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 Now, withdrawn, widowed, childless, and nearly broke, she stared out the cracked window in the direction of a rotted oak, happiness still an unachievable feeling.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.

by M.D. Smith

“We’ll grow old together,” you whispered that night under the streetlamp, your thumb tracing circles on my wrist. I believed you. That was our first lie—the sweetest one we ever told.

Eight months later, you moved to Chicago to teach. I stayed in Virginia Beach, running my father’s store. We promised distance wouldn’t matter. Your blue-ink letters arrived every Friday, smelling faintly of cinnamon and cigarette smoke. You wrote of your students, your loneliness, and once of a dream where we were gray-haired, still together on a porch somewhere, still in love. I carried that letter until it fell apart.

I always wrote you back.

Time moved on. You married a kind man. I married a good woman named Claire. We built separate lives, but sometimes, when the night went still, I’d wonder if you were looking at the same moon.

Decades later, your handwriting returned, shaky, fragile.

“I’m sick,” you wrote. “I wanted you to know I kept our lie alive longer than I meant to. Maybe love doesn’t die. It just changes its address.”

Claire read the letter and said quietly, “You should go.”

You were waiting on your daughter’s porch, eyes bright despite the disease. We spoke for hours. When the sun dipped low, you asked, “Do you still believe it?”

“I think love did conquer time,” I said. “Just not the way we thought.”
You smiled. Three weeks later, you were gone.

Your final letter arrived after the funeral:
“If you’re reading this, watch the sunrise at the ocean and think of me. That’s where I’ll be.”

I went. The tide whispered your name, and for one impossible moment, I felt your hand in mine again.
​
Maybe love is just the lie we keep believing. Our unfulfilled promises wash over me like the surf.

* * *

M.D. SMITH of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewildering Stories, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. 

by Fatimah Akanbi

​​A crumpled paper landed at your feet, and you hoped it would be a letter telling you how she had always loved you—like you had always loved her. Or how she always thought about you in those dreadful holidays between semesters, like you always thought about her. Or maybe how she would scribble your name on the mirror every morning, the way you would always scribble hers. But when you opened it, you only found wrong math workings she tore out of her notebook. She was going to throw it in the bin, and you just got in the way.

​* * *

FATIMAH AKANBI writes fiction and poetry. She has been writing since she was five, and is currently pursuing a degree in Information Technology at the University of Ilorin. She is @legendary.scribe on Instagram. 

by Allison Renner

When my grandmother died, I went with her. I floated just behind, through the ceiling and over the roof. As she surged toward the sea, I took one last glance down at the lush treetops, wishing I could reach for her so she’d know she didn’t have to make this journey alone. I remember her arranging my tea set just so, completing puzzles with both our hands pushing down the final piece, me struggling to stay awake while she watched the late-night talk show, baking snickerdoodles while the rest of the family talked in the den. The silence of us reading together on the couch, side by side as we are now, waiting for the waves to wash our spirits away.

* * *

ALLISON RENNER is the author of Green Light: The Gatsby Cycle and Won’t Be By Your Side. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Parachute, SoFloPoJo, Ink in Thirds, Gooseberry Pie, and others. She can be found at allisonrennerwrites.com.

by Claire Kroening

Today, burnt coffee clung 
to the back of 
my throat. A bitter 
epilogue of your 
sweetness.
Today, tears patter 
into empty china 
cups; moon-drenched 
lyrics shakily 
forgotten. Today is a 
reminder of our last.

* * *

CLAIRE KROENING is an award-winning writer and freelance editor/proofreader residing along the great lakes. Connect with them on Instagram @clairerosek. 

by Shama

Water chalked out marks on the apartment walls,
roping me in; the macaque screeched--
its toy lungs failing.

The rising brine strengthened
its noose. I swatted flies circling
the swollen coffee table.

The carpet's frayed hands
released their hold of Lego bricks,
from which you once made a house.

Mothballs rolled down and rattled
in the drain filter as I pulled the plug
and scavenged my leftover pieces

from your jetsam.

* * *

Shama has work featured in Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, The Pierian, and elsewhere. She writes from an old dusty corner of the earth and can sometimes be found on Bluesky @entangledrhyme.bsky.social and IG @entangledrhyme.

by Bart Edelman

Hadn’t walked the plank
In a number of years.
Never planned on it again.
But when you showed up,
I dispensed with my shoes,
Feeling the smooth wood,
Cold beneath my feet,
Familiar step by step.
I was halfway across,
Before you called out--
Told me to abandon fate.
And I wavered, of course.
Didn’t know how to retreat.
Couldn’t envision the course.
Unsteady each moment.
Then I paced my way back,
Where you stood, open-handed,
Offering what still remained--
One pirate heart to another.

* * *

BART EDELMAN’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, Whistling to Trick the Wind, and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023. 

by Adele Gallogly

Why does Faye keep giving the same line to library staff asking, “How are you?” When they emphasize are, she pictures a single, careening letter R. 

“Oh I’m good, besides missing the old lump in my bed!” she says. Exactly. Breathlessly. Unfailingly. To the retiring director. To the teenage volunteer. To the brusque clerk returning one-word titles Ron was too confused to begin: Endurance, Unbroken, Atonement.
​
Near the exit, Faye starts to answer the janitor tipping a black wastebasket, but stops after “Oh.” She hears herself tucking her beloved husband into a soft mound of grief in her throat. 

Oh.

* * *

ADELE GALLOGLY is a writer and editor in Ontario, Canada. Her very short stories have been published in FlashFlood, Writers' Hour, Six-Sentences, and Paragraph Planet. You can follow her on BlueSky.

by Sarp Sozdinler

So we up and swapped lives for a day: she would have two healthy breasts, and I would still have a mother.

* * *

​SARP SOZDINLER has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, JMWW, and Trampset, among other journals. Their stories have been selected for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50.

by Shanti Chandrasekhar

Mother remained stoic when my father, her husband of fifty-five years, died. With her firstborn on his deathbed now, she howls, gibbers. Hysterical.

My sister, who shuttles between the hospital and Mother’s home, yells from somewhere in the room, “Ma? Stop!” Her shrill command betrays her threatened mettle.

“How?” Mother asks me, the word trembling between her sobs.

My back slides down the wall. I sit on the floor, holding the phone. Far away from my mother, from my sister, from my dying brother.

Mother’s wail echoes across the Atlantic. It devastates, it haunts, it bridges. It glues us together. It does what her pretend stoicism couldn’t.

* * *

​SHANTI CHANDRASEKHAR’s words have appeared in Persimmon Tree, Bright Flash Literary Review, 50-Word Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and elsewhere. She writes and lives in Maryland.