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 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 Anne Howkins

maybe I wouldn’t have learnt the correct way to look at a painting. Think light and shadow, see the humility, the vulnerability, but here I am, in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and yes, I see it, the chaos, the girl looking at the powerful, red-sashed man, I get it.  

Now you’ve slinked away like a guttering flame, I’d like to say thank you for all those times you pointed out what Constable, or Turner, or Cezanne had hidden in the shadows. For all those times you talked about the building of layer upon layer on an empty canvas—the way those layers became scumbled, burying what lay beneath. For all those times you stood with me, directing me to the source of light, to trace its delicate illumination of a lace collar, its cruel glare on an old woman’s wrinkles. For all those times you talked about colour; Vermeer’s miring himself in debt to paint a girl’s headdress ultramarine, Turner’s daubed red buoy mocking Constable’s over-use of the same shade.

And I wanted to let you know, I saw you in that gallery a couple of years ago with a woman. I recognised the look on her face before I realised it was you, pointing and talking, and it was too soon for me, that day, there were too many of the layers you’d painted still to be brushed away. It was too soon for me, that day, to look at your face, to catch that familiar flash of blue eyes blazing as you lectured your entranced companion, and just a glimpse of a faded red scarf was enough to send me trembling out onto the street.

But if you were here now, I’d just say that Rembrandt chose to shine his light on the girl, and she’s glowing. 

* * *

ANNE HOWKINS' little stories have appeared at WestWord, Flash 500, Free Flash Fiction, NFFD, Cranked Anvil, The Hoolets Nook and TrashCatLit. Anne also looks after the finances of a charity, walks and spends time with her adored grandson. 
Bluesky @anneh23.bsky.social

by Jenny Morelli

Dear Little Red, 

I understand now why you wore a hood tugged low around your head. It was to buffer your fears. I understand now why it was red. It flared with your heartbreak and despair. The edges were equally frayed from the depth of your rage.  

This was your life, your grim tale to tell, a tale that began on a snowy night when a fur-cloaked shadow howled with hunger into the wind, desperate to survive. When you approached, bearing meat from your basket, the wolf chewed and swallowed, lay her head in your lap with warmth and gratitude and a love you never knew.  

Then a crack split the snow-muffled silence and your lap grew warm with her blood-red-hooded eyes as the Huntsman ran to save you, to pull you free from the monster, but you didn’t need saving, so you shoved him away as tears drenched your fevered, red-raged cheeks.  

You ran and you ran along the beast’s beaten path to where her cowering litter lay huddled tight and you covered them all with your red-hooded cape. You lowered your frayed hood against the winds, against the savages and lived your life with a newfound purpose, with a confound hope, with a profound love. 

* * *

JENNY MORELLI is a NJ high school English teacher who lives with her husband, cat, and myriad yard pets. She’s published in several literary magazines including  Spillwords and Red Rose Thorns, and has four poetry chapbooks with Bottlecap Press. Visit her website: JennyMorelliWrites.com 

by Dustin P Brown

He couldn’t tell her how he felt; it was too mean. His grandmother had taught him to keep his mouth shut if nothing good would come out of it.

Still, he wanted to. The pilot warned of turbulence in a crackly voice. He wanted to scream at the woman, all the horrible things he couldn’t say out loud. She wasn’t real to him. She could be a void to toss bad thoughts into.

But he didn’t. Instead, he ignored her feet on the back of his plane seat, same way he’d been ignoring the lump near his scrotum. Couldn’t do it. It’s what killed his Poppa all those years ago. Oops, there’s the bump, oops now you’re in a casket covered in unflattering makeup.

He could yell all of this at the feet shoving cushion into his spine. He could do it. It was all he wanted in that moment, but he didn’t. He literally bit his tongue, chewed it up into used gum, really tapped that rage down into the pit of his stomach where it throbbed next to the lump. Then he waved off a drink-cart-pushing flight attendant.

Did death hurt? Was he just afraid of pain? No, there was more. The unknown. The same fear his grandmother would soothe in her bedroom late at night when he’d spend the night at their house as a child. The way she’d flick on a nightlight and solve all his problems in a moment. Moments can be so powerful. A diagnosis. The insistent throbbing of an impolite woman’s feet against your back. A last breath. A light in the dark.

* * *

Dustin P Brown is a Michigan-born, Spain-based author of poetry and prose. He received his BA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and currently works as an editor and interpreter. 
Instagram: @dpbrownwrites / BlueSky: @dpbrownwrites.bsky.social‬
Author site: https://dustinpbrown.wixsite.com/author

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. 

Marc Littman

They called Todd Go-Go Boy because he was always on the go yet he ran about in a very small world. See, Todd couldn’t afford to go anywhere, no money and tethered to a rusty old trailer with a rusty old mother who drank away whatever money he scrounged from hustling odd jobs in a neighborhood where everyone hustled.

      But Todd escaped reality by roaming the Internet booking exotic trips from the bowels of Death Valley to the sublime heights of Mount Everest and canceling his reservations in the nick of time before his mother’s credit card could be charged. Still, the dreamy prospects of finally taking off plastered a bright smile on Go-Go Boy’s face and blinded his eyes.

      That might explain why Go-Go Boy failed to sense the thug on his tail one late night exiting the liquor store with a nightcap for mother. Now Go-Go Boy doesn’t need to make reservations or cancel. He goes where his soul pleases whenever and wherever.   

* * *

Marc Littman is a former journalist who now writes fiction. He lives in Los Angeles.

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 Colleen Addison

In those days his madness struck me as magic. He made drinking cups from foxglove flowers, replaced buttons with the heads of dandelions. Stories fell out of him about the fairies living in mushroom rings. As I grew older, I saw how the cups leaked; how the blossoms withered and grew grey. I saw how neighbours shifted away from him, fearful of any perceived association. I was angry but stopped short of wearing a hat like his, a long-abandoned coalhood he said kept off the rain better than any poncho. I felt trapped, jealous of his playful nature and reluctant to condone it, furious at the condemnation he endured while secretly harbouring a similar discomfort. One day when I trotted up the multicoloured cobblestones of his garden path, I saw emptiness in his house windows. Where had he gone? My eyes fell, surprised and envious, on a ring of mushrooms. 

* * *

COLLEEN ADDISON completed a PhD in health information; she then promptly got sick herself. Her work has been published in Halfway Down the Stairs, River Teeth, and Little Free Lit Mag. 

by Tejaswinee Roychowdhury

A faint mix of cologne and sandalwood agarbatti hangs in the air, where “relax” is a whisper behind my head.

The city jangles outside the plebeian studio. Relax. Oiled fingers sneak into my scalp. Relax. Their moves seem unpredictable, but I catch a rhythm. Relax. My eyelids flutter like paper blinds caught in a Nor’wester. Relax. Baby blue walls repainted in patches. Relax. A disarray of old photographs—gods and men hanging off bent-up nails. Relax. Chipped wooden chairs offering faux leather seats, beaten down by shifting buttocks. Relax. Barbering tools neatly lined up on a dirty blue laminate, struggling to remain glued to drawer tops. Relax. Plastic-cased mirrors with random spots and old stickers curling up at the corners. Relax. Tires screech, a truck blares out a sharp set of horns, and muffled men voice strong opinions. Relax. A thumb and an index finger create patterns on the skin over my sternocleidomastoids. Relax. Things begin to fade—the everyday Indian doesn’t care for the ambience, just the service. Relax.

* * *

TEJASWINEE ROYCHOWDHURY likes to write, mostly fiction and poetry, has publications worldwide, and edits The Hooghly Review. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Calcutta and can be found on X @TejaswineeRC and IG @tejaswineeroychowdhury.

by Kelleigh Cram

After driving for days, it’s the cows that do it.

A flock of them in a field, some standing, some grazing, some stealing a lazy nap in the afternoon sun. Activities that seem careless to us, performed with steadfast diligence.

 I slow down to watch them, these cows. Something is off. They have brown fur with white faces, like they are wearing their skulls inside out. Ghost cows. Are they real? I pull off on the side of the road and get out of the car. The gate is open, so I let myself in.

You call my name but I ignore you, walking up to one of the cows until we are standing face to face. I spread my fingers over its head, right between the eyes, the scratchy texture of cracked bone piercing my palm. So it is a skull, worn in reverse.
           
You run up from behind, your breath hot and rapid against my neck.
Wait, where were we going again?

When you grab my shoulder everything snaps into place: our bedroom, my feet sinking into the mattress, the cow painting looming over me.

“Why don’t you lie back down,” you say.

I yank my hand away as though it has betrayed me, revealing the portrait of a cow’s face. You guide me by the arm back to the car—or is it the bed? And once again we are on the highway, the ghost cows with their reversible skulls fading in the rearview mirror.

* * *

KELLEIGH CRAM resides in a small town near Savannah, Georgia. Her work has been featured in Ponder Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, and Right Hand Pointing.

by Chris Cottom

​Go full mortgage on a fixer-upper in Forest Gate. Love the way Beth swears she can’t live with this prissy Laura Ashley shit, wrestles the wallpaper stripper like it’s a hissing serpent. Try different finishes in different rooms; go bold in the bedroom with Salsa Red or Jungle Ginger.
 
Watch Beth mark out a spare-room mural with puddleducks and beaky geese. Start with the ceiling, careless about speckling her raven curls with Haystack Gold. When she splodges you in Jersey Cow Brown, let her lead you to the shower to loofah it off.
 
Assemble mood boards for Beth’s new business: mid-tone caramels, indulgent ochres, earthy terracottas. Let her chatter about tonal contrast, about Crushed Aloe and Distressed Leather. Photograph her remodelled basements, her faux-marble bathrooms, her kiddies’ bedrooms.
 
In your kitchen awash with swatches of Lost Lake and Atlantic Surf, ask your seven-year wife if it’s time to redo the spare room in Classic White, turn it into an office. Dab her tears with a handy length of curtain lining. Hold her tight until she pushes away with a sad little nod.
 
Wait until her workshop in colour psychology; spread your dust sheets as the front door closes. Bid goodbye to the pigs and chicks, the carthorse and the collie, the tractor and the barn. Be sure to use low-tack masking tape. You don’t want anything to tear as you start to pull away.

* * *

CHRIS COTTOM lives near Macclesfield, UK. One of his stories was read aloud on the Esk Valley Railway between Middlesbrough and Whitby. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien.
Bluesky: @chriscottom.bsky.social