by Elliott Fielding

I was lying on the farmhouse kitchen floor surrounded by a family reunion’s worth of worried grownups. There was blood from a slice like an eye had opened in the middle of my calf, revealing something pink and streaked. 

“I think we should drive to town for stitches,” one aunt said. 

“It’s not that deep, a butterfly bandage would be enough,” my grandma countered.     
                                                                                                             
My leg was the center of everyone’s attention, but instead of embarrassed, I felt proud. I had after all been with the cool aunt, climbing a ladder—a metal one, sharp at the edges—to look at a black racer snake draped over the barn rafters. After the ladder tipped, I’d hobbled into the house with blood running down my leg, but no tears. 

My mom knelt down next to me. “Do you want stitches?” she asked. “You might have a scar, otherwise.” 

They were asking? I was old enough to be given a choice? The word “stitches” made my stomach contract and my scalp tingle. I was too surprised to speak so I answered with a shake of my head: no stitches. The bandages were found and Grandma pulled the eye closed, butterfly by butterfly, into a red-line squint. 
​
On the last day of the reunion, we all drove to the lake to swim. I was forbidden from the water until I pleaded “look, it’s all closed up” and Mom, to my surprise, let me go in. The August-warm water softened the scab and the eye popped open. I didn’t say anything, though; I knew if I did, I’d be stuck sitting on the hot, thorny sand watching my cousins play chicken fight. I didn’t care about any scar and they had asked, after all. It was my leg, my choice—my favorite scar.

* * *

ELLIOTT FIELDING is a Coloradoan who writes for the love of words and the challenge of creating stories from experience and imagination. Xyr short narratives have appeared or are forthcoming in ScribesMICRO, MoonPark Review, Examined Life, and Five Minutes. 

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 Kelleigh Cram

Click.

Multi-colored light fills the room, waking me. This is the part when I get up, go about my day, facing trials and tribulations of the lighthearted variety for the amusement of strangers. It always starts the same, that music, upbeat with a moralistic tone. I can’t remember what happened between this moment and reading my name on the closing credits, but the dread of it clings to me, a reminder that none of this is real. I open the door as the song ends, delivering a perfectly timed one-liner. 

Pause.

My hand stops mid-air, reaching for the mug. During pause I am incapacitated yet fully aware, the closest my conscious mind gets to the in-between. The moment stretches on, locking me in place while pulling me apart like one of those medieval torture devices. Unable to move I am forced to remember the darkness, the nothing, the act of non-existence that is my life without an audience. 

Rewind.

A force yanks me backwards until the door closes in front of me. Once again I step out of my bedroom, delivering the punch line to an awaiting laugh track. I don’t know how they stand it, feigned amusement, just as happy hearing the joke for the thousandth time as the first. 

Mute.

I pour the coffee, no splash as the liquid hits ceramic. The cup steams in silence.

Unmute. 

I slurp, hot liquid searing my insides as the pain crawls up my ribcage. I cry out, but only half a scream.

Click.

* * *

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

by Kathryn Kulpa

Have you ever noticed the grass that grows in the cracks on the highway? Maybe it’s on the soft shoulder, the breakdown lane, the verge. Maybe it’s on the median strip. Maybe it’s on the old exit spur, no longer used. It’s not pretty spring grass. It’s brown December grass, and if drivers notice it at all they just wonder if the highway’s being kept up, but mostly they don’t notice because they are listening to directions or sneaking glances at a text on their phones or worrying about being late and losing the jobs they hate but can’t quit because they would lose their healthcare, because they live in America and their lives mean less than the scraggly-ass grass that grows where nobody planted it. It’s not a flower or a topiary or a heritage tree. Maybe it’s an invasive species, like Japanese stiltgrass or pepperweed, and if the highway department notices those unruly spikes breaking through asphalt they only want to poison it, but the grass mowed down in their weekly Roundup finds its way past poured concrete to re-cover the earth. It’s here, and it grows, and it doesn’t care if you don’t think it should be here.

* * *

KATHRYN KULPA lives in New England. Sometimes she writes poems on the side of the road. She would stay up all night reading if you let her. Find her writing in Best Microfiction, Flash Frontier, Ghost Parachute, Hot Flash Literary Review, trampset, and at kathrynkulpa.com.

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 Andrea Tillmanns

After the rain, the air tastes like summer, blowing in through the open window and enveloping you in night. The quiet grunting of hedgehogs in the garden, above which bats flit silently through the dark. A single blackbird sings timid notes from the fir tree before settling down to sleep.

These quiet moments write notes inside you, which you may transfer to sheet music and later to strings, and even later release to other people who listen to you in small groups and perhaps remember: the taste of the air after the rain and the summer night that envelops them.

* * *

ANDREA TILLMANNS lives in Germany and works full-time as a university lecturer. She has been writing poetry, short stories and novels in various genres for many years. More information can be found on her website www.andreatillmanns.de.

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.