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.
​
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.
​
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.   

* * *

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.   

by David Henson

Cans of green beans, corn, carrots, and more litter the kitchen floor. My father sits at the table looking out at the bird feeder. When I ask him how it happened, he says something about needing more sunflower seeds. The ceiling creaks, and white flakes fall. Inside, not out. Bits of ceiling plaster, not snow.

I tell Dad that he must know what this means. My sister is lucky she lives out of town. She’s been warning me this day was barreling toward us, but I’d been putting it off. 

My father points toward the window. “Cardinal.” It was my mom’s favorite bird. Older folks, I’d noticed, seem to anoint favorites for lots of things — birds, flowers, trees. Guess they harken back to pleasant memories. Might be different for me if I forever associate cardinals with today.

I study my dad’s hand. The hand that taught me to throw a curve, bait a hook. He seems shakier than usual. Is it because of what’s happened or what’s about to? 
I go out the kitchen door to the garage to check the damage again. The overhead door is open, but the maroon Impala, its bumper crumpled, has its nose to the wall. 

When I step back inside, the cardinal flies away. Frightened or has it eaten its fill? I hold out my hand. My turn to tremble. The keys jingle as Dad gives them to me.

* * *

DAVID HENSON and his wife reside in Illinois, USA. His work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart prizes and has appeared in various publications, including Trash Cat Lit and Best Microfictions 2025. His X handle is @annalou8. His website is http://writings217.wordpress.com

by Leigh Loveday

Her hometown, Ffion had decided, looking back towards land from the old stone pier, was full of dragons. A wyrm here, a wyvern there, tucked into parks and factories and the warren of tight streets that tumbled inelegantly from mountainside to sea. Rampant or dormant, they lifted her heart.
 
The closest she’d found so far had nested in the ramshackle beachfront fairground, more allure than alarm these days in its ragged rollercoaster crest.
 
Downwind, fiercer fellows hunkered in the steelworks where town became wasteland, all ridges and combustion and nocturnal furnace roar.
 
Behind them all, the mountain itself: a stunted hill really, so deeply enfolded in sleep that its week-long inhalations went by entirely without notice.
 
Studying it, striving to regain lost detail, Ffion found the daylight beginning to fail around her. She sighed, and stirred her limbs to lead her home.

As she walked the pier’s crumbling span, she reached out to touch the great jack-shaped stones that braced it on both sides, known to everyone in her orbit as the Dragons’ Teeth.
 
Ffion smiled sadly. A town full of tales to hide in. She walked away and left them there, on the shoreline, to pick up again another time.
 
Far out in the bay, catching the low winter light, the last remaining leviathan raised its head to watch her go.

* * *

LEIGH LOVEDAY grew up on the Welsh coast and now lives in the English Midlands, besieged by cats and foxes. He writes short fiction aggressively slowly, landing in the likes of Uncharted and Shoreline of Infinity. Find him at @leighloveday.bsky.social.

by Mikki Aronoff

Father doesn’t talk much, except when he’s gripping a tool. He leads me down to his basement workshop, his after-hours refuge, plucks the spirit level from its place on the pegboard, and hands it to me. I wobble to its jittery fluorescence. It’s challenging to zero the bubble. “It’s not what you think,” Father says. I look at him, nervous, perch myself on a stool, settle in for a story. 
 
He tells me the vial that’s now in the spirit level replaced the original. “Didn’t know where else to put it,” he said, adding that it came to him via one of his patients, an astronaut recently returned from a mission to a faraway planet. There he was seduced by an extraterrestrial charmer familiar with Father’s obsession with interstellar communication. She desperately wanted contact. She’d implanted a coded message to him in the vial and placed it, unsterilized, into the astronaut’s neck when he fell asleep. By the time he returned home, it festered, as was part of her plan. Father conducted the sensitive and costly surgery necessary to excise it from the space traveler’s septic skin. “The level's a bit useless now, really,” he adds. “More keepsake than tool. Not sure why I bothered to keep it after I decoded it and answered her back. But it’s yours when I go, if you want it. Might fetch something on eBay if you find yourself strapped.” 
 
I hand the spirit level back to Father, chuckle at the back roads the vial's taken to get to him. He nods, tells me he considered the alien’s strategy circuitous.  Outside later that evening, he points towards Orion, pronounces, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” He tilts his ear to the stars. A long breath, a bit like a whistle, escapes from his chest. “The heart is a lonely hunter,” he sighs. I wrap a tentacle around him, give him a squeeze. 

* * * 

MIKKI ARONOFF lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025 and Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025. She is a co-author of the book, Neverafters. 
More at https://www.facebook.com/mikki.aronoff/.

by Barbara Brooks

The green tint on the hills slowly grows darker.
Columbine blooms in the back yard.
The last call of winter’s white throated sparrow
leaves only the locals at the bird feeders.
 
Asters put forth their leaves with the promise
of blooms in the Fall. Blond daffodils rock
in the spring breeze. The smell of grass
after its first cutting. Waking up to the chatter
of wrens.
 
Mornings enter the screened window.
Dog lazes in the Spring sunlight.
Weekend coffee on the deck hearing only birds.

* * *

BARBARA BROOKS is a retired physical therapist and author of 3 chapbooks, The Catbird Sang, A Shell to Return to the Sea, Watercolors.  She is a member of PoetFools writing group. She lives in Hillsborough, NC with her dog.

by Ruth Holzer

​How slight they look— 
my husband and my mother
on a bench beneath the flowering cherry,
from where I stand
on the far side of the pond,
having walked away from them,
just for a minute.

* * *

RUTH HOLZER is the author of ten chapbooks, most recently, On the Way to Man in Moon Passage and Float. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a multiple Pushcart, Touchstone, and Best of the Net nominee.  

by Lindsay McLeod

Say what you like
but I made sure
she had the space

to be right or wrong
to be brave and proud
determined and complete

able to wear in equal
measure her ferocity
and bare vulnerability

and to let the world
like it or lump it
right alongside me.

* * *

LINDSAY MCLEOD lives by the Port in South Australia where he is driven by his cattle dog, Mary. He has won a few awards for his writing, which appears most recently in Ephemeral Elegies, Rat’s Ass Review, Snakeskin, and Meniscus.

by Joshua Walker

I wake before dawn,
the quiet pressing against my chest.
I make coffee the way I always do,
sugar measured by habit.
Light moves across the kitchen
without stopping.
My son murmurs.
My daughter shifts beside him,
hands closing around the blanket.
I fold the laundry I meant
to fold yesterday,
shirts,  socks
returning to their places.
A note on the counter
from last week’s goodbye
waits where I left it.
I read it aloud.
Evening gathers slowly
in the living room.
I sit with it.
Some days healing is quiet.
Breath leaves.
Breath returns.

* * *

JOSHUA WALKER is a poet based in Oklahoma City. His work has appeared in Potomac Review, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, Solarpunk Magazine, and elsewhere. He writes about language, memory, and the quiet architecture of ordinary life.

by John Grey

A single carved heart made this tree part of my story.
My hand shook as I dug blade into bark.
 
Though I pressed lightly, it felt as if the heart ran deep,
was there already, and I was merely tracing it.
Then the initials, cautious at first, emerged slowly, sweetly,
like sap warming its way to the light.
 
Through many seasons, many wandering years,
this etching, this loving declaration, remains.
 
Ah WS, where are you now? What does it matter?
Never engaged but we’re engraved.
And this tree keeps the small truth of us.

* * *

JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, Trampoline and Flights. Latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters, and Between Two Fires are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.

by M. Frost

I’ve tried for a year to contain myself, to trim
the fat, to fit into the box (or the clothes from before).
To scrape words off my plate to meet the word count. I’m trying

to be smaller, but every day’s an incremental failure.
The tempting adjectives entrench, then an adverb 
sneaks in deliciously. I succumb, buy the larger of the men’s pants, 
the roomier women’s blouse. My bra bulges like the anpan I tried in Japan.
I cover it with shirts that don’t care. Order another syllable.

* * *

Find M. FROST in The Hopkins Review, Little Patuxent Review, Strange Horizons, and others, with chapbooks Cow Poetry (Finishing Line Press) and The Women of Myth (Island of Wak-Wak).