by Chris Cottom

or robbers stealing my rabbit, Mr Nibble, to sell him for vivisection, Mum would spray me with Worry Remover. She’d mix it herself with the squeeze of a lemon and ‘a teaspoon of love’, always kept a bottle handy. She sprayed Dad when he went for promotion as Deputy Foreman, sprayed herself before every appointment up at the General. At the end, I fetched her the bottle, misted her with magic when the nurses weren’t looking. I said I was proof that it worked, because I’d long stopped worrying about Mr Nibble.

* * *

CHRIS COTTOM is a recovering insurance copywriter with recent work in Banshee, Barrelhouse, Fictive Dream, matchbook, New Flash Fiction Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Orange Blossom Review, and The Broadkill Review. Catch him pedalling around Cheshire, UK, and at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom.

by Karen Walker

The art gallery has rejected it.    
Feel was pacing, and I was napping when the thanks-snicker-but-no-thanks call finally came.
On the way to pick up our painting, Feel wants to talk.
I don't.  
Feel sniffles.
Of course there's no tissue left in the car. Of course Feel used the entire box on the way home after I broke up with John.
Our painting is of his flowers and his card. Says, "Love you. Please don't leave."  
Feel says it hurts.
"Am sure it does," I reply.
The gallery is on the third floor. I climb the stairs alone. Feel stays in the car. 

* * *

KAREN WALKER writes and draws and paints in Ontario, Canada. Her recent work is in or forthcoming in Does It Have Pockets, SoFloPoJo, Weird Lit, Hotch Potch, and Literary Garage. 

by Clodagh O Connor

How alive you were, born from me as clear water, burbling over small pebbles, curving around granite rocks, rushing down mountain slopes.

How you ignored my warnings, leapt down rock faces, not looking ahead until you found yourself trapped in man-made places.

How you were forced into channels, told what was expected of you, pushed underground.

How you were sullied by the foulness of that life, but you pushed on, found your strength, burst forth.

How you deepened and grew powerful, stopping for nothing until you embraced the wide, wild, open ocean.
​
* * *

CLODAGH O CONNOR lives in Dublin, Ireland, and is working on becoming a writer. She particularly enjoys the challenges of tiny fiction. She can be found on Bluesky at @iamagnat.bsky.social.​

by Beth Sherman

My father never wanted me to swim in case I drowned. At the beach, he hovered as I constructed elaborate sandcastles erased by the tide. The ocean glittered, snarling like a beast stalking its prey. Once, I tried a back float in the community pool, his hands cupping my body, lifting me clean out of the chlorine so I floated on air. Let go, I wanted to tell him, imagining the plunge to the bottom, cradled in blue. But I saw fear in his eyes and couldn’t even master the dog paddle. At sleep away camp, the counselors tried to teach me, following the usual progression—blow bubbles, turn head, windmill arms, flutter kick, let go of the edge. By then, I dreaded swimming as my father surely intended, hated that drowning sensation when water surged up my nose, the frantic struggle to breathe.

Decades later, dying of leukemia, he showed me a faded photo of his younger self with a woman who wasn’t my mother and a daughter who wasn’t me. Instantly I knew. That girl, a child with solemn eyes and postcard-perfect curls, had swum out too far one day, in a lake somewhere in Wisconsin where my father once lived. I pictured her drifting like a lost mermaid, fish wriggling through the sockets of her eyes. No, my father said, as I held a cup of ice chips to his lips. Car accident. He was driving. One careless moment: fumbling with the radio, taking his eyes off the road. A lifetime of regrets. Be safe, he whispered, although I think we both knew that was as likely as me gliding through rough waters, swimming straight and true.

* * *

BETH SHERMAN is the author of HOW TO GET THERE FROM HERE (Ad Hoc Fiction). She has had more than 250 stories published in literary journals and has also written five mystery novels. 

by Sarah Senft

He uses … in his emails
every one of them

familiar now
always three dots

I can almost hear him
speaking them

They leave space
to soften
what comes before

or after

comfort
gentle
like him

always …

* * *

Sarah is a writer living in Vancouver, Canada. Her work has appeared in The Closed Eye Open, 50-Word Stories, Bending Genres, Ivo Review, Halfway down the Stairs, Fish Girl Collective, The Martello Journal, Interrobang Lit, Feel Lit Magazine, Orange Rose Lit mag, Maudlin House and others.

by Leah Mueller

It is time
to get rid of
our yellow teacups.

You’re not
coming home
for tea.

* * *

LEAH MUELLER's work appears in Rattle, Best Small Fictions, Certain Age, Writers Resist, The Shallot, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net.

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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. 
​
I’d believed you. 
​
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 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 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 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 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).