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). 

by Ruth Holzer

What would I not give
to lie in that first remembered room,
​to fall asleep as the lights
of cars on Main Street
slid across the ceiling
like friendly ghosts,
and my sister breathed softly
in the bed next to mine.

* * *

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 Terry Trowbridge

I did not know my kid likes kingfishers
until, 24 years old, they saw one
flying over the orchards,
tilting itself during a long glide,
shoulders facing the sun
within earshot of Lake Ontario.

My kid was all smiles and surprise,
noting they did not know we had kingfishers,
remarking on the bird panoply that soars above us.

Now they live away, at college, home weekly.
One of my privileges of parenthood
is learning what they see here, renewed,
educated to reinterpret our place.

* * *

Canadian farmer TERRY TROWBRIDGE's poems have appeared in CV2, The New Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, Nashwaak Review, The Great Lakes Review, Pamenar Press, The Ex-Puritan, Studies in Social Justice, and ~200 more places. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for funding during the polycrisis.

by Jim Harrington

She'd been young, brash, married to a banker, an older man. Happiness didn't matter. Money and prestige did. That's what her mother had preached unceasingly. Now, withdrawn, widowed, childless, and nearly broke, she stared out the cracked window in the direction of a rotted oak, happiness still an unachievable feeling.

* * *

JIM HARRINGTON lives in Huntersville, NC, with his wife and two dogs. His stories have appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Free Flash Fiction, Short-Story.me, and others. More of his works can be found at https://jpharrington.blogspot.com.

by Liz deBeer

When an Adirondacks Park Campsite sign flashes past our station wagon, Daddy says, “Used to hike there with my pals.” Pauses. “Some never returned home from the war.” I inch closer, wondering but quiet. Later, we park and paddle to Lake George’s center, imagining catching bass, perch, trout. Daddy’s line jerks. He yanks, hoping-hoping-hoping. Too small. Then my line trembles, tugs. Daddy’s hands steady mine; we reel in together. Another loop of maybes, but—not a keeper either. Paddling back, me in the bow, him in the stern, we glide together, holding something that won’t fit into our empty cooler.

***

LIZ DEBEER is a teacher and writer with Project Write Now, a writing cooperative. Her flash has appeared in BULL, Fictive Dream, Switch and others. She is a volunteer reader at Flash Fiction Magazine. You can also follow Liz on Substack.

 @iamagnat.bsky.socialby Clodagh O Connor

My child is an unsolved equation. Doctors try to figure him out, cancelling out known factors until only his difference remains.

My child is a statistic. Normal children can’t help but be mean—it is their nature. He finds himself far from the centre, hiding in the long tail almost disappearing to nothing.

My child is not the problem. Why should he integrate himself into our way of thinking?  He must find his own solution, and I will be here to balance things out.

* * *

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.

Michael Roberts

As I drove her to the doctor’s office, my grandmother said, “it’s disorienting this business of getting old, all these aches and ailments, fuss and trouble, and thinking you’re 16 until you pass by a mirror.” I was 16 and nodded like I understood. Now 74, I’ve had an epiphany.

* * *

MICHAEL ROBERTS is a retiree enjoying life and good writing, and writing good, even if bad.