Spring has arrived, and with it, a brand new issue of The Hoolet’s Nook—our biggest one yet! 

While compiling the issue, it became evident how drawn we are to work that whispers and invites reflection—pieces that sometimes unfold further with a second reading. It’s a quiet sensibility that THN will continue to hold space for.
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To all our contributors and readers, thank you for your kindness and support—we hope you enjoy the issue. And if something speaks to you, please consider leaving a comment. It means the world to our authors.

Namaste,
G.R. LeBlanc
Managing Editor

Thinking of submitting? Our next reading round opens June 1st. Guidelines are available here. ​

IT NEVER WAS ABOUT THE COFFEE, by Foster Trecost
PROBABLY RIGHT, by Louella Lester
THE MODELS, by Natascha Holenstein
THIN AIR, by Beth Sherman
THE SNOW INSIDE, by David Henson
PORT OF DRAGONS, by Leigh Loveday
THE BILL WAS ASTRONOMICAL, by Mikki Aronoff
​SUMMER NIGHT MELODY, by Andrea Tillmanns ​

by Sophia Adamowicz

not fresh flowers, because desiccated petals never wilt, and because lopped-off buds require no water and no sun, and because, when the dried orange peel and cinnamon sticks lose their fragrance, I can lavish them with artificial sweetness, and because nothing in this house ever grew as it should, and because flowers with the suppleness of a child’s cheek remind me of the times I never wiped yours.

Let the fresh flowers remain at the field’s edge, where they may spill their seeds to the wind and never have to bear the weight of what one person owes another.

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SOPHIA ADAMOWICZ is a writer and tutor based in Cambridge, UK. Her work, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in several publications including Cunning Folk, Crow & Cross Keys, Haven Speculative and Trash Cat Lit. Her debut novel, The Brink, releases next year.

by Tim Love

I hold up the old red dress that she was wearing when I first saw her. When I return to the hospice I'll put it on her. It will fit her again now. She's been unconscious all day. I will sit beside her till the end, hoping for the impossible again, lost for words again, just staring.

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TIM LOVE’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance) and a story collection By all means (Nine Arches Press). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appeared in Stand, Rialto, Magma, The Forge, The Cortland Review, etc. He blogs at litrefs.blogspot.com/

by Moira Richardson

Do you remember picking black raspberries, staining our fingers with their juice, laughing in the sunshine? Your hair like diamonds, lips stained red. Your hand on the small of my back. The way the brambles scratched our skin. 

​You’d run your thumb along my lip, kissed away my tears when I confessed what I had done. You’d never stop loving me, you’d said. 
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I’d believed you. 
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But the next summer, when I drove my old truck along the cowpath to the back of your family’s property, our secret berry patch was gone, all that remained a burnt patch of earth.

* * *

MOIRA RICHARDSON lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her partner and three grumpy cats. She’s been published by Rat Bag Lit, Dragon Tomes Publishing, ELA Literary magazine, and The Writer’s Workout, among others. 

by Luanne Castle

When she saw the umbrella she envisioned their hereafter. Tattered, dirty, obviously pulled from a nearby trashcan, the umbrella’s frame still functioned. He held the umbrella without any help from her. They were separated by a foot. The over-sized umbrella was a castoff from a golfer’s cart, so they both kept dry. She debated herself. The umbrella’s skeleton seemed sturdy. But the tatters. Eventually holes would form, and in a storm, she would be drenched.
 
Now the rain’s velocity had reduced to a trickle, yet they both stayed motionless, he gazing off in a direction opposite her, she toward her future.

~After photo of umbrella, man, and woman by Naveen Ketterer on Unsplash

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LUANNE CASTLE has published four award-winning poetry collections. Scrap: Salvaging a Family,  a memoir-in-flash, was recently published by ELJ Editions (2026). Her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026.

by Emma Phillips

We’re astronauts, floating. I’m the stronger swimmer. Hey, you say, it’s as if we could reach out and pocket the Earth. Like a marble, like God. I grin at the contrast in colors. Every single star feels like mine.

There’s unexpected joy in weightlessness. You release a cape from my hospital gown, pull back your hands and make superhero arms. Out here, constellations are strung to fairy lights. Where are we going? you mouth. I shrug. In recovery, gravity will do its work. Enjoy, I whisper. It’s a long way down.

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EMMA PHILLIPS lives by the M5 in Devon, which sometimes lures her away in search of adventure. Her words appear in print and online, and have placed in competitions such as the Bath Flash Award and NFFD Microfiction Competition.

by Cailín Frankland

She was of two minds, and in more ways than one—her parents’ divorce drove the rift between her brain’s hemispheres long before the surgeon called for a scalpel. A simple procedure, really—the skull drilled through, dura pulled back, axons carefully severed—her seizing neural clusters were neatly quarantined, the cognitive effects negligible. Cortices are hardy things, she learned. Marriages, less so.

​Her left brain led her public life, reducing her right self to a stowaway on her commute, an eavesdropper to her mother’s calls. Her right mind maintained ambivalence, cluttering her home with life-sized portraits of her father.

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CAILÍN FRANKLAND (she/they) is a British-American writer and public health professional based in Baltimore, Maryland. They live with their spouse, two old lady cats, a rotating cast of foster animals, and a 70-pound pitbull affectionately known as Baby. You can find them on Twitter/X as @cailin_sm.

by Karen Baumgart

Oh love, don’t apologise—I understand. It’s not you it’s me, right? I wonder, though, could you maybe just hit send sometime? Let them see you’re anxious, how it comes from a wounded place? Stop saying I think maybe when you’re sure?

​I remember how your dad would return each letter with grammatical corrections; there’s such shame behind your impeccable use of semi-colons. My darling, what I’m trying to say is: maybe it’s fine to soften an email with three exclamation points, or to sign off with a pink flower emoji. Maybe, sweet girl, your first draft is always ok.

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KAREN BAUMGART lives in Australia and adores beautiful quotes, pink things, cats and chai lattes. She used to be an English teacher and is quite certain that writing is, indeed, the best therapy.
Instagram @miss.cake.girl | Bluesky @cake-girl.bsky.social | Twitter/X @cake_girl__

by Alastair Millar

We married young and uncertainly, seeking security in a time of portents—when storms, wildfires and UFO sightings made the future precarious and frightening. Then we weathered the natural disasters, inevitable conspiracy theories, and First Contact; turned out that those were the challenges that would really bring us together.

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ALASTAIR MILLAR lives in the Czech Republic, and enjoys good books, bad puns, coffee and travelling. His flash science fiction collection ‘Mars & More’ was published in 2024. Find his social & other links at: https://linktr.ee/alastairmillar

by Moira Richardson

My calves burned like fire, my hair streaming behind me in the wind of my own creation. For the first time in a long time, I felt free.

You’d wrapped me in bubble wrap like a precious heirloom, but my lungs needed crisp fall air and hints of bonfire smoke. I dreamed of sunshine park benches with bayside views. I wanted to follow the bike path to its natural conclusion, the way our love had reached a breaking point.

But I knew I’d turn back, return to our apartment, my cheeks flushed with life, and let you make me tea.

* * *

MOIRA RICHARDSON lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her partner and three grumpy cats. She’s been published by Rat Bag Lit, Dragon Tomes Publishing, ELA Literary magazine, and The Writer’s Workout, among others. 

by Steven French

Although lacking a singularity at their core, boson stars are very similar to black holes in both physics and appearance. They too have immense gravity, causing light to bend around themselves, thereby creating the shadow of an event horizon, and will also trap whatever happens to venture too close. And likewise, thanks to relativistic effects, while mere years pass on the surface of such an exotic object, aeons will sweep by out beyond its tidal reach. Which, as the creature imprisoned there reflected, sadly and not for the first time, adds a whole new dimension to the understanding of loneliness. 

* * *

STEVEN FRENCH is a retired academic living in West Yorkshire, UK. His work has appeared in various places, most recently Antipodean SF, Spank the Carp, and Suburban Witchcraft.

by Foster Trecost

It’s not often I finish a cup of coffee. I start out with every intention, but it gets cold long before I reach the bottom. The last sips feel familiar. Like something that's been waiting too long. Or maybe stopped waiting. I don't care for these feelings. So I leave them in the cup. 

I thought about starting with less. Maybe half a cup. A manageable amount. But I don’t like the look of it. That shallow, defeated slosh at the bottom of the mug. It feels like accepting failure, even before I’ve failed.

And I’ve done that too many times already.

So I fill it to the top. Steam rising. Dark. Full of promise. I tell myself this time I’ll stay with it. This time I won’t get distracted. I won’t wander off mid-morning. Or stare out the window, lost in thought.

I tell myself lots of things. One day, I’ll learn to listen.

The day pulls me away. It always does. By the time I come back, the surface has lost its life. The warmth is gone. I take one last sip, just to see if it’s salvageable.

It never is.
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Still, each morning I’ll fill my mug. Not because I think I'll finish it. But because I'm not ready to admit it never was about the coffee. 

* * *

FOSTER TRECOST writes stories that are mostly made up. They tend to follow his attention span: sometimes short, sometimes very short. Recent work appears in Literally Stories, Fabula Argentea, Across the Margin, and Roi Fainéant. He lives near New Orleans with his wife and dog.

by Louella Lester

When I refused to take a high school typing class, Mom said, “You won’t have secretarial work as a fall back.” I told her she was probably right. When I accidentally poured boiling water on my hand, Mom cried out, “Now you’ll never have a career as a hand model.” I told her she was probably right. When I broke up with the only boyfriend of mine she had ever liked, Mom tut-tutted, “You’ll not find anyone like him again.” I told her she was probably right. When she was in her eighties, I visited Mom in the care home. She suffered dementia, but knew who I was when she asked me to hem her slacks. I reminded her I had never learned to sew, so she should probably ask someone who had that skill. Mom looked up at me with damp eyes and said, “Oh, you can do anything.”

* * *

LOUELLA LESTER is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks (At Bay Press 2021), contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review, and is included in Best Microfiction 2024 & 2026.

by Natascha Holenstein

The model sits in a crappy diner in front of a plate of syrup-soaked waffles that she regrets ordering. It was a moment of weakness that her manager, Brian, would chide her for, but it’s been a long day of caked-on rogue and flashing cameras. She slouches in the booth rubbing her mascara smeared eyes and kicking her stiletto with the broken heel off her foot. The waitress approaches, and to avoid thinking of an excuse for the cold plate of food, she searches around the room for a diverting topic of conversation.
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What’s that painting on the other side of the room? she asks the waitress, because it looks so out of place with its pallid, half-dead heroine drifting in a creek of flowers.
I think it's called Ophelia, she says. I know, looks too fancy to be in this place. The manager just put it up because he thought she looked pretty.

The model thinks that she looks pretty too as she jabs at the waffles with her fork and pushes them away. In about fifteen minutes she will drop a twenty on the table and move on with her evening, waking up bright and early to be dolled up and stolen away in a photograph. She will never come to know how long ago that beautiful girl who modeled for the painting lied in a bone-cold bathtub for hours on end and subsequently succumbed to a short life of long illness just to favor the whims of men. 

* * *

NATASCHA HOLENSTEIN is a writer and dancer from the California Bay Area. She is currently the nonfiction editor for the literary journal Rawhead. Her fiction is forthcoming in Slash Magazine, After the Art, and London Fog Literary.  ​

by Beth Sherman

Only three minutes elapse before the baby starts bawling. Take-off triggers it. Ears popping. Pain. That unnerving sensation of tilting, pushing you back while the plane hurtles forward. You hate flying too, you want to tell the baby, who’s seated in her mother’s lap across the aisle, screaming. But when your father dies in Miami and you’re in New York, there’s no other way to get to the funeral quickly.

Out the window nothing but clouds, torn scraps of vapor.   

The baby cries harder. You order a gin and tonic, time your sips between the baby’s sobs. Poor darling, the mother croons. There is no father. Maybe they’re on their way to visit him. Maybe they’re divorced, the baby the axe that caused the guillotine to slice their marriage open. Maybe she chose to be a single mother. Long nights staring out the window, holding the baby, saying hush little one hush.  

Hubris to be speeding through thin air, the earth a distant ball spinning so slowly no one notices. Your father preferred buses. If God had wanted us to fly, etcetera. Once, when you were six, he took you on a bus from Miami to Atlanta so you could see your mother again. Out the window: farms, fields, cows, things you could touch. The clouds a grey blip above, where they should be. The ground visible from the window, teeming with insects and growing things. You remember turning the word mother over in your mouth. It tasted bad, like milk gone sour. She’d left without even a goodbye hug. But your father said it would be alright and you believed him. He held your hand until he fell asleep and you watched his breath leaving and entering his mouth like a lullaby, both of you moving through grassland together.   

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BETH SHERMAN has had more than 200 stories published in literary journals. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 and Best Small Fictions 2025.She’s also a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.