window. They are supposed to ride Le Funiculaire but the storm comes early so she plies him with coffee and drags him down gallery row through ice pellets.

They step in and stomp their feet. It’s like a movie, all antique lamps and yellow light, the friendly and distracted gallery owner who accidentally leaves the door unlocked, old mellow jazz, fireplace with real fire.

They offer bonjours, his louder than hers because he forgets his hearing aids at the hotel.

It’s huge. Dense poppies, fierce movement and heat.

Combien coute, eh? and Lucy points to the canvas. Max offers a robust slurp, shoulders hunched into his jacket and looks up, having heard something. He tugs her jacket, rebukes her with a look.

It will fit in the hatchback, she whispers. We can come back later to pick it up.  

You’re buying a painting? Top of his lungs. The gallery owner shuffles paper on her desk.

Yes, says Lucy. I’m buying a painting. It’s ridiculous. But --

But you’ve never.

I love it, she says.

Tres mille, says the gallery owner from behind them.

Lucy smiles, looks at her feet as the wind slaps her face from the door opening and closing so fast.

She gives a last look before she says merci and follows him out.

They call it the red painting they didn’t buy. Whenever Max tells the story, they are both in love with it but the gallery owner won’t sell. The owner’s mother painted it, Max explains, and it was a gift. It would have fit in the back of our car, he says, and Lucy listens.

'The Night Before Driving Back from a Camping Holiday, Mid-August 1977' by Sherry Morris

I’m refusing to sing along when the radio interrupts:
The King has died on his Graceland throne. You pull the car over. Your hands grip the steering wheel so tight your knuckles go white. You rock and sob down sorrow.
Mom’s fine. She’s always been a Barry Manilow fan.

Around the campfire you’d curled your lip, shook your hips.
Me and the crowd clapped and cheered for more.
Later, I spot you through a window.
In a camper that’s not ours. With a woman who isn’t Mom.
It’s a different, though somehow similar, performance.
That’s really when the King died.