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.